Message From Chairs

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to COMSNETS 2014, the 6th International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS, and to Bangalore, India's technology city. COMSNETS is a premier international conference dedicated to advances in Networking and Communications Systems.  The conference is a yearly event for a world-class gathering of researchers from academia and industry, practitioners, and business leaders, providing a forum for discussing cutting-edge research, and directions for new and innovative business and technology.   Following the tradition established by earlier editions of COMSNETS, COMSNETS 2014 includes a highly-selective technical program comprising peer-reviewed submitted papers, keynote talks by leaders in the field, and a small set of invited papers on important and timely topics from well-known researchers. The conference also features three workshops on emerging topics, a Ph.D. forum, demos and exhibits sessions, posters, and three panel discussions.  COMSNETS also hosts Mobile India 2014, which explores development and business models for applications, services, and content that can be provided to mobile platforms and over wireless networks. COMSNETS 2014 is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, and is presented in-cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMOBILE and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.

In organizing COMSNETS 2014, we were honoured to work with a superb organizing committee whose efforts made it an easy task to serve as General Chairs!  We are particularly thankful to the efforts of the Steering Committee Co-Chairs Giridhar Mandyam, (Qualcomm, USA), Rajeev Shorey, (ChiSquare Analytics, India), Uday Desai, (IIT Hyderabad, India), and G. Venkatesh, (SASKEN, India).  A good conference is known by its technical program, and this year's COMSNETS is no exception. The excellent technical program for COMSNETS 2014 was assembled under the able leadership of our Technical Program Co-Chairs Neelesh Mehta, (IISc, India), Ram Ramjee (Microsoft Research, India) and Sanjay Shakkottai (UT Austin, USA).

We would also like to thank the chairs of the three workshops being held at COMSNETS 2014: the Workshop on Energy in Communication, Information, and Cyber-physical Systems (E6) led by Zainul Charbiwala (IBM Research India) and Amarjeet Singh (IIIT Delhi, India),  the Workshop on Networked Healthcare Technology (NETHEALTH) organized by Ashutosh Sabharwal (Rice University, USA) and Bharadwaj Amrutur (IISc, India) and the Social Networks – Science and Engineering Workshop organized by Madhav Marathe, (Virginia Tech, USA), Y. Narahari, (IISc, India) and Ramasuri Narayanam, (IBM India Research Lab, India).   This is the first edition of COMSNETS to hold a workshop on the emerging field of social networks.  Thanks are also due to the organizers of Mobile India 2014 – Varadharajan Sridhar (Sasken, India) and S. R. Raja (Mobile Monday India).   The E6, NETHEALTH, Social Networks Workshops as well as Mobile India, all provide wonderful additional avenues during COMSNETS for sharing the latest ideas and opportunities in communication systems and networks.

The panels this year were expertly organized by Fabian Bustamante, (Northwestern University, USA) and Animesh Nandi, (Bell Labs, India).  Special thanks also go out to our Demos and Exhibits Chairs, Niranth Amogh, (Huawei, India), Vinayak Naik, (IIIT Delhi, India) and TV Prabhakar, (IISc, India), to our Ph.D. Forum Chairs, K. Raj Kumar (Qualcomm, India) and Rijurekha Sen (Singapore Management University, Singapore) as well as to the Posters Chairs: Zainul Chabriwala, (IBM Research, India) and Radha Krishna Ganti, (IIT Madras, India).   Thanks are due also to Anand Muralidhar, (Qualcomm, India) who as Publications Chair, dealt with the many details of putting the proceedings together.

We had 209 technical-program-paper submissions from authors in 22 countries for the technical program which is the largest ever for an edition of COMSNETS.    The number of total current registrations (145+) is also close to an all-time high.  Much of the credit for this goes out to Sushantha Das, (NIIT University, India), Ignacio Castro, (IMDEA, Spain), and Vijay Subramanian, (Northwestern University, USA), the co-chairs responsible for publicizing our conference as well as rapidly generating and disseminating various updates to the call for papers and the call for participation.   This year, the publication co-chairs were ably aided by a publication sub-committee comprising of Ashok Kumar Das, (IIIT Hyderabad, India), Swades De, (IIT Delhi, India), Bikash Kumar Dey, (IIT Bombay, India), R. K. Ganti, (IIT Madras, India), Manish K Gupta, (DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India), Vinayak Naik, (IIIT Delhi, India), and Vinod M. Prabhakaran, (TIFR, Mumbai, India) and thanks go out to them as well.

Vinay Veerappa, (SASKEN, India) and Nikita Ambasana (IISc, India) did a great job of managing the conference web site and we would like to pass on a big vote of thanks to them for this.  Local arrangements for the conference were superbly handled by Sudipta Maitra (Delhi, India), while registration and visa were handled by Chandrika Sridhar (IISc, India) and Raji Maitra (Godfrey Phillips, India).  Chandrika Sridhar also handled the finances.   We consider the student travel grant program for COMSNETS one of the strong points of the conference, and we are glad that we are able to continue and expand it each year, with the strong support of our corporate sponsors.   Thanks go out to the Travel-Grants Chairs Mouli Chandramouli (Cisco, India) and Dinkar Sitaram (PES University, India). A total of 22 domestic and 3 international travel grants were awarded in the current year.

Our sponsorship chairs, Sudipta Maitra (Delhi, India) and Rajeev Shorey, (ChiSquare Analytics, India), have managed to generate substantial resources for the conference; we thank the patrons, university partners, and community partners, whose generous support has contributed to the success of COMSNETS 2014.    We would like to thank in particular, our corporate sponsors Microsoft, Cisco, Google, AirTight, IBM, Qualcomm, Radio Studio and Netsim.  We are also grateful to our university sponsors and partners: IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Hyderabad, IISc Bangalore and BITS, Pilani.   Thanks also go out to ACM SIGCOMM for their generous support of international student travel grants.    The success of a conference is often built upon the hard work of volunteers, this conference is no exception and we express our thanks to them. 

We would like to thank our keynote speakers, Arogyaswami Paulraj, Professor Emeritus, (Stanford University, USA), Nick McKeown, Kleiner Perkins, Mayfield and Sequoia Professor, (Stanford University, USA) and Soumen Chakrabarti, Associate Professor, IIT Bombay, India) for graciously agreeing to give keynote talks in spite of their busy and demanding schedules.  Thanks also go out to the invited-paper authors for their help in seeding the technical program with excellent papers.   We would finally like to thank all the authors and speakers for their fine technical contributions and the attendees for their participation.

We look forward to the exciting and informative four-day event ahead of us!

Kevin Almeroth

P Vijay Kumar

Venkat Padmanabhan

We are pleased to introduce the Sixth edition of the International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS). The conference has evolved over the years and continues to offer a high-quality program with well-known keynote speakers, a selective technical track and poster session, vibrant panel discussions on current topics, workshops that address critical areas of communications and their impact on society, Mobile India 2014 – the Business Track of the conference, a strong slate of demos and exhibits, and a PhD forum where students from several highly-regarded institutions can discuss their ongoing research and interact with experts and other students working on similar topics. We are glad to continue to host the conference in Bangalore, the technology hub of India.  This year, COMSNETS 2014 has crossed 200 registrations, a record participation that speaks very high of the conference quality and the interest that it has generated.

COMSNETS 2014 boasts of an outstanding organizing committee, drawn from top researchers from around the world both in industry and academia. We are grateful to the entire organizing committee for their tremendous hard work and meticulous planning. We would like to take this opportunity to convey our gratitude to the General Co-Chairs – Prof. P. Vijay Kumar (Indian Institute of Science, India), Prof. Kevin Almeroth (The University of California-Santa Barbara, USA) and Dr. Venkat
Padmanabhan (Microsoft Research, India), the TPC Co-Chairs – Dr. Ram Ramjee (Microsoft Research, India), Prof. Neelesh Mehta (Indian Institute of Science, India) and Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai (The University of Texas at Austin, USA). The General Chairs, TPC Chairs, the Technical Program Committee, Workshop Chairs, Panel Chairs, Poster Chairs, Ph.D Forum Chairs, Demos & Exhibits Chairs, Publicity & Publications Chairs, Local Arrangements, Sponsorship and Registration Chairs have put together a high quality program that should prove to be innovative, thought-provoking, and educational. Our special thanks go to Chandrika Sridhar (Registration & Finance Chair) and Sudipta Maitra (Sponsorship & Local Arrangement Chair) for their continued support of the conference through the years.

This year’s version of the conference has a large number of industrial sponsors and university partners.  We are extremely grateful to our Industry partners: Microsoft Research, CISCO, Google, IBM Research, Qualcomm, Airtight Networks, Radio Studio and NetSim for their financial support. A big thanks to our conference partners – Department of Information Technology (DEITY), Government of India, SASKEN and BigONet Technologies for actively participating and contributing towards the success of the International conference. We are delighted to have IISc Bangalore, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Hyderabad, NIIT University and BITS Pilani as university partners. Our university partners continue to provide invaluable assistance to the conference.  Many of the student volunteers that assist conference participants come from these institutions.  These universities also serve as the source for many of the papers included in the technical program and workshops. We are also delighted to continue our relationship with IEEE who are the technical co-sponsors of COMSNETS again through the IEEE Communications Society.  We are grateful to ACM for their continued support, through the SIGCOMM and SIGMOBILE interest groups. 

We welcome you to COMSNETS, and hope that you will be able to experience all this conference has to offer. And while you enjoy the conference, do take some time out to see Bangalore and visit some of the finest R&D labs in Communication Systems and Networks in the country.

We would also like to note the passing away of Mr. Zorawar Singh, affectionately known as “JoJo”.  JoJo was a great friend of the conference and provided invaluable assistance over the years.  He will be greatly missed by the COMSNETS family. May his soul rest in peace in Heaven.

Uday Desai, IIT Hyderabad, India                     

Giridhar Mandyam, Qualcomm, San Diego, USA    

Rajeev Shorey, ITRA, Dept. of IT, GoI, New Delhi, India        

G. Venkatesh, SASKEN and IIT Madras, Chennai, India
          

Welcome to COMSNETS 2014! The technical program this year consists of 36 regular papers.  We received a record number of 209 paper submissions from authors in 22 countries. After an initial round of filtering (e.g., out-of-scope, insufficient technical content), 149 papers underwent a rigorous review process, with each paper receiving at least 3 reviews. 65 TPC members from academia and industry all over the world provided the reviews. The reviews were followed by a thorough on-line discussion among the TPC members, based on which the final accept and reject decisions were made.

In addition, we have 8 invited papers. Our goal in having invited papers is to invite eminent researchers to speak about their work on topics of current interest. We thank the invited paper authors for accepting our invitation and presenting their latest research at our conference.

We are grateful to TPC members and the reviewers for their tremendous efforts.  We would also like to convey our thanks to the web chairs Nikita Ambasana and Vinay Veerappa for meticulously updating the web site, often at short notice. Our work would not have been possible without the constant support and prodding of the General Chairs and the guidance from the previous TPC Chairs.

We hope that you enjoy and benefit from the technical program at COMSNETS.

Neelesh B. Mehta

Ramachandran Ramjee

Sanjay Shakkottai

The COMSNETS 2014 Poster Session is a forum to showcase new and exciting ideas in the fields of networking and communications. This session is designed for the researchers to showcase their current and cutting edge work. This years session includes posters from computer networks, communications, data centers and software systems.
This year there were 43 submissions of which 15 were accepted for posters. These were evaluated by a TPC consisting of 24 members. Each submission received at least two reviews. We would like to thank the TPC members for the timely reviews.
We welcome you to COMSNETS 2014 Posters session and hope that you find the posters interesting and engaging.  

Regards
Zainul Charbiwala

COMSNETS has a long tradition of excellent and well-attended panel discussions from leaders in the industry and academia. This year, we continue this tradition with three thought-provoking panels on a broad range of topics. We hope that these panels, each of which will be held on a different day of the main conference program, will be interesting to the attendees.

The first panel, to be held on Tuesday, January 7th, is titled “Telling gold from pyrite: Promising research direction or hype ?” The goal of the panel is to explore a systematic way (if any) of forecasting whether an emerging technology trend is a promising research direction or if it is merely a hype. The second panel will be held on Wednesday, January 8th, and is titled “Leveraging the synergy between academia/research labs/startups”. The goal of the panel is to brainstorm ways in which academia, research labs, and startups can leverage their respective strengths to create disruptive innovations with big market impact. The final panel, to be held on Thursday January 9th, is titled “Research aimed at broader societal impact”. The goal of the panel is to identify research areas focused on improving the life of individuals across all strata of society, and for which no good solution exists today.

All panels have been structured to provide multiple, compelling viewpoints on the topics in question, and will be highly interactive to enable significant audience participation. All panels include panelists from India and abroad, from theory and practice, and from academia and industry. We are grateful to all the panelists for
agreeing to serve on these panels and look forward to energetic and engaging panel discussions.

Thanks and Regards.

Fabian Bustamante, Northwestern University, USA

Animesh Nandi, IBM Research India

COMSNETS 2014 features a “Demos and Exhibits” session designed to allow industry and researchers to showcase their latest industrial applications and research prototypes in all communications and networking related topics. This includes innovative technologies, platforms, analysis tools and applications. The demo sessions are spread over two days to ensure maximum visibility and favor a close interaction between presenters and participants. The key features of the Demo session includes an exclusive Demo Snaptalk session in the main conference agenda followed by a two hour demo session co-located with the posters; Each accepted demo also has an accompanying technical paper which will be available through IEEE Digital Library; The demo which exhibits highly innovative technological research overcoming major technical difficulties and also exhibit high benefits will receive the Best Demo Paper Award.

We received an overwhelming response by industry, academia & startups to showcase the state-of-the-art research prototypes, Proof of Concepts and solutions. The following are the list of accepted demos:

1. A Novel and Scalable LED Communication System - Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

2. Online Statistics of Keyword-Indexed Youtube Videos - University of Avignon, France

3. Mobile Platform and Application Research at SMU LiveLabs - School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Singapore

4. People In Motion: Spatio-temporal Analytics on Call Detail Records - IBM Research, India

5. Secure Personal Authentication through Remote System for E-Transactions (SPARSE) - Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services, Bangalore, India

6. Wireless Mobile Network Planning and Optimization: A Tool Based Approach - TCS Networks Lab, Bangalore, India

7. Bigonet Mobile Cloud Framework - Bigonet Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India

8. CAPAS: Context Aware Personalization of Application and Services - Huawei Research and Development, Bangalore, India

9. LoadSense: Passively Estimating Cellular Load - Microsoft Research, Bangalore, India

10. Get Better Insights Faster - ChiSquare Analytics, India

11. Wizshark - Airtight Networks, India

12. NetSIM: Simulation Platform – Tetcos, Bangalore, India

We warmly welcome you to COMSNETS 2014 Demos and Exhibits session. We would like to thank our sponsors and all the participating organizations of the Demos and Exhibits session. We also thank the Local Arrangements Chairs for the logistics support for this session.

Niranth Amogh, Huawei R&D India, Bangalore

Vinayak Naik, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-D), Delhi

Prabhakar T V, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore

Sponsorship

Once again raising sponsorship for Comsnets 14 has been a herculean task. Most multinationals remained squeezed for funds and the bigger Indian companies just shied away as in the previous years. Inspite of this a vigorous campaign yielded a decent support from 8 entities including the Government of India. I am truly grateful to all of them irrespective of their level of support.

Microsoft was the biggest contributor who came as a Platinum Sponsor. I am truly grateful to MSRI team for their effort. Cisco gave us a lot of tense moments but came through in the end once again as a Gold Sponsor. Their constant high level support for the past 4 years is commendable and I am truly grateful to them. I would also like to record my appreciation to Ministry of IT for once again coming forward with their financial support..

My heartfelt thanks also goes to AirtightNetworks, IBM and Qualcomm for their continued support. A special thanks to Radio Studio for supporting us for the first time.

Thank you all for your confidence in this conference without which it could never be as successful as it is today.

Local Arrangements

The Chancery Pavilion continued to be the venue for Comsnets for the 7th year in a row for same three reasons, namely, for its location, good conference facilities and its relatively affordable cost. As always The Chancery Pavilion offered our delegates a special tariff as they did in the previous years. I would like to thanks to Mr Ajay Sharma, Vice President Sales and Marketing of The Chancery Hotels and Mr B Madhushudhan, Asst Banquet Manager Chancery Pavilion Hotel, for all their help and support.
This year again The Chancery Pavilion Hotel promised a total gastronomic delight by providing a very special menu for all the lunches, welcome reception and the gala banquet.

I would like to record a special thanks to  Mr Kuldeep Singh of  Foureleven India and Mr Ravi Chandra of Audio Plus for all their help in providing the backdrops, banners, brochure, audio visual equipment etc.

This year both Microsoft Research India will provide a guided tour of their lab. I strongly urge all delegates to make use of this opportunity to visit a great lab.

Last but not the least I would like to record my heartfelt thanks and gratefulness to Dr Rajeev Shorey for his constant help, support, guidance and above all his confidence in me. I remain much obliged to him.

Sudipta Maitra

The COMSNETS 2014 PhD Forum aims to provide a friendly and supportive environment for doctoral students (in various stages of their PhD) to present and discuss their dissertation research both with their peers and experienced researchers from academia and industry. In addition to providing technical feedback and advice, this forum will provide an excellent opportunity for students to network as well as to practice presenting their research, clearly and concisely.

We received a total of 15 submissions for the PhD forum, from a wide range of research topics. Due to a large number of high quality submissions this year, we decided to have both an oral presentation and a poster session within the PhD forum session. The PhD forum will comprise of 10 minute oral presentations by 6 selected students, and a 30 minute poster session, where 10 students (the 6 oral presenters + 4 more students who have been selected solely for poster presentation) will display a poster in the same venue. The audience will walk around interacting with the students during the poster session, and give feedback to all 10 participants. The goal of having a poster session, in addition to oral presentations, is to (a) increase the interaction among the presenters and the audience and (b) give more students the opportunity to present their work and get feedback.

All student presenters are eligible for partial conference attendance support, in terms of travel grant and registration support. In addition, there will be a best presenter award, judged by a panel in the audience. The award includes a certificate and a cash prize.

The submissions were evaluated by the following evaluation committee, with each submission receiving three reviews:

1. Ashok Anand (Instartlogic, India)
2. Kiran Gowda (Broadcom, India)
3. Harshan Jagadeesh (Monash University, Australia)
4. K. Raj Kumar, Co-chair (Qualcomm, India)
5. Rijurekha Sen, Co-chair (SMU Livelabs, Singapore)
6. Sanjit Kaul (IIIT Delhi, India)
7. Sreeram Kannan (Univ. of California Berkeley, USA)
8. Sujogya Banerjee (Amazon, USA)

We would like to thank all the reviewers for their excellent and timely reviews, which enabled rigour in the selection process.

Rijurekha Sen, SMU Livelabs

K. Raj Kumar, Qualcomm Research India

The integration of social networks on the move, the analysis of massively Big Data  and provisioning of associated services over the cloud has been gaining momentum. The theme for Mobile India 2014 is Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC). In India, the subscriber base of Facebook and LinkedIn together has surpassed 100 million mark; and the mobile Internet user base has surpassed 140 million. These two phenomenon generate huge amount of data and a potential user base for myriad of applications in the areas of enterprise, education, healthcare and government programmes. At the same time, it also gives opportunities for niche companies in the area to provide Big Data and analytics support to personalize these services towards individuals and organizations. The cloud paradigm provides a viable alternative, especially for Small and Medium Enterprises to reduce their capex spend and attain advantages of reliability and quick time to  deploy.
Mobile India 2014 will explore opportunities and challenges in the following four sessions:

1. Mobile in SMAC
2. Big Data Analytics and Visualization: Key for success
3. Mobile Cloud
4. Mobile Social Media

Dr. Sanjoy Paul, IEEE Fellow and Managing Director, Accenture Technology Labs India

Mobility in the Social Mobility Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) is important as it provides a “context” for any application or service rendered. This “context” information, once a privy to mobile operators, is now available through various channels to whoever wants to leverage it.  Further, users now demand the same type of services that were available on their PCs and Laptops to be made available on their mobiles. With the proliferation of Smartphones and tablets, how does Mobile fit in to SMAC? This session with experts in the field of mobility who are trying to fit it in to the SMAC paradigm will deliberate on the challenges and opportunities in this area.

Panelists:

Ramesh Adiga, AVP & Head, Global Delivery - Mobility Unit, Infosys Ltd
Bharati Jacob, Founder Partner, Seedfund
Manjunath Gowda, CEO, i7 networks

Moderator: S.R. Raja, Founder President, MoMo Bangalore

Business data analytics is key to survival in today’s business environment. The huge amount of data generated by information systems, especially those that are mobile enabled, create opportunities for firms to dig deep in to it for not only analyzing status-quo but also do prediction on key factors for business growth. The Big Data generated by the SMAC paradigm has created many start-ups such as price comparison sites, mobile advertising firms, media analytics companies, and telecom analytics solution providers. Larger IT companies have also started incubating business units in this area. The session will explore the challenges and opportunities for firms wanting to explore this area, including data availability, reliability of data, the technologies and business models for handling Big Data and associated analytics. 
There are companies that found white space in this area and have developed niche products. Hear from the experts on how to leverage technology for Big Data analytics and the subsequent monetization of the same. The session will also delve in to visualization models for Big Data and businesses around the same.
Panelists:

Muralikrishnan, G., COO, Sasken Network Engineering Ltd.
J. Ramachandran, CEO, Gramener
Venkatesh Vaidyanathan, VP - Product Management, Business Analytics, SAP Labs
Sridhar Pai, CEO, Tonse Telecom

Moderator: Dr. Rajeev Shorey, Co-Founder, ChiSquareAnalytics

Dr.Gopal Pingali, Distinguished Engineer and Director, IBM Academy Leadership Team Member, IBM India

With large amount of data to process varied needs of the users especially to support mobile devices of various form factors and platforms, organizations are migrating their information systems thus far in client-server mode to cloud platforms. Then there are cloud providers who provide on-demand services thus reducing time-to-deploy critical applications. The evolution of technologies for cloud enablement including open source repositories and techniques such as Hadoop are increasingly in use. Apart from pay-per use and shift of capex to opex, cloud enablement also provides advantages of shared resourcing, economies of scale and other associated benefits. However, the adoption of mobile cloud is strongly correlated with good quality network connections which are often very poor in countries such as India. Experts will discuss cloud strategies, monetization models, economics of the cloud, how the cloud paradigm fits in to SMAC and challenges in deploying cloud services in India.
Panelists:

Girish, S., COO, ConnectM;
Shreekanth Joshi, Vice President, Cloud Practice Head, Persistent Systems;
Madhwesh Kulkarni, General Manager - Advanced technology solutions, Wipro technologies
Ajayan Narayanan, Senior Director, EMC Software and Services India

Moderator: Swami Krishnan, Head – Marketing, Sasken Communication Technologies

Enterprises are exploring ways to leverage the power of social networks, along with the ubiquitous use of smart mobile broadband devices, and the cloud to be agile, flexible, and productive. Social networks generate the Big Data that can be analyzed in depth for improving customer centricity and directions of market spend. Within large organizations, both formal and informal social networks help improve employee stickiness, knowledge sharing, employee mentoring thus improving organizational performance. A number of start-ups have sprung up recently to tap on the opportunities provided by the social media, augmented by Smartphones and Tablets on the move. This session will deliberate on the challenges and opportunities that social networks generate for the SMAC paradigm.

Confirmed Panelists:

Ashvin Vellody, Partner, KPMG
Kaushal Sarda, CEO, Kuliza Technologies
Adhvith Dhuddu, Founder and CEO, AliveNow
Hrish Thota, Senior Manager - Social Computing, Happiest Minds

Moderator: Dr. Madanmohan Rao, Head-Research, YourStory

Dr. V. Sridhar, Sasken Communication Technologies

S R Raja, Mobile Monday Bangalore

Welcome to the 4th Workshop on Networked Healthcare Technology (NetHealth'14). There is a clear consensus that our current healthcare models are not well suited for our future generations, in that they cannot be scaled up in a cost-effective manner for the growing healthcare needs. To promote a rich dialogue between different constituents of healthcare, NetHealth 2014 will adopt a new workshop model of conversation between leaders from both medical and engineering communities. The aim of the one-day workshop is to promote a deeper dialogue leading to actual collaborations.

We will begin the day with short invited talks in a new “I wish…” session, where we have invited experts from different walks of healthcare. The speakers will discuss their challenges and present their wish-list of technological inventions which could help them address those challenges. Immediately following the “I wish…” session, we will have a demo and poster session, where we have innovative demos from research labs and companies to continue the conversations. The aim is to have conversations over actual products and prototypes. The afternoon session will have a mix of three peer-reviewed research papers and several invited talks. Our aim was to balance participation from academic research and corporate efforts.

We would invite all researchers with an interest or curiosity in the intersection of technology and healthcare to come and participate in this and future workshops. The community that attends NetHealth is diverse, vibrant, and growing every year.

Please come and join us!

Ashutosh Sabharwal, Rice University, Houston, Texas

Bharadwaj Amrutur, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

The use of social networks and analytics is now a critical component of many emerging applications. Further progress in this field will necessarily emanate from a melding of ideas in diverse fields, including, computer science, engineering, social, behavioral and economic sciences, physics, and biological sciences. This workshop brings together academic, R&D, and industry researchers from these disciplines  to address both the science and engineering challenges associated with this rapidly evolving field. We believe the workshop will set up an impactful platform to address the above need.

The workshop comprises three invited talks by acknowledged leaders (Nidhi Hegde from Paris Research and Innovation Centre; David Parkes from Harvard University; and N. Viswanadham from the Indian Institute of Science) and nine contributed papers, on a variety of interesting topics. The workshop also includes a Demo Session where social network analysis tools will be showcased by academia and industry.

The workshop offers a unique opportunity to interact with active researchers on both foundational and applied aspects of social networking.

Looking forward to your participation,

Madhav Marathe, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA

Y. Narahari, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

Ramasuri Narayanam, IBM India Research Lab, Bangalore
(Organizers)

Welcome to the Fourth E6 (Energy in Communication, Information, and Cyber Physical Systems) Workshop. Due to rising energy costs and environmental concerns, energy has become one of the most important concerns for communities, governments and industries. E6 takes on all aspects of energy from generation to distribution to consumption. It is becoming increasingly clear that information technology and communications must be intimately sewed into the energy fabric to deliver the promises of higher reliability, security and efficiency.

This year, the E6 workshop has brought together the prominent thinkers and doers of the energy domain. These are academicians, industry researchers, entrepreneurs and practitioners from the government that already have great work under their belts. The objective is to disseminate the new advancements in research to the practitioners and to provide the researchers with new insights from the field and challenges faced by the practitioners. In doing so, we hope to identify new directions where participants can forge new long-term collaborations that are mutually beneficial to both communities.

The program includes a keynote talk by Deva Seetharam of IBM Research, India. He leads the Smarter Energy Group there, which has developed technologies across the energy spectrum from better wind farm deployments and PMU analytics to microgrids and distributed demand response. We have a session dedicated to those who are arguably doing the best work in the energy domain, the start up entrepreneurs: SELCO, Enzen, Simpa, Bijli Bachao, and Radio Studio. This is followed by sessions for industry researchers: Philips, Bosch, IBM; and one for academics: IIT Bombay and IISc.

We have planned a brainstorming session at the end of day where ad hoc teams will be created from the researcher and practitioner groups. The objective is to identify potential opportunities wherein teams built during the workshop can submit joint proposals for funding.

We've planned a fun event and look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you,

Amarjeet Singh, IIITD

Zainul Charbiwala, IBM Research India