Two IITS to coordinate smart city research

INSIGHTS The Indian Institutes of Technology at Madras and Kanpur will be leading the coordination efforts of an international research consortium focusing on smart cities

NEW DELHI: Indian Institutes of Technology at Madras and Kanpur will be leading the coordination efforts of an international research consortium focusing on smart cities. The Heritage Network is an Indo-european network of twenty technical higher education institutions. The consortium promotes research and academic activities by identifying partner institution/s within the network.

A ‘Smartcity working group’ was constituted during the second General Assembly meeting of Heritage Network hosted by IIT Madras recently.

During this meeting, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur were chosen as Indian coordinators to coordinate the activities and action plans on smart cities with Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm being selected as the European coordinators.

“Member institutes have been collaborating in the past but this time liveable global cities was identified as an important theme where members could take advantage of each others’ strengths,” said Ashwin Mahalingam, associate professor, IIT Madras. “Given that the idea of smart cities is now taking of due to government’s focus, we decided to identify areas of mutual cooperation where our individual strengths could be utilised colleectovely.”

For instance, IIT Madras has been conducting research on areas related to water management and urban transport planning. “We intend to utililse existing strengths to work on research proposals jointly in the first stage,” adds Mahalingam.

Currently, there is no clear agenda on what or how the consortium plans to do such as a specific research blueprint or funding sources as the recent meeting was the first where this proposal was approved. Further development of the agenda is expected at subsequent meetings.

The Smartcity working group plans to hold follow-up meetings before the next annual GA meeting in 2019 and a dedicated workshop on smart city to evaluate the progress of the working group during the next annual GA meeting in 2019.

To be sure, this research is not tied directly to the government’s smart cities project. “Globally, liveable cities are an important area for innovative research and infrastructure challenges have been dynamic in different geographies,” explains Mahakingam. “While some of the issues in focus in India may cater to basic infrastructure needs, in other parts of the world, efficient urban integration may be a key concern.”

The meeting also saw the approval of the launch the Heritage Network Workshop Series. The series involves conducting a thematic workshop along with the annual GA meetings each year, on topics/areas of mutual interest/importance to both Europe and India.

In addition to the existing partners, four more institutes, two each from India (IIT Dhanbad and IIT Roorkee) and Europe (UPM, Madrid and KTH, Sweden), became members of the Heritage Network through a formal voting procedure.

THE CONSORTIUM ALSO APPROVED THE LAUNCH THE HERITAGE NETWORK WORKSHOP SERIES ON THEMATIC FOCUS AREAS