Special Lecture (18) Industrial Internet by Dr.Abhinanda Sarkar, Principal Scientist, Software & Analytics, GE John F Welch Technology Centre, Bangalore.

International School of information Management (ISiM) organised a Special Lecture (18) on “Industrial Internet” by Dr.Abhinanda Sarkar, Principal Scientist, Software & Analytics, GE John F Welch Technology Centre, Bangalore, on 15th December, 2011 at 11:00 am @ International School of information Management (ISiM), Manasagangotri, Mysore.

Brief Report:

Dr.Abhinanda Sarkar addressing students at International School of Information Management (ISiM), in the course of his Special Lecture on “Industrial Internet” said connecting communication devices and other gadgets that are used for domestic and manufacturing purposes, would bring in revolutionary changes is the way things have been working so far. He said connecting the service industry, advertising, supply chain, internet and almost all industries on a single platform can be beneficial to consumers as well as serve business interests. He talked about how a service engineer for your washing machine company could show up at your door step and say “Your washing machine called me up” and I am here to service. This would enhance safety and improve efficiency.
Drawing an analogy, Dr.Sarkar said industrial internet is Facebook for jet engines, real-time status updates that help aircraft technicians maintain the log chart with more precision, thus delivering better service to passengers ensuring care traffic control, which reduces waiting times and fastens passenger movement a lot than before. Today it is possible to get real time flight data including the condition of the different components of the aeroplane to monitor the flight details and help diagnose problems if any.
His talk was full of examples from diverse domains including Health care, vehicular traffic management & safety and others.

While the Internet in the last 20 years has connected the entire world by connecting the communication devices such as the computers, mobiles and others, the Industrial Internet is about the next stage of Internet. The Industrial Internet is all about connecting millions of the machines that help to move, cure, power and build the world we live in. The Industrial Internet is Facebook for jet engines: real-time status updates that help aircraft technician’s do maintenance more efficiently, which keeps passengers on the move. Its “care traffic control:” algorithms that smooth operations in ERs so patient wait times are shorter. And its rail Movement Planner: software that crunches data from locomotives on the move to increase average network speed by 2 to 4 miles per hour, which saves approximately $200 million in capital and expenses per year. The Industrial Internet is all of these innovative solutions and so many more, saving customers money and connecting our world. GE’s software engineers are working on developing and more from a B to B perspective, on “Industrial Internet” to make our lives much better by connecting various machines that are part of our daily lives.

Speaker Bio:

Dr.Abhinanda Sarkar is currently Principal Scientist, Software Sciences and Analytics, in GE Global Research and is based in the GE John F Welch Technology Center in Bangalore. In this role, Abhinanda works with GE research and engineering teams as they design software and solutions built around data mining, modeling, and optimization. He is also Manager of the Edison Engineering Development Program for high-potential engineering talent. Earlier in GE, Abhinanda has served as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and has led and contributed to services technologies for GE Energy and GE Capital focused mostly on risk management and reliability. In a research career with GE, IBM, and MIT, Abhinanda’s publications and patents have been in applying statistical and probabilistic methods to areas such as wind energy forecasting, bond market analytics, biomedical text mining, content-based image retrieval, wireless network interference, gravitational wave detection, etc.

Dr.Sarkar received his B. Stat and M. Stat degrees from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and his PhD in Statistics (with a minor in Economics) from Stanford University, USA. He taught Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, for several years while pursuing research interests in time-frequency methods in stock prices and mutual fund ranking dynamics. He has also been visiting faculty at Stanford and ISI. While at IBM Research, he received invention achievement awards for his work on pricing of e-commerce services.