Ideas for the future

Security Systems:
National security is broadly understood as nation's preparedness against threat to subversive terrorism in all the forms-mass killing by suicide bombing to the infiltration of fake currency. If one can compare the number of terrorist cells busted by FBI as opposed to frequent acts of terrorism that blitzed India since 9/11, one will be able to appreciate the security system developed by homeland security to thwart terrorist attack well in advance. It was a success of information assimilation , filtration and artificial intelligence.

Since the time of Chanakya, information gathering has been regarded as key to national security. With the advent of modern telecommunication systems, when 500 millions people in India are talking to each other with couple of billions of phone calls in each day, identifying a handful of suspicious voice in real time among the billions of phone calls can make huge difference in a nation's preparedness against the enemy. No matter how simple it may sound, even to achieve such success requires several layers of complexity in wide area network, data streaming and data filtration each of which demands manifold research and development according to local and customized requirements.

Sensor integration for better urban life:
Among the top 20 polluted cities of the world, Indian and China are home to 9 of them. Exponential growth of population in the cities and with a limited resource to spare, these two rising giants have been suffering on all the accounts of urban development-from traffic congestion to inorganic contamination in the water. European cities have successfully controlled city pollution by wide area sensor network-that is for air, water and traffic, multiple sensors strategically located at the different part of the cities can bring feed and polluting information in a central location through mobile network. This enables environmental monitoring of the cities in the most effective way so that the municipality can take focused steps to reduce pollution levels. However to design such a sensor network is more of an art customized to a city's requirement and geography than a mere integration job.

Wide Area Video Surveillance:
In these days, local area video surveillance is no brainier. However to monitor the terrorists or a catastrophic event where feeds from traffic camera, local surveillance and satellite images need to be integrated and to be fed to various federal Government agencies on need to know basis , a cobweb of high data rate video feeds originating from thousands of kilometer remote location need to be accomodated to a single server and then distribute to different Government servers. This involves marriages of complex technologies like fiber optics network, Wi Max , human face auto-recognition by the remote camera and many more! Such system would enable much better response from Government agencies during emergency of terrorist attack or a national disaster like earth quake or cyclone as they would be able to allocate resources more appropriately.

Tourism Marketing and Monitoring System
Tourism is a major source of revenue for any country. These days, all the international tourists look for information in the Internet before deciding their vacations. Several thousands of websites exist to offer information to the tourists in the form of blogs, forum and wiki. Despite the existence of volumes of information, in the underdeveloped countries, very often tourists get touted by the local fraudsters since all the information are not readily available to the tourists on the spot. A mobile application that allow any tourist to access information on need to know basis could change this situation for ever since a tourist can verify any price offering immediately using mobile phones.

Improving the safety in the Railway systems:
Despite deployment of various safety measures, train accidents do happen all over the world. In the developing nations like India, it does happen more frequently because of dilapidated track condition, manual signaling and lack of proper maintenance. However with the advent of various sensor and video technologies and existence of fiber optical link along the railway track, effective video and sensor surveillance can be developed to identify weak condition of the track and hazardous situation arising out of flawed signalling. Overall, remote monitoring and automatic fault detection in the track can reduce the frequency of the accidents in the Railway to a great extent.