Department of Electrical Engineering

Appointment of our new Deputy Director- Prof Amit Patra

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur welcomes its new Deputy Director, Professor Amit Patra from the Department of Electrical Engineering. Prof Patra has assumed the charge as Deputy Director from June 30, 2021.

The IIT Kharagpur Director, Prof Virendra Kumar Tewari affirmed, “As a Deputy Director, Prof Patra will provide academic and administrative leadership to the Institute in our ambition to become a pioneering institution of higher education, setting new global standard and academic benchmarks thus revolutionizing the education landscape in the country. I am sure, he will take the institute activities to newer heights”.

Prof Amit Patra is an alumnus as well as faculty of IIT Kharagpur. He received the B.Tech., M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1984, 1986 and 1990 respectively. During 1992-93 and in 2000 he visited the Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany as a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1987 as a faculty member. During 2018-19, he visited the University of Maryland, Baltimore County as a Senior Visiting Research Scientist and since his return, has been serving as an Honorary Adjunct Professor. He was the Professor In-Charge, Advanced VLSI Design Lab, at IIT Kharagpur during 2004-07. Between 2007 and 2013 he served as the Dean (Alumni Affairs and International Relations) at IIT Kharagpur.

Dr. Patra received the Young Engineer Award of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 1996 and the Young Teachers’ Career Award from the All India Council for Technical Education in 1995. He had been a Young Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 1992-97. He is a member of IEEE (USA), Institution of Engineers (India) and a life member of the Systems Society of India. Dr. Patra had been listed as one the top contributors of engineering publications in the country by a DST-conducted survey spanning the period 2002-2014. Under his mentorship a team of students received the DST-TI Innovation Award for their pioneering work on Battery Management Systems in the year 2018.

Prof Amit Patra said, “I am honoured to be chosen as the Deputy Director of IIT Kharagpur. I am glad to get this opportunity to serve my Alma Mater. I want to express my gratitude to the competent authority and the IIT community for bestowing their trust in me. I am looking forward to work with all the stakeholders to achieve the goals and aspirations of the institute.”

Contact: Paramita Dey, Junior Assistant

Email: media@iitkgp.ac.in, Ph. No.: +91-3222-282004

Yeh Papa ka college hai…

Mr Ajit Kumar Alok in front of his department with family

“Papa yahan khelta thha?” lisped a 3-year-old Ghrishneshvar, as he pointed out to the Tata Steel sports ground, just opposite to the Ramanujan Complex. He, along with his elder sister, Ujjavalaa, both toddlers, were at IIT Kharagpur campus for the first time with their parents and elder brother Aayush, who is in IIT-BHU. Their father, Mr Ajit Kumar Alok, a 1995 alumnus of the Electrical Engineering Department of the Institute, was here to attend the 17^th Annual Alumni Meet held at the campus from 10^th to 12^th January 2020.

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon when The KGP Chronicle caught up with these two pre-schoolers at the Arena. They had just come from Lala Lajpat Rai (LLR) Hall of Residence, which was their father’s address from 1991 to 1995. Excited to know that their ‘Papa’ was just like them – he also carried a bag to college. “Humko bhi jana padhega?”, “Will there be a playground with jhula in my college? – came in questions one after the other. Too young to understand the concept of a campus, what really mattered to them was whether their father felt homesick. The fact of staying away from home for four years didn’t quite go down well with them. Aayush kept smiling all the while keeping a hawk’s eye on his younger siblings.

For their mother, Mrs Alka Sinha Alok, it was also her first time on this campus. “It feels wonderful to be able to converse in Bengali after such a long time. I am originally from Chittaranjan, near Asansol, but due to my husband’s transferrable job, we stay in Punjab and there is absolutely no scope of speaking the language,” she let out a sigh of relief. She missed her friends who were the wives of her husband’s friends in Bangalore. “They had some prior commitments, and so couldn’t come,” she regretted.

Mr Alok in front of the Institute main building

Mr Alok is a senior employee with the Indian Railways. His job requires him to shift his base every three years. “For me, it is my job, but for my family, it gets very taxing, especially for the children. But then, they are slowly getting used to a cosmopolitan culture, which I think should mould them into better human beings,” remarked Mr Alok. Thus when the daughter pointed out to a Punjabi dish on the menu which she didn’t quite like, but loved the mishti doi, it did not come as a surprise.

“Yahan papa ko khana koun khilata thha?” asked Ujjavalaa, while fiddling with the drums in one segment of the Arena. Now that was a real googly. The close to 12,000 students on campus make friends who ultimately become second family to them. Their father himself did so, which is why he was back for the Annual Alumni Meet… to be with his long lost friends. But that is something beyond the comprehension of little Ujjavalaa. For the pre-schooler, it is impossible to imagine a world without parental love and attention. Hence her innocent query.

Currently residents of RCF Kapoorthala Punjab, the Aloks would be moving out of the place very soon since Mr Alok has already been transferred to Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh. “I will miss my friends at Oxford Junior School,” said the two munchkins in unison, “but will have new friends in Ratlam,” chipped in Ujjavalaa.

The family had a wonderful time in the campus. The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves running along the tree-lined campus roads, enjoying swing and see-saw rides at the children parks and dancing to the tunes of Balam Pichkari on the Gala Dinner Night with bonfire and DJ, on Saturday 11^th January 2020.

Smart thinking

Smart cities need smart water management and distribution system. In advanced countries, telecommunications, computing, computer-based modelling, AI, Machine Learning, Data analysis and processing have changed the way water resources are managed. In fact, they have given rise to what is called hydroinformatics systems. A similar change may happen in India as well.

Aditi (extreme left) and Stuti (extreme right) at Da Lat

Two students of IIT Kharagpur, Stuti Modi and Aditi Kambli recently presented their paper on an intelligent water management and distribution system based on data-driven models at the Third International Conference on Machine Learning and Soft Computing (ICMLSC) in Da Lat, Vietnam. They won the Best Presentation Award at the conference held in January 2019.

Stuti and Aditi proposed the use of two data-driven models – recurrent neural networks (RNN) and fuzzy-logic based models. With the use of these models, they demonstrated how daily average water demand can be predicted, how drought/flood could be predicted and an optimum level can be maintained in the dam reservoir, how the water level in reservoirs in houses and localities can be controlled, how the drinkability of water can be judged and water treatment can be planned.

Previous works in this field have concentrated on any one aspect of the water management process, for example, on either water demand prediction or treatment. “What we offer is a complete one-package solution. Our model is segmented in such a way that in case of any breakdown, we can easily track the root cause for it and get it fixed. All the individual models here come together and form a platform for water management,” said Aditi.

Aditi is from the Department of Ocean and Naval Architecture and Stuti belongs to the Department of Electrical Engineering. They had worked under the guidance of Prof. Sudhir Kumar Barai of the Department of Civil Engineering on a course of Soft Computing that he teaches to all departments.

For the prediction of daily average water demand, the duo work on the presumption that smart water meters are installed in all houses or localities. Data on water use of individual households, collected by the sensors of the smart water meters, are sent to a central medium. This data is used to train an LSTM based RNN, which then predicts the water usage for the upcoming day.

To validate their assumption, they used the time series data of daily water usage for the last four years. Water usage of the past 30 days was provided as an input to the network. The training of the RNN was performed using Keras.

In the case of drought/flood prediction and the optimum dam reservoir level, the fuzzy inference system is implemented using percentile storage, percentage full storage capacity of the reservoir and rainfall to predict the condition of the dam reservoir. Too much water in the dam threatens dam safety and could cause flood and too little could cause drought. The fuzzy inference system predicts what should be the optimum water level in the reservoir and the Fuzzy PI Controller controls the reservoir water level by releasing or not releasing water.

Such fuzzy logic controller could also man how much water needs to be present in individual water tanks of residential houses. It is often seen that the inlet of water into the tanks is not proportional to the outlet rate, causing the water tank to empty out faster than it fills up. To obtain the water level, however, an ultrasonic water level sensor has to be installed on the top of the reservoir to monitor input and output flows. The water reservoir also has to be modelled as a tank in Simulink whose input and output rates can be controlled.

The water quality model is divided into two parts in this research. One, the assessment of water quality, and two the treatment of moderate/non-drinkable water in a water treatment plant.

For water to be drinkable, various parameters – such as pH, dissolved oxygen, alkalinity, coliform etc – have to be within safe limits. Stuti explains, “Suppose the turbidity of the water is poor and the DO (dissolved oxygen) is moderate, but if the pH and coliform component is rated good, the water is drinkable. This means, all the parameters do not necessarily have to be good for water to be drinkable.” Their fuzzy expert system creates a water quality index that is easy to understand, logical and useful for common people.

Once the fuzzy expert system grades a water to be moderate or non-drinkable through the data collected by sensors and assessed by MATLAB program installed on the computers of the water treatment plant, the water ought to be sent for treatment. For treatment again, the fuzzy logic based system sets ideal values, and based on the error, the correction methodology is powered.

Aditi and Stuti know that the ideas proposed can be improved further with actual sensor data and constant updating of standard points. They would also like to create separate models for each region, since the same parameters don’t work for every region.

Prof. Barai says, “Aditi and Stuti need to implement their model on a large scale hardware model to observe the results and fulfil their goal to implement an intelligent system that conserves and uses water efficiently.”