In a world where things are getting unpredictable it would be a boon to have someone informing you about the next earthquake.

“We can place a sensor network robot at the bottom of the sea. Any change in the water can be communicated, saving disastrous outcomes,” said Professor S S Iyengar, Louisiana State University, USA, speaking on distributed sensor networks.

Sharing his thoughts with Deccan Herald, Prof Iyengar at the International Conference on Information Processing (ICIP) said, “In the US, we are looking at creating algorithms for bio-chemical sensors to detect terrorist activities.”

Areas of concern
“Cyber security is the main area of concern in this regard.”

Prof Iyengar also informed, “Working with the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre we are looking to develop nuclear sensors to measure temperature, pressure in reactors. We even plan to develop robots which will move into the hazardous areas and make the necessary changes.”

One of the other uses of these sensor networks is for creating smart chairs. These chairs are fitted with sensor networks that can be connected to the doctors or hospitals.

Initiative
The University Visvesvaraya College (UVC) of Engineering, Bangalore organised the ICIP conference between 10-12 August, 2007 in the city.

This first ever initiative by UVC on information processing, is a venture to understand the importance and applications of information processing in collaboration with the Society of Information Processing. The conference attracted about 300 papers and 200 delegates from countries such as the USA, UK, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand etc attended the event.

Ethics
Speaking at the inaugural session, Minister for Science and Technology Ramachandre Gowda, said, “As science advances, we move away from the realities in the country. It is essential that we maintain our ethics in this regard.”

The areas covered in the conference ranges from computer networks, information security, pattern recognition, image processing, data mining, information retrieval.

One of the focus areas is the biometric recognition which 75 papers related to this topic for discussion. The conference also saw the release of a book and international journal on information processing.