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 activities envisioned under this mission will provide a great fillip to Indian manufacturing and societal betterment, via the development of new protocols, inventions of novel products/processes and services. The endeavour shall catalyse the creation of skilled young engineers, researchers, technicians, and entrepreneurs, together with human resource at all levels, besides become a key contributor to realizing the vision of “Digital India”, “Innovate in India”, and “Make in India”.
IIT(BHU) has traditional strengths in the development of smart sensors and system (SSS), development and Information and Communications Technology (ICT), as well as in the frontier disciplines of Materials science, Pharmaceutics and Bio Medical engineering, thereby harnessing diversified application areas of interdisciplinary academic and research pursuits with deep scientific and analytical skills. IIT(BHU) is putting extensive thrust/application for its contribution towards modernisation of the country’s core sector applications to Power, Manufacturing, Smart City, Mobility, Intelligent Networking, Armed forces response, and Healthy Wellbeing, for smart management of societal needs. These are the niche areas that will give India, our country, the advantage for achieving well timed leadership in the critical and emerging field of interdisciplinary data analytics and predictive technologies (DAPT).
The term “Data Analytics and Predictive Technologies (DAPT)” refers to the application of pattern recognition and inference engine as a smart decision support interface, to take timely decisions and deploy necessary actuation, in order to take holistic control of the real-life situations, either in online or off-line. Historically the first DAPT devices are from the age of ancient antiquity, such as the well-known Astrolabe and Antikythera calculators which were mechanical analog computers, developed around 500 BC in Asia minor, for aiding geographical surveying, navigation, and astronomical predictions.
Today, the term DAPT is used for systems involving intelligent pattern-recognition based decision support interfaces backed up by densely embedded sensors and actuators, interconnected by the Internet of Things (IoT), with computation occurring within the network, or at the edge, or in the cloud, for the purpose of observing, controlling, and optimising the performance of technical/societal/human systems, such as smart cities, smart energy grids, smart urban water networks, smart homes, smart farms or smart healthtech.
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.
NM-DAPT and the associated activities will be coordinated under one umbrella. The major sub- missions or programmes of the mission will be on (i) Technology Development, (ii) Establishment of Centres of Excellence, (iii) HRD & Skill Development, (iv) Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Start-up Ecosystem and (v) International linkages & collaborations; each further split into a number of components (projects/schemes).
The Mission will support research and innovation in academic and research institutions as well as industry and the venture business system, in areas such as those described earlier, leading to the development of DAPT technologies and applications. The NM-DAPT will support centers of Excellence (CoEs) in academic and research institutions across the country, in association with the industrial and financial sector, with significant economic and technical collaborations and with promises of technology adoption of the products so developed, for social upliftment. TheCoEs will focus on the development of disruptive innovations in interdisciplinary, collaborative, and translational research to generate core domain knowledge and know-how. As per the mandate, IIT(BHU) will develop enterprise grade prototypes and proofs-of-concepts (PoC) following internationally standardised norms (e.g. IEEE, E.U.-ESO, FDA and others) and translate them into products, in conjunction with industry and start-ups leading to significant job creation and economic growth, across the country and the globe.
Skill development, HRD and nurturing the start-ups through entrepreneurship programmes are also one of the goals of the NM-DAPT at IIT (BHU). Development and deployment of smart systems-of-systems, enhanced with DAPT applications, will require skilled human resources and faculty re-training at all levels, in technologies such as the intelligent IoT systems, design and deployment of low power wide area wireless sensor networks, machine learning and data analytics, together with security and privacy for the development and acceptance DAPT, both in the industries and by the society. At the deployment level, just as in the 1990s where there grew a need for digital communication network deployment technicians, there will emerge the need for the DAPT competent manpower for its strategic deployment and success in the form of products. There is a need to generate an advanced level of skilled HR to meet the emerging demands across the sectors. The NM-DAPT at IIT (BHU) will also develop and establish
Research collaborations with international academic & research institutions for the advancement of interdisciplinary approaches in DAPT and associated research in the country.
The NM-DAPT is proposed to be implemented over five years.
