The Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) is the country’s oldest multi- disciplinary engineering institute, which has dedicated itself to the nation for the last 100 years. IIT(BHU)’s mandates are to identify new and emerging areas in the context of national development goals and to initiate timely interventions for fostering such areas for creating strategic leadership. The area of Data Analytics and Predictive Technologies (DAPT) has been identified as one of the emerging fields whose progress will add significant impact on a number of verticals of the economy, such as, Telecommunications, Power, Road Transport and Highways, Defence Research and Development, and Health and Family Welfare. Further relevant areas are urban smart city initiatives, including city-wide water distribution, waste management, air quality monitoring and control, as well as manufacturing and governance at national and international scales.
The term smart states that the corresponding system (or “vertical,” e.g., an urban transportation network, soldier protection, or healthcare diagnostics) is being enhanced by DAPT technology, the work on each vertical segment depends on the integration of several techniques, or “horizontals,” e.g., sensors, wireless communication, cloud computing, and data analytics). With the increasing need for efficient utilization of scarce resources such as water and energy, increasing urbanization, diagnostic/therapeutic delays, and increasing awareness of the impact.
In the climate due to human activities, there is going to be increasing emphasis on “smartening up” our socio-technical systems, thereby requiring us to deploy the technology of DAPT.
The development of DAPT technologies requires fundamental scientific and mathematical advances in understanding of the system models, learning algorithms, wide variety of simple to deep networks, along with infrastructural components in terms of materials and devices, communications, computing and control over networks, along with machine vision, robotics, brain-machine interfaces for smart actuations, and neuroimaging platforms for cognitive and neuronal engineering.
Although the practical DAPT arena of the near future will be built on standard digital electronics, digital computing, and digital communications, rapid advances are happening in the technology areas of Quantum Computing, DNA Computing, Psychodynamic Affective Computing, and Brain-based Computing, where even the current computational paradigm will also change. To engage the expertise of our scientific community, to generate Human Resources for the future, and to develop our expertise and technologies in DAPT, the Mission envisages support from national research groups in all allied technologies as well.
National Mission on DAPT will empower National Critical Infrastructure (NCI) on intelligent breeds of innovative systems and will carry the potential to significantly impact daily lives as they form the basis for emerging and future smart services. Further, increased use of DAPT will also safeguard the new cyber security threats and would intelligently protect us from adverse consequences over the nation, as a country and the society as a whole.
