MESSAGE FROM 2016 COMSNETS GENERAL CHAIRS

Welcome to the 8th version of COMSNETS! COMSNETS has been growing in participation and stature and this year represents yet another milestone in many respects. The technical program chairs Profs. Niloy Ganguly, Teng Joon Lim and Narayan Mandayam have worked hard to maintain the high standards that COMSNeTS continues to set- the core technical program comprises of 39 papers and 10 invited speakers from academia and industry. This is augmented by a poster session shepherded by poster chairs Chandramani Singh and Rijurekha Sen. A highly anticipated component of COMSNeTS are the panels where experts and participants can engage in open dialogue on topics of emerging interest. We have three exciting panels – thanks to the Panel Chairs Ravi Kokku and Gaurav Sharma - covering the viability of the IOT boom, the controversial net neutrality positions and the tussle between private industry and government sectors in leading national development. Demos and exhibits involving university developed technology as well as new products from start-ups and established companies have been compiled by the   chairs Mohit Kumar and Kuldeep Yadav and continue to be an integral part of COMSNeTS. The keynote speakers this year includes eminent researchers and technologists such as Prof. Fumiyuki Adachi from Tohoku University, K. Ananth Krishnan from TCS, Prof. Henning Schulzrinne from Columbia University. Our Banquet speaker Peeyush Ranjan, Flipkart CTO will speak on various technical and business aspects of the evolving network economy.

Several topical workshops complement the main technical program – thanks to Koushik Kar, Workshops Chair - and highlight specific topics of current interest. As in past years, we continue the successful Mobile India (chaired by V. Sridhar, D. Manjunath and Debabrata Das), Social Networking (chaired by Ravindran B and Animesh Mukherjee), Intelligent Transportation (chaired by Krishna Jagannathan and
Gaurav Raina) and NetHealth (chaired by Pushpendra Singh and Jagdish
Chaturvedi) workshops. With IOT and Big Data becoming central technologies, this year we are introducing a new workshop called WACI (Wild and Crazy Ideas in the Interplay of IOT and Big Data), conceived and chaired by Rajeev Shorey and Rahul
Mangharam.
 

A distinguishing aspect of COMSNeTS has been a concerted attempt to promote participation of graduate students and young scholars. We thank the efforts of the Graduate Forum Co-chairs Pradipta De and Vinayak Naik as well as the Travel Grants Chair Vijay Gabale, as well as COMSNeTS Innovators organizers Sergey Gorinsky, Kaustubh Dhondge, Prashant Vaishnav and Bharat Dwivedi for putting together mentoring sessions - a first for COMSNeTS – that are important contributors to the above goal. And last but not least, we recognize the Publicity efforts of the Co-chairs Joydeep Chandra, Aveek Dutta and Nitin Maslekar and Baek-Young Choi (Publications Chair) for efficiently taking care of the publication logistics.

In response to the exponential growth in the start-up ecosystem in India in recent years, we have organised a new “IOT League” to serve as a platform for developers, designers and entrepreneurs to pitch IOT based product ideas, form teams, build prototypes and present to our Hackathon judges. League winners win
prizes, and achieve necessary publicity and connections to carry the ideas forward.

COMSNeTS is most grateful for the continuing sponsorship it has received from
industry, which is critical for successfully organizing a high quality
conference. We thank Cisco for being a Platinum sponsor, TCS, Microsoft, Google, VMWare, Samsung, Google and Flipkart for being Silver sponsors and
University of Pennsylvania, IBM Research, Xerox, Icann, Xfinity, Ericsson
and Adobe for being Bronze sponsors this year. True to its mission of involving the next generation of engineering scholars and innovators, COMSNeTS achieved new highs in providing travel support to students. Generous support from ACM SIGCOMM and LRN Foundation enabled awards to 9 international students and COMSNETS Association further funded the travel of 35 local students.

Finally - organising a popular and growing international conference like COMSNETS seamlessly over the years has relied on the steady support and contribution of many people, who work quietly and tirelessly behind the scenes. Without them, the conference would simply not be the experience that it is today and we would like to acknowledge their efforts. Tulika Pandey has been our interface with the Government of India and smoothened many a process for foreign visitors over the years; Zartash Uzmi, Prashant Pillai and Dah-ming Chiu have pitched in with advice as our International Advisors. Chandrika Sridhar and Rajeshwari Maitra have supported registrations and kept the conference organizational logistics flowing smoothly. Sudipta Maitra has most ably managed sponsorships & all local arrangements. Giridhar Mandyam has lead the Organizing Committee conference calls over many years that have been key in keeping the different parts of COMSNeTS planning functioning smoothly. Ananda Krishna has managed the COMSNeTS website with consummate skill over many years, and we appreciate his continuing dedication.

And finally, Rajeev Shorey deserves the most kudos as the very embodiment of COMSNeTS for his drive and persistence in making COMSNETS a top-notch event; his contribution to virtually every organizational aspect continues to be fundamental to the success of the conference.

We look forward to your active participation in ensuring a very successful conference this year!

Sumit Roy

UWash, USA & IIIT Delhi

Ishwardutt Parulkar

CISCO, India

We are pleased to introduce the Eighth edition of the International Conference on COMmunication Systems and NETworkS (COMSNETS). The conference has the honor of hosting highly accomplished Keynote speakers, Banquet speaker and Invited speakers from around the globe. The conference boasts of a very high quality technical program, with a mix of invited and submitted papers, and a top-notch poster session.  Mobile India 2016, the business track of the conference, compliments the technical program with an industry-focused program that explores the theme of the “App Economy”. Once again, the conference has scheduled several interesting panels with recognized experts in the areas of the Internet of Things (IoT), Net Neutrality, and the roles of government and industry in national development. The conference is complemented by four workshops – namely, WACI, ITS, Social Networking and NetHealth, in cutting-edge areas of great current interest that address innovative applications of digital communications and a strong slate of demos and exhibits coming from a mix of established companies and start-ups. In addition, a new Graduate Forum has been introduced where students can discuss their ongoing research and work-in-progress. The conference will once again take place in Bangalore, with robust involvement from local industry and research institutions. We also introduce the IoT league this year that promises to be an important and exciting event of COMSNETS.

COMSNETS 2016 has benefited from a carefully-assembled organizing committee, drawn from top researchers from around the world from both industry and academia. We are grateful to the entire organizing committee for their efforts in putting together this year’s program. We sincerely thank the General Co-Chairs – Prof. Sumit Roy (The University of Washington at Seattle, USA) and Dr. Ishwardutt Parulkar (Cisco, India), the TPC Co-Chairs – Prof. Niloy Ganguly (Indian Institute of Technology – Kharagpur, India), Prof. Narayan Mandayam (Rutgers University, USA) and Prof. Teng Joon Lim (The National University of Singapore). The General Chairs, TPC Chairs, the Technical Program Committee, Workshop Chairs, Web Chair, Panel Chairs, Poster Chairs, Graduate Forum Chairs, Demos & Exhibits Chairs, Publicity & Publications Chairs, Travel Grants Chair, Local Arrangements, Sponsorship and Registration Chairs, COMSNETS Innovators and members of the IoT League have worked hard and put together an outstanding program for this year’s conference. We sincerely thank Chandrika Sridhar, Sudipta Maitra and Ananda Krishna for their continued support of the conference through the years. Sudipta has worked extremely hard throughout the year and has ensured that the conference is financially sustainable. Our young, vibrant and dynamic web chair, Ananda Krishna deserves a very special mention for playing a stellar role throughout the year and in taking the conference to even greater heights. This year has seen four highly enthusiastic and motivated experts join the committee as ‘COMSNETS Innovators’ – we welcome Sergey Gorinsky, Prashant Vaishnav, Kaustubh Dhondge and Bharat Dwivedi to the core team. The innovators have been instrumental in planning for the Mentoring Sessions in COMSNETS 2016 – a first of a kind event in the conference. We would like to sincerely thank Ms. Tulika Pandey, DeitY, Government of India for her unstinted support in obtaining approvals from the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.

The conference continues to benefit from many industrial sponsors and university partners.  A very special thanks to this year’s Platinum Sponsor, Cisco.  We are sincerely grateful to our Silver Sponsors – Tata Consultancy Services, Microsoft, Google, VMWare, Flipkart, Samsung.  We appreciate the contributions of our Bronze Sponsors – The University of Pennsylvania, Xerox, IBM Research, ICANN, Exfinity, Ericsson and Adobe.   In addition, we give a special thanks to conference partners Airtight Networks and Carrot. We are delighted to have the University of Pennsylvania, IISc Bangalore, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIIT Delhi, IIIT Hyderabad and IIIT Bangalore as university partners. We are also delighted to continue to partner 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.  ACM SIGCOMM has very generously supported the COMSNETS international travel grants and the Geo-Diversity travel Grant. This year, COMSNETS has also partnered with LRN foundation – selected students attending COMSNETS’16 would be provided funds to participate in reputed international conferences where they have a paper.

In summary, COMSENTS 2016 will see several new members in the community, new events and new areas of research being added to the conference portfolio. More than fifty organizing committee members have worked extremely hard throughout the year in ensuring a very high quality, exciting and enriching COMSNETS 2016. The conference has been growing in stature and reputation with year passing year.

We welcome you to COMSNETS 2016, and hope that you have a fulfilling experience. Enjoy your stay in Bangalore!

Uday Desai

IIT Hyderabad, India

Giridhar Mandyam

Qualcomm, USA

Rajeev Shorey

TCS Innovation Labs, USA/India

G. Venkatesh

SASKEN, India

Welcome to COMSNETS 2016! The final technical program this year consists of 39 regular papers and 10 invited presentations. We received 143 paper submissions from authors in 14 countries out of which selected 39 papers.  The accepted papers are divided in 14 sessions covering wide-ranging topics in the area of networking

We had a rigorous reviewing process where all papers with divided opinions underwent three or more reviews. A total of 90 TPC members from academia and industry all over the world provided peer reviews for these papers, which was followed by on-line discussion and selection that was overseen by TPC chairs. We are grateful to all TPC members for their tremendous effort in helping us put together a strong technical program!

For the invited papers, we have 10 eminent researchers from the academia and the industry who will present their state-of-the art research at the conference.

We are pleased to share that we have instituted best paper awards (in partnership with ACM) that will recognize the top 2 student authored papers. The SIGCOMM GeoDiversity Travel Grant sponsors one author from the two best locally-authored papers of the regional conferences supported by SIGCOMM (i.e., COMSNETS, AINTEC, and LANC) to attend the SIGCOMM main conference (or other SIGCOMM-sponsored conference of their choice). The grant covers travel, lodging, and registration.

Besides the main program, the conference includes 4 workshops on related topics of IoT and Big Data, Social Networking, Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Networked Healthcare Technologies. The main conference also features  3  cutting edge panels on the topics of IoT, Net Neutrality and National Development along with poster and Demo sessions and as well as a Graduate forum.

We wish all the COMSNETS’16 delegates a very pleasant and productive stay in Bangalore in January 2016 !

Niloy Ganguly

IIT Kharagpur, India

Teng Joon Lim

NUS Singapore

Narayan Mandayam

WINLAB, Rutgers University, USA

COMSNETS 2016 features three exciting panel sessions on topics of broad current interest for the COMSNETS communities:

Panel 1: Internet of Things: Will it Flourish or Fizzle?

5:30-6:45pm, 6 January 2016, Sigma Hall,

Panelists: Aruna Balasubramanian (Stony Brook University, USA), Manoj Choudhary (Samsung, India), Som Pal Choudhury (Analog Devices, India), Shivkumar Kalyanaraman (IBM Research, India), Rajat Moona, (C-DAC, India), Deepak Rajanna (Flipkart, India), Jeffrey Tew (TCS Innovation Labs, USA)

Moderator: Giridhar Mandyam (Qualcomm, USA)

Panel 2: Net Neutrality: Is it Good, Bad, or Confusing for the Telecom industry?

5-6:15pm, 7 January 2015, Sigma Hall

Panelists: Anand Agarwal (Cisco, India), Sean Blagsvedt (babajob.com), Sergey Gorinsky (IMDEA Network Institute, Spain), Mohan Rao (Samsung, India), Henning Schulzrinne (Columbia University, USA), V. Sridhar (IIIT, Bangalore)

Moderator: Vijay Mann ( IBM Research, India)

Panel 3: Worlds Collide: Should Government or Private Industry Take the Lead on National Development?

5-6:30pm, 8 January 2015, Sigma Hall

Panelists: Narendra Ahuja (ITRA, India and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA), Manish Gupta (Xerox Research Center, India), Sourav Mukherji (IIM, Bangalore), Tulika Pandey (DEITY, Govt. of India), Shriram Revankar (Adobe Research)

Moderator: Gaurav Sharma (University of Rochester, USA)

Please join us for an engaging discussion each evening at COMSNETS as eminent members from Academia, Industry and Government share their perspectives and suggestions for future research, business, policies, and more. All panels will take place in the Sigma Hall at the Chancery Pavilion Hotel, Residency Road, Bangalore, India, the venue for COMSNETS 2016.

Panels Website: http://www.comsnets.org/panel_discussions.html

We thank all the panel members for participating and agreeing to share their expertise and thoughts with us. We also thank the COMSNETS 2016 organizing committee for their excellent suggestions and feedback on panel topics and prospective panelists, and the COMSNETS 2016 Web Chair for the excellent support for the panels.

Ravindranath Kokku

IBM Research, USA

Gaurav Sharma

University of Rochester, USA

The COMSNETS 2016 Graduate Forum provides a supportive environment for graduate students to showcase their preliminary work. This year we have extended the graduate forum to include submissions from masters candidates, in addition to doctoral candidates. The idea is to provide the students with useful feedback and guidance on various aspects of their research from participants from a wide spectrum of audience, including members from academia, research labs, and industry.

This year we received 24 submissions. Each submission consisted of a 2 page extended abstract, a short-bio of the student author, and a presentation deck. The Technical Program Committee, listed below, helped us evaluate each submission. We provided at least 2 reviews for each submission. Finally, we accepted 8 submissions, with an acceptance rate of 33%. The presentations are on topics related to resource management problems in different settings, network and system analysis, as well as, on sensing. We have organized the 8 presentations in two back to back sessions.

Each presenter will have 20 minutes for presentation, including 5 minutes for Q&A. With a limited number of high quality presentations, we believe it will be a stimulating environment for the presenters to showcase their ongoing work and get early feedback for further improvement. This year we will select one presentation for the Best Presentation Award and one for Runners Up Award. We are also including the 2-page extended abstract as part of the proceedings for the authors who are willing to publish their work. We have 6 out of 8 accepted submissions to be published in the proceedings.

We would like to thank the TPC members of the Graduate Forum, who volunteered their time to review the submissions. Without their help, we would not be able to put together the program. We thank the following members of the Graduate Forum TPC:

Abhinav Parate (HP Labs, USA)
Debraj De (Missouri University of Science and Technology)
Dhaval Patel (IIT Roorkee)
Karthik Dantu (SUNY Buffalo)
Mahima Agumbe Suresh (Texas A&M University)
Upendra Sharma (IBM Watson Research Lab, USA)
Maitreya Natu (TRDDC, India)
Vinayak Naik (co-chair) (IIIT-Delhi)
Pradipta De (co-chair) (SUNY, Korea and StonyBrook University)

We would also like to thank Aruna Balasubramaniam from StonyBrook University who agreed to be the judge for selecting the best presentation and the runners-up.

Vinayak Naik

IIIT Delhi, India

Pradipta De

SUNY, Korea

This session is designed to allow start-ups, industries and researchers to showcase their latest industrial applications and research prototypes in all communications and networking related topics. This year, we had an overwhelming response from sponsors, industry partners, start-ups, and universities. In the final program, we have 11 demos from COMSNETS sponsors including Cisco, TCS, IBM Research, Xerox Research, Adobe Research, and Microsoft Research. India has a fledgling ecosystem of startups that is growing at a steady pace. We continued with the last year’s initiative of invite technology startups to be part of this session and glad to report that 9 start-ups will be demonstrating their cutting-edge solutions. Also, we have 6 demonstrations from universities which are selected based on their technical merit and peer reviews.

We have spotlights talks in the conference opening session where each demo presenter will get an opportunity to briefly talk about their demonstration and why people should visit and see it in more detail. The demo sessions are spread over two days to ensure maximum visibility and favor a close interaction between presenters and participants. Additionally, the demo session has two best demo awards, selected by a jury during the exhibit session. Finally, we thank all the demo presenters, sponsors, and COMSNETS 2016 organizing committee for their support.

Mohit Kumar

Flipkart, India

Kuldeep Yadav

Xerox, India

COMSNETS Innovators are a new organizing committee introduced for COMSNETS 2016. The committee members come from across the world and are encharged with taking the conference series to new heights by injecting fresh elements into the conference program and promoting global participation in COMSNETS.

The Mentoring Sessions at COMSNETS 2016 constitute the main inaugural initiative by the COMSNETS Innovators. The objective of the Mentoring Sessions is to give student attendees an opportunity to interact one-on-one with eminent researchers in the field of communication systems and networks. This new element of the COMSNETS program enables the students to get feedback on their current research results and future research plans.

We are greatly pleased with the enthusiastic interest generated by the Mentoring Sessions among not only the student attendees but also the researchers who agreed to serve as the mentors. The group of 36 mentors includes the COMSNETS 2016 general chairs, technical program chairs, steering committee chairs, keynote speakers, invited speakers, and other prominent researchers with at least 6 years of experience after receiving their Ph.D. degrees. Each of the 44 mentees gets the benefit of a 40-minute one-on-one session with the assigned mentor, with the initial 15 minutes to explain the research results and plans to the mentor, and with the remaining 25 minutes for a discussion to obtain candid constructive feedback.

In addition to the 44 one-on-one mentoring sessions held throughout the main conference days of January 6th, 7th, and 8th, COMSNETS 2016 will conclude its main conference with a plenary mentoring session in the evening of January 8th.

While Saurabh Aggarwal is not formally on the COMSNETS 2016 Innovators committee, he has been an integral part of our team organizing the Mentoring Sessions. We are thankful to Saurabh for his hard work on identifying potential mentors and matching the mentors with the mentees. We are also thankful to Ananda Krishna for all his help, which went far beyond the timely updates of the webpage for the Mentoring Sessions.

Most importantly, we would like to thank all the mentors for accepting the mentoring roles and wish continued success to all the mentees! As COMSNETS 2016 Innovators, we hope that you will thoroughly enjoy attending COMSNETS 2016!

Sergey Gorinsky

IMDEA Network Institute, Spain

Kaustubh Dhondge

UMKC, USA

Prashant Vaishnav

IBM China

Bharat Dwivedi

SMU, Singapore

Welcome to 1st IoT League (IoTL'16) at COMSNETS !

Internet of Things (IoT) is set to transform and disrupt many areas of business and everyday life.

The optimism of IoT being transformational is driving innovation in both traditional and nontraditional application domains. IoT solution providers must be well-versed in identifying and validating realistic and implementable IoT solutions that can deliver real value to customers and end users.

The IoT league aims to brings together technologists and enthusiasts through an open competition to communicate their IoT vision and value proposition.

The meticulous selection process of the IoT league has short-listed the 'top three' teams.

They will be presenting their work at the WACI worskhop (on 5th Jan 2016) and demonstrating their solution in the demo/exhibit session (on 6th Jan 2016).

The winner of the 1st IoT League (IoTL'16) will be announced in the conference banquet on the 7th of January 2016.

Please come and join us!

Prasant Misra

RBCCPS, IISc Bangalore, India

Ananda Krishna

Czar Securities, India

Saurabh Aggarwal

TCS Innovation Labs, USA/India

Kaustubh Dhondge

UMKC, USA

The COMSNETS 2016 travel grant awards are designed to give young and inquisitive researchers an opportunity to travel from various parts of India and the world to Bangalore where COMSNETS is held annually. This year we received 113 applications for the travel grants, 18% of which were from outside India. We were able to award travel grants to all the authors who applied for the travel grants and had an accepted submission at the conference, be it a full paper, workshop paper, poster paper or graduate forum abstract. We awarded in total 46 travel grants, 37 from various parts of India and 9 from outside India. We are especially thankful to SIGCOMM travel grant awards to support travel of a subset of authors from North America and Europe. I am very happy to report that through the travel grant awards, we were able to support travel (via air or road) of all the selected authors, speaking at the conference. I hope that the large number of travel grant award provided by COMSNETS will encourage more and more students and young researchers to submit their work and participate in the conference in a meaningful way.

Vijay Gabale

Infilect Technologies

Once again raising sponsorship for Comsnets 16 has been a herculean task. Most multinationals remained squeezed for funds and the bigger Indian companies just shied away as in the previous years. In spite of this a vigorous campaign yielded a decent support from 14 entities. I am truly grateful to all of them irrespective of their level of support.

Cisco once again was the biggest contributor who came as a Platinum Sponsor. I am truly grateful to the Cisco team for their support. Their constant high level support for the past 5 years is commendable. I would also like to record my appreciation to Microsoft Research India and Google Research India for once again coming forward with their financial support.

Due to the high impact this conference has been creating in the Networking world companies such as TCS, Samsung, VMware, Flipcart,  University of Pennsylvania, Ericsson, ICAAN and Adobe have for the first time financially contributed to Comsnets. I am truly grateful to all of them and hope they find it worthwhile to invest in us in the future as well.

My heartfelt thanks also goes to the other sponsors namely Xerox Research, IBM Research who have once again chipped in with their financial support. A special thanks to Airtight Networks for supporting us by providing the conference with free WiFi service.

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

Rajeev Shorey

TCS Innovation Labs, USA/India

Sudipta Maitra

New Delhi, India

The Chancery Pavilion continued to be the venue for Comsnets for the 9th 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 Vivek Thakur, GM of The Chancery Pavilion Hotel and Mr Vinay Hinduja and Mr. Surya, the Banquet Managers of The Chancery Pavilion Hotel, for all their help and support.

This year again The Chancery Pavilion Hotel promises a total gastronomic delight by providing a very special menu for all the lunches and welcome reception. The Royal Orchid Hotel, has been chosen as the venue for the Comsnets Gala Banquet. Everyone is aware of their great tradition of hospitality and so our expectations are high. They have promised us a a dinner fare suited for Kings in their Grand Banquet Hall. I thank their Exec Asst Manager, Mr B Madhusudhan, for his help and support to make this happen.

I would like to record a special thanks to Mr Kuldeep Singh of Foureleven India and Mr Ravi Chandra and Murali of Audio Plus for all their help in providing the backdrops, banners, brochure, audio visual equipment etc. Gentleman, I thank you for your your help and support to us for the ninth year in a row. You are an inseparable partner to Comsnets and you shall remain as such.

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

New Delhi, India

Ananda Krishna

Czar Securities, India

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the second workshop on Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This interdisciplinary workshop aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines, and will focus particularly on urban transportation systems. This year's ITS workshop will feature keynote addresses by two leading academic experts, Prof. P. R. Kumar (Texas A&M University) and Prof. Carolina Osorio (MIT), in addition to peer-reviewed and invited paper presentations.

Krishna Jagannathan

IIT Madras, India

Gaurav Raina

IIT Madras, India

The theme for the Net health workshop 2016 is “Invent – Implement- Impact”. The sessions have been carefully designed to echo this theme and to ensure that all key stakeholders in the healthcare innovation ecosystem participate in the event and interact with each other through interactive discussions and networking sessions. This NetHealth Workshop focuses to bring together leading clinicians, MedTech stalwarts, mobile health pioneers, engineers, designers and entrepreneurs to a common platform to network and build a strong healthcare innovation platform. The aim is to build synergies among the multidisciplinary participants to help in the development of new healthcare technologies for India.

As the chairs of this workshop, we are very excited to share that we are expecting a strong presence from doctors, engineers and healthcare professionals from various backgrounds in this workshop. This will be a unique opportunity for enterpreneurs and engineers to interact with clinicians and recieve feedback on their respective projects. Most importantly these clinicians have keen interest to support healthcare innovations and many have themselves had prior experiences in the development of new healthcare technologies.

There are three panel discussions covering technical, commercial and clinical aspects of the healthcare ecosystem to allow an engaging and meaningful interactive discussion among panelists and attendees of the workshop. The workshop also aims to provide impactful and inspiring talks by keynotes and invited speakers on important healthcare topics. Finally, the most valuable aspect of the workshop are the 10 paper presentations delivered by young entrepreuneurs/scientists followed by a showcase of new technologies in healthcare technology.

We welcome all participants to attend and benefit from this workshop to ignite the spirit of innovation for the development of new healthcare technologies for India.

Jagdish Chaturvedi

Innaccel, India

Pushpendra Singh

IIIT Delhi, India

We are happy to welcome you to this year's workshop on Social Networking, organized along with COMSNETS 2016. We have assembled an exceptionally strong set of research presentations that, in conjunction with excellent keynote and invited speakers, have the ingredients for making an intellectually stimulating workshop. Srinivasan Parthasarathy shall deliver the keynote address on trust in networks while Niloy Ganguly, Partha Pratim Talukdar and Sayan Ranu shall deliver three exciting invited talks on disaster management, multi-relational networks and communication motifs respectively.

The study of social networks is helping in better understanding of how people communicate & interact on a daily basis. Online social networks are serving as a vital means for information diffusion and resource sharing - aiding discovery of connected communities, improving communication between globally dispersed individuals, and even measuring the impact of specific events on public opinion. A significant fraction of mind-share in the form of applications, diverse access interfaces, and a large economic ecosystem has developed around this field. This workshop strives to bring together academic, R&D, and industry researchers from various engineering and science disciplines to address the fundamental and technological challenges associated with the rapidly evolving domain of social networking. The goal of this workshop is to facilitate cross-disciplinary discussion of relevance to social networking, involving novel ideas and applications, and experimental results. It will provide an opportunity to compare and contrast the ethological approach to social behavior in humans (and other social animals) with web-based evidence of social interactions, information diffusion, behavior of individuals and affinities between web-based social networks. To remind you, we have had 21 submissions of which 7 were selected after undergoing a rigorous review process. If you have any feedback about the workshop, please feel free to convey this to us either in person at the workshop or electronically.

Ravindran B

IIT Madras, India

Animesh Mukherjee

IIT Kharagpur, India

Theme: App Economy: Interplay between Telcos and  OTTs

 

The App Economy in India has been jumpstarted by the new age start-ups, commonly referred to      as “Over The Top (OTT)” players. Compass (2015) upgraded Bengaluru from  #19  to  #15  in  its Global Start-up Ecosystem Ranking, much to the delight of all of us. The app economy and the traditional economy are overlapping to a greater extent. Apps are being integrated into many traditional activities ranging from grocery shopping to calling a cab, a trend that is rapidly spilling revenue from almost every industry in the higher revenue traditional economy into the app economy. It is expected that the spill-overs are greater in emerging countries such as India where there are substantial inefficiencies in the traditional industries. This has also caught the attention    of funding agencies. While more than $4 billion was invested in start-ups in  India in  2014,  the  meter is up to $1.5 billion in Q1 of 2015, indicative of the promise of this sector of the economy.

 

Simultaneously, the telecom, mobile and Internet infrastructure backbone that is required for the app economy is also gearing up. Nationwide 3G mobile service is available and year 2016  is expected to be the “Year of 4G mobile”. Mobile broadband subscriber base is touching 100 Million and continues to grow at a quarterly growth rate of more than   15%.

 

Hence the interplay between telcos and OTTs are very important to bolster the app economy. Meanwhile, the “Net Neutrality” debate is also peaking with the world watching our policy steps     on this issue closely.

 

Mobile India 2016 will explore opportunities and challenges of the App Economy and the interplay between Telcos and OTTs in the following four sessions with all stakeholders in the   ecosystem:

 

Morning Keynote Address:

 

Dr. Henning Schulzrinne, Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University & CTO, United States Federal Communications Commission

 

 

 

Afternoon Keynote Address

 

Mr. Samiran Gupta, Head-India, Internet Consortium for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)

 

 

Session 1:  The start-up ecosystem and its role in the App Economy

The fledgling start-up ecosystem in India is growing rapidly leveraging the strength of information and communication technologies in various areas. This has generated both direct and indirect employment and has contributed to local and national economy. Bangalore houses more start-ups than any other place in the country. Though there are criticisms of Indian start-ups aping those in the U.S., there are some fine grained technology and business innovations that these start-ups are doing with specific reference to the somewhat unique Indian context.

The panelists from start-ups, venture funds, and consulting firms will discuss the problems, challenges and solutions in building a robust app economy.

 

 

Panelists

 

Chinnu Senthilkumar, Partner and CTO, Exfinity Ventures Pradeep Nair, Co-Founder and CEO, Confianzyz

Mohit Kumar, Data Scientist, Flipkart

 

Dr. T.K. Srikanth (Moderator), Professor, IIIT-Bangalore

 

Session 2: Telcos’ role in the App Economy

While Telcos have been concentrating on their network deployments to improve coverage and  capacity, they are being threatened with relegation to being mere bandwidth providers. The magic monetization of each byte through their networks has eluded them while they are  being  threatened with being marginalized to some extent by the OTTs. However, Telcos can  be  considered a “powerful player” in the game as they guard their forte of network infrastructure and radio spectrum. How do Telcos view their role in the app economy? What is the interplay between Telcos and OTTs in the app  economy?

The panelists from mobile operators, Internet Service Providers, and start-ups will discuss the above and related issues in co-opetition.

 

Pre-event article on the session topic in Hindu Business Line can be accessed at: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/imprisoned-in-the-box/article7992618.ece?css=print

 

 

Panelists

Ishwardutt Parulkar, Cisco Distinguished Engineer, Cisco

Dr. Pravin Bhagwat, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, AirTight Networks SR Raja, Associate Vice President, Persistent Systems

 

Dr. D. Manjunath (Moderator), Professor, IIT-Bombay

 

Session 3: ICT for Innovation

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies was founded on  17  May, 1865 and  2015-16 marks the 150th  Anniversary of ITU. In line with the theme for the year “ICT for innovation”, this session      is devoted to ITU’s mission of connecting the entire world population. Critical to this is the telecom infrastructure including allocation and assignment of radio spectrum which is part of  the  role  of  ITU.

This session co-hosted with the ITU Asia Pacific Telecommunity Foundation of India (IAFI) Bangalore chapter, will have panelists from Start-ups, ITU, telcos, equipment makers and telecom infrastructure providers to discuss how ICT enabled Innovation can give a boost to the new app economy.

Panelists

Shri. Anil Kaushal, Member, TRAI Shri. Vipin Tyagi, Executive Director, C-DOT

Shri. Vimal Wakhlu, Managing Director, TCIL Shri. P.K. Garg, Former Wireless Advisor, GoI

Shri. T.R. Dua, Chairman, Infrastructure Providers Association

Dr. Shailendra Hajela (Moderator), Chairman, ITU APT Foundation of India

Session 4: Law, regulation and policy of App Economy

The app economy does not stand on its own. It is interwoven with the traditional economy and industry. Hence there are a number of issues in legality, liability, responsibility and ownership of   the OTTs compared to traditional industries. While the governments all over the world are  grappling with this, India has had its share with liability and licensing of app based taxi aggregation service, taxes with respect to app based e-commerce services, authentication of mobile payment services and so on.

This session will have panelists from law, social organizations, academia, government and OTTs who will discuss the nuances in law, regulation and policy in the app economy.

Panelists

Dr. H. Jamadagni, Professor, IISc Parnil Urdhwareshe, Researcher, ICRIER

Deepak Maheshwari (Moderator), Head-Government Affairs, Symantec

V. Sridhar

IIIT Bangalore, India

D Manjunath

IIT Bombay, India

Debabrata Das

IIIT Bangalore, India