The Speakers

Dr G Venkatasubramanian is currently working as a Professor of Psychiatry, National Institute of Mental Health And Neurosciences (NIMHANS), India. He has received his MBBS degree from Stanley Medical College, Chennai, India in 1998. He has obtained his MD and PhD in Psychiatry from National Institute of Mental Health And Neurosciences, Bengaluru, India in 2001 and 2013 respectively. He received the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in the field of Medical Sciences in 2018. His overarching research interest to learn the science that will facilitate a personalized approach to understand and treat severe mental illnesses like Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and several others. In pursuit of this, he has been involved in translationally relevant research studies to understand the clinical neurobiology of these disorders.

Dr Dwarikanath Mahapatra is currently working as a Senior Research Scientist at the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE. His current focus is on developing algorithms for Digital histopathology image analysis. His previous positions include working as a Research Staff Member at IBM Research Melbourne where he led image analytics effort for developing machine learning and image analysis algorithms in computer aided diagnosis of different diseases. He was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Machine Learning (ML) group headed by Prof. Joachim Buhmann at ETH Zurich. His PhD studies were completed at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, in 2011 under the supervision of Dr.Ying Sun. He has done his Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering in 2006 from NIT Rourkela, India.

Dr Bong Jun Choi is an associate professor at the School of Computer Science & Engineering and jointly at the School of Electronic Engineering, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, State University of New York Korea, Korea, and concurrently a research assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, USA. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Yonsei University, Korea, both in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His current research focuses on distributed artificial intelligence, distributed intelligent energy networks, and security. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM.

Dr Hanumant Singh Shekhawat is working at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. He did his postdoc from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, and The Netherlands. His research was on multi-linear data (tensor) reduction techniques, which has applications in video/speech processing, MRI and (higher dimensional) data analysis. He completed his PhD in Nov 2012, from the Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Twente, The Netherlands. His research was related to optimization problems in sampling and interpolation. He has completed his masters (in 2004) from the Department of Electrical engineering and his bachelor in Electronics and communication engineering (in 2002) from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and Rajasthan University in India, respectively. After the master degree, he worked in the Texas Instruments India and Sasken Communications India for around four years in the area of electronics, software and algorithm development. He had visiting faculty position in University of Pardubice, Czech Republic during May-June 2019. Currently, his work is related to problems in radar, tensor, speech, signals and systems.

Dr Mark D. Whitaker (PhD, Sociology, UW-Madison, USA, 2008) is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Sociology and author of two books (Toward a Bioregional State (2005), and Ecological Revolution (2009)). He has lived and worked in Korea for 12 years, teaching at 3 universities. He has given keynote addresses (International Conference on the Smart City and Future of Human Community) and won research awards from the US National Science Foundation, the Korean Science Foundation, and currently the Korean National Research Foundation (2020-2023) in support of his global online sustainability project called Commodity Ecology that blends sustainability foresight, virtual and real civic participation, business incubation, and a more democratic risk assessment. From 2015, he teaches at the Department of Technology and Society, Stony Brook University, SUNY Korea, Songdo, Incheon. Toward sustainability, he researches interactions between environment, technology/materials, and society in modern states. Additionally, he employs comparative historical methods for what can be learned about our long-term chosen patterns of environmental problems and sustainability via deeper historical analysis. In 2019, he presented at the United Nations Secretariat in New York City and the Asian Development Bank in Manila, Philippines, about his model for sustainability called Commodity Ecology (prototype:softlabsgroup), a mobile virtual community platform to achieve the SDGs by reaching instantly and cheaply a public of over 5 billion mobile phones as of 2019. The United Nations Academic Impact Office (UNAI) ranked “Commodity Ecology” as first in a list of applied implementation models for SDG #12 (Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns), and was the only idea in the category with its own UNAI.

Dr Mukesh Saini has 12 years of experience in video processing and data fusion. He obtained Master of Technology (M. Tech) in Electronics Design and Technology from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in 2006 and PhD in Computer Science from School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore in 2012. He worked as post-doctoral researcher at National University of Singapore, University of Ottawa, and New York University. In recent years, he has focused more in information systems that exploit multimodal data, particularly video audio and text in application areas of smart classrooms, social network analysis, multimedia surveillance, and automatic video mashups.

Dr Dhananjay Singh is a Full Professor/Director of ReSENSE Labs in the Department of Electronics Engineering at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), Seoul, South Korea. He is co-founder/CTO of VESTELLA and COIKOSITY to provide an innovative solutions based on AI, Blockchain, BigData Analysis and IoT for Smart City Technologies and services. He is the recipient of U.P. NRI award (Apravasi Bharatiya Ratna Puraskar) for the outstanding work in the field of Technology in the year 2019, Varanasi, India. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM societies. He is a series Editor of Springer Blockchain Technologies and Associate Editor of PlosOne Journal.

Mr Vernon Dmello is currently pursuing his PhD in psychology from the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati. His past experience includes working in the field of Psychological test construction as a Psychometrician as well as teaching as an Assistant Professor in Amity Institute of Behavioural and Allied Sciences (AIBAS) at Amity University Mumbai. His areas of research interest include positive psychology and mental health.

Dr Ajit Kumar is a Post Doctoral researcher at Soongsil University, Seoul, South Korea. Currently, he us working in project title "Korea-India Joint Network Center (JCN) on Depression Diagnosis and Medication Adherence (우울증 진단 및 약물 순응도 연구 센터)" funded by MSIT, Korea". He completed his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Department of Computer Science, Pondicherry University, in May 2018. His research work involves the application of machine learning to solve various cyber security issues. Apart from his core research area, he works with other researchers to extend the application of machine learning to other domains. He has published his research works in SCI journals and international conferences. For his research works, he has won the best paper awards at two conferences. He is passionate about sharing his skills and knowledge with communities and young researchers.