IIITH Organises Roundtable on Healthy Smart Cities

- Key stakeholders from government, technology partners, front line workers, academia and startups deliberated on post pandemic challenges and technology solutions, especially on how to make schools and public spaces safer

- IIITH's Smart City Living Lab to actively tackle the challenges by planning and working closely with key stakeholders on future actions

HYDERABAD, India, July 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart City Living Lab at IIITH, organized a multi stakeholder round table discussion on healthy smart cities to bring in perspectives from government, technology partners, frontline workers, academia and startups for a better understanding of how cities and technology players are responding to the pandemic and to get valuable insights and address it collaboratively. As life after COVID slowly eases back to normalcy, governance and management of organisations/workplaces/schools/government need to understand the best practices and be equipped with the best solutions for managing the safety and wellbeing of citizens. A position paper was made and published on the discussion, solutions and next steps. 

"Reaching out to the market has always been a struggle. The concept of reaching the market and demonstrating the solution can only be accomplished through a living lab that provides a test environment for solutions to be tested and an environment for ecosystem players to come together and demonstrate a workable solution," said A.K Garg, Sr. Director at Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology.

The key focus of deliberations was to understand when every one gets back to work/school, public transport/spaces and markets and how to make it safe. Various concerns that need to be addressed for effective and safe reopening and functioning of schools, work, public spaces etc were discussed and valuable recommendations were made. Some are 1) Real time updates with sensor network deployment 2) Live Monitoring and Screening 3) Mandatory Periodic Screening 4) SOP Guidelines and Training in place 5) Real Time Tracking. Solutions discussed were for early detection and mitigation of COVID Aerosols from air. Standard SOPs will also play a major role in use for smooth reopening of institutions.

"The spirit and essence of the Living Lab was wonderfully captured in our round table discussion. Due to great moderation by NSN and excellent engagement from all participants, we were able to get very meaningful insights which can help us create impactful solutions that can be demonstrated in in the Lab. Looking forward to many more such initiatives," said Vincent Van Noord, Director Europe at European Business and Technology Centre (EBTC).

Smart City Research Center at IIITH was set up with support from MEITY (Government of India), Smart City Mission and Government of Telangana at IIITH. The research center includes a Living Lab, that is a setup with support from EBTC and Amsterdam Innovation Arena. Living Labs will be taking an active role in tackling the challenges by working closely with key government stakeholders to plan on future actions, for quarterly follow-on round tables and to host challenges based on the problems identified. Living lab will act as a hub for building solutions and test bed to ensure the right standards are in place by validating the products in the lab environment.

"Thought leadership is an important aspect of the Living Lab. This roundtable is the first of many we are planning towards engaging the stakeholders for the benefit of the larger ecosystem," said Prof Ramesh Loganathan, Co-Innovation and Head Research/Innovation Outreach at IIITH.

Panellists included  Dr A K Garg - Sr. Director at Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology; Dr.Chinnababu Sunkavalli - Consultant Surgical Oncologist at Apollo Hospital; Dr. Ashish Srivastava IAS - CEO & MD, Dehradun Smart City PMC; Manish Kothari VP, India at Silicon Labs, Dr. Prabhakar Bhimalapuram Assistant Professor, at IIITH; Priya Prakash CEO Of HealthsetGo; Rajesh Kumar Additional Director at Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology; Sukanto Aich Whole-time Director & Board Member; Business Leader - Systems & Services at Signify; Venkatesh Narasimhan Sr. Director, Engineering at Silicon Labs; Vikram Murty Foundation for ISHRAE , Founder Member, Past President ISHRAE. 

About Smart City Living Labs: The Smart City Research Center is set up with support from MEITY (Government of India), Smart City Mission and Government of Telangana at IIITH. The research center includes a Living Lab, that is a setup with support from EBTC and Amsterdam Innovation Arena. The Building on the Smart Campus @ IIITH Smart City Research Center is based on the following Objectives: There is a huge push for smart cities in India under the Smart Cities Mission, a new initiative by the Government of India to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local development and harnessing technology to create smart outcomes for citizens. In this ambitious project, 100 cities are being covered for the duration of 5 years with a budget of Rs.100 crore per city per year. The goal of the Living Lab plan is to create an urban area enhancing three value domains: social, economic and environmental. Thus developed Living Lab shall enable the following: 1)Get expertise in IoT for Smart Cities related research and deployment 2)Generate data for research 3)Creation of a viable innovation and demand driven ecosystem in universities.4)Provide a test bench for IoT based Smart City implementations to start-ups as well as big companies.

About IIIT-Hyderabad

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) is an autonomous research university founded in 1998 that focuses on the core areas of Information Technology, such as Computer Science, Electronics and Communications, and their applications in other domains through inter-disciplinary research that has a greater social impact. Some of its research domains include Visual Information Technologies, Human Language Technologies, Data Engineering, VLSI and Embedded Systems, Computer Architecture, Wireless Communications, Algorithms and Information Security, Robotics, Building Science, Cognitive Science, Earthquake Engineering, Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, Education Technologies, Power Systems, IT in Agriculture and e-Governance.

Website: www.iiit.ac.in/

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Sunory Dutt
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IIIT-Hyderabad

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