Balaji Hariharan’s research while affiliated with Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and other places

In today’s world of technological advancements, technologies such as data science, big data and IoT play a huge role in simplifying human life. Access control is a major concern for any data source. Legitimate access to confidential data is important to ensure privacy, integrity, authenticity and confidentiality. It is further very important to devise access control in situations where data is critically private, such as in the case of health care. Access control policies stored in a centralized storage are prone to security breaches due to single point of failure. Blockchain is a decentralized storage system which is based on peer-to-peer network architecture. It is immutable and helps in recording transactions between two parties in a permanent and verifiable manner. The project concentrates on storing the access control policies of a healthcare data source and the transactions that follows in a blockchain. The results of storage of policies and transactions are shown in Remix IDE using Ethereum blockchain framework.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are widely used in Precision Agriculture (PA) to increase the productivity and for monitoring the crop. Agricultural field is spanned over many acres and in order to design an efficient monitoring network, one of the key requirements is to maintain the sensor coverage and network connectivity. WSNs are often operated in resource constrained environments and is required to design power aware algorithm for routing, data acquisition, communication in order to enhance the network lifetime. This research work focus to design an Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (EERP) designated to PA applications. In this protocol, energy efficiency is achieved by distributed data collection and reduced number of transmissions in various phases of route setup. Maximum agricultural land coverage, monitoring the sensor node energy, and routing protocol scalability are the few elements that influence the WSN implementation in precision agriculture. The Sensor Nodes (SN) have limited storage so the nodes should store only the important data. This research work has also proposed designing and developing an EERP that offers effective coverage and a better network lifetime. The proposed protocol outperforms the existing AODV and DSR protocol in terms of the packet drop rate, energy consumption, end to end delay, network lifetime and throughput.

Multimedia communication issues are a common occurrence during e-Learning sessions. The issues are not only due to human errors but also due equipment, bandwidth, server and network problems. As our Smart classroom e-Learning system uses many audio/video and display equipment to achieve multi-perspective gaze aligned immersive experience [1, 2], there are many chances of communication errors due to equipment and setup failures. Since a problem might occur due to a failure at any of the participating node and users like professors or students usually are not technically qualified; it’s time consuming effort to troubleshoot, localize and to fix these communication issues. The Control center tracks the status of all the equipment, bandwidth and network of each computer at each classroom including the server and presents the data in a rich interactive GUI in real-time and hence it becomes much easier for the administrators to identify, localize, and fix all the issues at the earliest to ensure the smooth operation of the e-Learning session. During our development and testing phases we have used the control center extensively to debug the setup issues of our e-Learning system to save time. In this paper we describe the Control Center tool of our Smart classroom system along with the analysis of audio/video issues and related troubleshooting work-flows.

India is the second populous country in the world. The major occupation of Indian people is agriculture but majority of Indian crops will be dependent on the monsoon. With the decrease in rainfall, farmers have to use other alternate means of freshwater for the crops. This increase in demand and unsupervised usage of the available freshwater has led to water shortage. To address this issue an efficient water management and prediction techniques need to be implemented by using the ever-augmenting technologies like (IoT), which has progressed in recent years as an effective and cost-efficient substitute to conventional computing techniques. The need to design a dependable assessment and innovative mechanism needs to be designed. - A system that is capable to calculate, monitor and predict an efficient usage pattern to reduce water wastage and avoid subsequent crop loss. This paper surveys the techniques and areas that have to be considered for developing an IoT based agriculture system.

With the recent advances and proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is a huge demand placed on its infrastructure requirements. The amount of data generated by these small low-cost, low-power (LCLP) IoT devices is phenomenal and at the same time due to the devices being low-powered, they cannot be used to perform complex computations and other algorithm implementations. There are also limitations in communication data rates at different stages in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), which mainly uses wireless technologies such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, etc to achieve low power communication. These technologies come with limited bandwidth and are not very reliable at high data rates. Hence the challenge of handling high amounts of data with low bandwidth communication technologies is one of the main hurdles inefficient LCLP IoT system deployments. To address this problem, we propose a combination of data compression techniques, which will result in reduced data size, without compromising affecting the quality of the data. This paper describes the implementation of a combination of Delta and RLE compression techniques on specific sensor data, particularly those used in our deployment of the World's First Wireless Sensor Network-based System for Early warning and Monitoring of Rainfall induced Landslides in Southern India. The test results show a good compression ratio of 52.67% for 12bit ADC, without compromising on the quality of the data. This has been implemented on a Programmable System-on-a-Chip (PSoC) system and the results presented.

Existing live tele-teaching systems enable eye-contact between interacting participants, however, they are often incomplete as they neglect finer levels of adherence to gaze such as gaze awareness and gaze following. A multilocation eLearning classroom setting often does not preserve relative neighborhood i.e., displays showing videos of remote participants at each location might not be congruent with their actual seating positions. This leads to incoherent gaze patterns during interactions. We present a media-rich distributed classroom architecture with multiple cameras and displays in each classroom. During interaction changes, cameras capturing appropriate perspectives of participants are streamed to displays in other classrooms. Hence for all interactions, the physical participants of a classroom are presented with appropriate perspectives of remote participants resembling gaze patterns during conventional-classroom interactions. We also present a framework to systematically analyze gaze patterns with its dependencies. The framework dictates optimal placement of media devices ensuring minimal deviation in capturing appropriate perspectives for a given set of resources. Evaluation results on a three classroom test-bed indicates a marked reduction in viewer cognitive load in discerning the entity-at-focus in an eLearning classroom environment.

Live eLearning systems present multimedia elements constituting the teaching environment, such as - teacher, teaching aids, in various ways creating virtual representations. Often, teacher’s video and screencast of the teaching material are streamed and displayed as mutually exclusive disconnected entities. Though the existing eLearning systems give a clear view of the screen and the instructor delivering the lecture, they break the spatial connection between teacher’s gestures and content on the screen. In this paper, we identify five perception parameters that influence visual perception of the teaching environment. We introduce new multimedia based representations that circumvent shortcomings of current approaches and provide a spatially coherent view mimicking the real world classroom scenario. By improving the perception parameters, we arrange the representations in a stepwise hierarchy that progressively moves towards an immersive teaching environment. We then present a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of various representations based on these parameters. Finally, we present a user study to substantiate our findings. Results indicate significant enhancement in classroom experience with proposed new representations.