India-EU ICT Standardisation Cooperation Project supports CoE on IoT for Smart Cities at IIIT-Hyderabad

European Union through its India-EU ICT Standardisation Cooperation Project is supporting the creation of a Centre of Excellence (CoE) on Internet of Things (IoT) for Smart Cities at IIIT-Hyderabad. As part of the CoE, the EU India project will not only help to design relevant courses on IoT, but will also facilitate capacity building by supporting research collaborations and exchange of experts between India and EU.

With an aim to build a deeper understanding of the standards driven approach for smart cities, and facilitate collaboration between various smart city stakeholders across India and EU, the project will also organise outreach activities such as hackathons, workshops and conferences. These activities would be organised on varied components of IoT including the use of standards such as oneM2M for interoperability for the benefit of public at large.

The CoE brings together faculty from several IIIT-H research centres such as signal processing and communications, embedded systems, data science, computer systems group and domain areas such as building science, spatial informatics, e-governance, and earthquake engineering, thereby facilitating co-operation between different experts on interdisciplinary aspects of IoT for Smart Cities.

The EU as part of the project facilitated an exploratory trip to Estonia of the IIIT-H faculty in January. With a view to strengthen and support developers’ community, CoE has conducted number of trainings including applications of LoRaWAN standard for smart-cities and use of oneM2M in IoT applications. In July, the CoE will undertake a visit to France for enhancing collaboration between Indian and French universities and start-ups working in Toulouse and Bordeaux.

Commenting on this initiative, the coordinator of this CoE Dr Sachin Chaudhari, Assistant Professor, Signal Processing and Communications Research Center, said, “Learnings from our research collaborations, courses and hackathons, conducted as part of this CoE’s activities, will be used to apply smart city solutions in Hyderabad and then the successful models will be replicated across India. Thus, this CoE at IIIT-H, supported by India-EU ICT Standardization Cooperation Project, is expected to trigger a smart city revolution in India in several ways.”

Elaborating on the importance of the CoE, Raimund Magis, Chargé d’Affairesa, said, “Add interoperability and open innovation to IoT and it becomes a game changer which can positively impact millions of lives. The Centre of Excellence at IIIT-H facilitates the latest in IoT, being developed across India and the EU based on global standards, to reach a wider audience. We hope that these deliberations and interactions will further fast track solutions for the Indian smart cities requirements.”