_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Personal Details _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Full Name: Nilesh Mishra Sex: Male Homepage: http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/nilmish Cellphone: +919415540742 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Contact Information _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Office Address: CS-222 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur Kanpur, India. 208016 Phone: +91-512-2597591 Permanent Home Address: F-29, Krishi Nagar, J.N.K.V.V., Adhartal, Jabalpur, M.P. India, 482004 Phone: +91-761-2681374 Email Address: nilmish@cse.iitk.ac.in, nilmish@gmail.com _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Research Interests _____________________________________________________________________________________________ My current research work focuses on the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in building a low cost scalable network for automated monitoring of railway bridges. I am involved in design, measurement and optimization of different aspects of the system including reliable transport, time-synchronization, event detection and data gathering. I like to work on projects having practical implications. I would like to explore and work in fields related to Wireless Networks, Sensor Network (system and protocol design), Computer System and Network Security, and Embedded Systems. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Education _____________________________________________________________________________________________ M. Tech in Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India Spring 2005 till Summer 2006 - GPA 7.2/10.0 Research Advisor: Prof. Bhaskaran Raman Thesis: Design Issues and Experiences with BRIMON Railway BRIdge MONitoring Project B. Tech in Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India Fall 2001 till Fall 2004 - GPA 7.9/10.0 _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Research Experience _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Senior Research Associate (SRA) in Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur (September'06 - Till date) I am working under Prof. Bhaskaran Raman and Prof. Kameswari Chebrolu on designing a low cost structural health monitoring system for remote and on-demand monitoring of railway bridges and tunnels. The system is being designed to be deployable on all the major bridges and tunnels to collect structural data. The work is a joint effort of Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur. I am working on, * Design of a suitable detection mechanism for incoming train for which data needs to be collected or transferred to. * A low overhead time synchronization protocol which can be used for application governed time-stamping of collected data. * Data compression and sampling techniques which can be used for reducing the data which need to be sent over the network. * Measurements related to throughput and range of 802.11 and 802.15.4 radios under static, moving and radio noise polluted conditions. Project Research Assistant (PRA) in Rural Network project, IIT Kanpur (October'05 - August’06) The aim of the Rural Networking project is to provide a low cost 802.11 mesh network to provide ICT (Information and Communication Technology) services to rural areas. Most of these mesh networking nodes are located at places where grid power is scarce. The network sat idle for most of the time waiting for a connection to come. This results in wastage of stored battery energy. * I worked with Prof. Bhaskaran Raman and Prof. Kameswari Chebrolu and designed a low power remote switching technique of rural networking equipment. We developed a mechanism called Wake-on-WLAN (see paper titled 'Wake-on-WLAN ' below) which addressed this problem. This method provided on-demand remote power switching of the equipment using low power sensor nodes as channel monitors and actuators. * The basic implementation of Wake-on-WLAN suffers from false wake-up instances due to presence of noise in the channel. I worked on a mechanism to develop a selective wake-up technique called S-WOW (see paper titled 'S-WOW - Signature based Wake-on-WLAN') which uses signature templates and pattern matching for removing false wake-up instances. Summer Intern, IBM Software Labs, Bangalore (May'04 - July’04) I looked into the feasibility of using knowledge discovery and machine learning algorithms to perform data mining and knowledge discovery on clinical data which can come in structured and unstructured formats. We also developed a key word extraction algorithm for key word discovery in the data. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Teaching and Mentoring _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Tutor, Fundamentals of Computing (Java), Department of CSE, IIT Kanpur (Fall'05 and Spring’06) I tutored for two semesters a total of fifty six first year bachelor students of the introductory computer course at IIT Kanpur, taught by Prof. S. K. Agrawal, and was judged amongst the best tutors in the student's feedback. I was also awarded a letter of appreciation by the Academic Senate, IIT Kanpur for my performance. Mentoring, Wireless Networks: Principles and Practice, Department of CSE, IIT Kanpur (Fall'05) I mentored three group of students on their course projects in the course, Wireless Networks: Principles and Practice, taught by Prof. Bhaskaran Raman. My work was to assign and assist the students in their projects. The groups worked on the following * Designing of copper loop antenna for ST's CRX14 based Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) reader * Interfacing ST's CRX14 based RFID reader with Tmote sensor node over I2C * Authentication over web using Philip's Near Field Communication (NFC) module. Tutor, Programming in C, Programming Club, IIT Kanpur (September '05 - November ’05) I tutored for a special workshop spanning over 20 classes and 5 tutorials of Programming in C under Science and Technology cell of Student Gymkhana, IIT Kanpur. The workshop was conducted to introduce and improve programming skills and algorithmic problem solving using 'C’. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Publications _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Conference * 'BriMon: A Sensor Network System for Railway Bridge Monitoring', Kameswari Chebrolu, Bhaskaran Raman, Nilesh Mishra, Phani Kumar Valiveti and Raj Kumar WWW 2007. [under review] * 'Wake-on-WLAN', Nilesh Mishra, Kameswari Chebrolu, Bhaskaran Raman, and Abhinav Pathak, The 15th Annual International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2006), May 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland. [Acceptance rate: 11%]. * 'S-WOW: Signature based Wake-on-WLAN', Nilesh Mishra, Dheeraj Golchha, Akhilesh Bhadauria, Bhaskaran Raman, Kameswari Chebrolu, The First Annual Workshop on WIreless Systems: Advanced Research and Development (WISARD 2007), A COMSWARE 2007 Workshop, Jan 2007, Bangalore, India. [Acceptance rate: 50%] Book Chapters * 'Off-Line Signature Recognition' Indrani Chakravarty, Nilesh Mishra, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, and P. Gupta; Vol. 2, Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining, Editor: John Wang, Idea Group Reference. * 'Online Signature Recognition' Indrani Chakravarty, Nilesh Mishra, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, and P. Gupta; Vol. 2, Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining, Editor: John Wang, Idea Group Reference. Posters/Demo * (Won the `Best Poster' award) 'Wake-on-WLAN', Nilesh Mishra. Poster session TechVista 2007, Microsoft Research India's annual research symposium. * (Won the `Best Poster' award) 'BRIMON: Railway BRIdge MONitoring', Nilesh Mishra, Raj Kumar, Phani Kumar, Hemanth Haridas, The First Annual Workshop on WIreless Systems: Advanced Research and Development (WISARD 2007), A COMSWARE 2007 Workshop, Jan 2007, Bangalore, India. [Accepted] * 'S-WOW: Signature based Wake-on-WLAN', Nilesh Mishra, Akhilesh Bhadauria, Dheeraj Golchha, The First Annual Workshop on WIreless Systems: Advanced Research and Development (WISARD 2007), A COMSWARE 2007 Workshop, Jan 2007, Bangalore, India. [Accepted] _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Thesis _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Design Issues and Experiences with BRIMON Railway BRIdge MONitoring Project Condensed Abstract: We propose a system design for remote, on-demand railway bridge monitoring system which is easier to deploy and autonomous in its operation. The system achieves low cost using off the shelf equipments and replacing expensive sensing equipments with Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems (MEMS) based sensors and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for the cabling and data logging system. Our approach using independent nodes attached with appropriate sensors and batteries makes the system easy to deploy, without hassles of cabling, as seen in existing wired solutions. Using wireless data transmission and multi-hop data transport our solution is highly scalable both in terms of span and number of sensing nodes. Use of low power devices also enable our design to have a longer maintenance cycle. A modified implementation of the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) is used. These modifications reduce the average error at nodes farther from the root as well as improve the network wide synchronization stability. A Wake-on-WLAN based event detection mechanism detects an incoming train. The train acts both as mechanical shaker for data collection as well as data transporter from remote bridge location to a data repository. The event detection method also turns on the MEMS sensor just in time for data collection thus saving power. Results reflecting the achievable distances for successful operation of Wake-on-WLAN and comparison of MEMS accelerometers with existing Forced Balance Accelerometers (FBA) show that our design is viable for future deployment. Overall our approach achieves more than 96% cost savings over currently used wired solutions. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Major Projects _____________________________________________________________________________________________ * BriMon: Structural Health Monitoring of Railway Bridges September 2005 - August 2006 (Team of 2), Current [Team of 3] Supervisor: Prof. Bhaskaran Raman, Assistant Professor, Department of CSE and Prof. Kameswari Chebrolu, Assistant Professor, Department of EE, IIT Kanpur. We use tri-axial accelerometers and sensor motes to remotely monitor the health of a railway bridge. The motes are programmed to collect the data for free, forced and ambient vibrations and upload them to a monitoring train periodically. This data is further analyzed at the base server to identify the natural frequency of the bridge. * K-Mote: IIT-K sensor mote August 2006 - Current [Team of 3] Supervisor: Prof. Bhaskaran Raman, Assistant Professor, Prof. Rajat Moona, Professor, Department of CSE and Prof. Kameswari Chebrolu, Assistant Professor, Department of EE, IIT Kanpur. We are building a sensor mote platform around the TI's MSP430 microcontroller and CC2420 radio. The mote is being built keeping in mind the requirements of current projects undergoing at our group (BriMon, WiBeaM). The target is to gain a first hand experience in building hardware platforms which will be evolved as per our requirements. We want to develop a low cost kit which can be provided to colleges and educational institutions, enabling them to work on sensor network applications as learning and knowledge gaining tools. * Wake-on-WLAN July - December 2005 (Single) Supervisor: Prof. Bhaskaran Raman, Assistant Professor, Department of CSE and Prof. Kameswari Chebrolu, Assistant Professor, Department of EE, IIT Kanpur. The 802.11 (Wifi) protocol was not designed to be power efficient. The current off the shelf equipments require the whole protocol stack to be switched on even when the radio only needs to listen. Also the computing subsystems currently being used do not allow wakeup via wireless Ethernet packet. In this work we proposed a method to switch on the Soekris computing platform and the 802.11 card at remote location using a sensor mote. The mote performs carrier sense of 802.11 traffic using its 802.15.4 compliant radio and switches on the power supply for the Soekris using a relay switch. * Digital Accelerograph Generation Software September 2005 - Present (Team of 4) Supervisor: Dr. K. K. Bajpai, Senior Scientific Officer, Structures Lab and Prof. S. K. Jain, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Kanpur. With the move to digital photography, photographic films are getting produced in lesser and lesser quantities. India is having more than 200 strong motion accelerometers (SMA) required to measure structural response of a building to earthquakes. They use special photographic films, which is getting obsolete and difficult to procure, to capture the events. We have digitized the image capturing module of the accelerometers using a CCD array and are able to take online data which can now be stored in databases in digital form on a computer and managed as well recalled in a much efficient fashion than the current manual method deployed. * RFID and NFC based applications May - September 2005 (Team of 2) Supervisor: Prof. Bhaskaran Raman, Assistant Professor, Department of CSE and Prof. Kameswari Chebrolu, Assistant Professor, Department of EE, IIT Kanpur. We looked into the feasible applications for RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and its derivative latest technology NFC (Near Field Communication) in various domains. We have been successful in creating a RFID reader around ST's CRX14 reader chip and an access monitoring application around Philips NFC module. This project gave us footing in handling of PCB (Printed Circuit Board) designing, handling of SMDs (Surface Mount Device) and antenna building. * Corner Point Detection using SVM July - December 2004 (Single) Supervisor: Prof. Pabitra Mitra, Assistant Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Kanpur. In this work we proposed an algorithm to do corner point detection in grayscale images using a nonlinear svm classifier. It is based on computing the direction of maximum gray-level change for each edge pixel in an image, and then representing the edge pixel by a four dimensional feature vector. A support vector machine is designed using this feature vectors and the support vectors, representing critical points in a classification problem, correspond to the corner points. The algorithm is straightforward and does not involve computation of complex differential geometric operators. * Biometric Offline Signature Verification System May 2002 - April 2005 (Single) Supervisor: Prof. Phalguni Gupta, Professor, Department of CSE, IIT Kanpur. We implemented an offline signature verification system which was able to give an accuracy of 93%. This system was successfully developed and deployed for both acquisitions via hand held PDA 'Simputer’ and image scanners. This system is currently being used in the biometrics lab IIT Kanpur. * Medical Knowledge Discovery from Clinical Data May - July 2004 (Team of 2) Mentor: Dinesh A Venkateswaran, IBM Software Labs, Bangalore Medical records, both in structured and un-structured form, are rich in data. A knowledge base can thus be created using the information contained in these records. In this work we looked into various techniques of machine learning and knowledge discovery useful for extracting such information. The ultimate goal of this system is to device a assistant software which can be used as a help to doctors. My work involved studying the knowledge content of such data and use of data mining techniques for recovering this knowledge. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Academic Achievements _____________________________________________________________________________________________ * Stood 173rd (99.86 percentile amongst 126,000 students) in the All India IIT Joint Entrance Examination 2001. Around 400,000 students appeared in 2006. * Certificate of Appreciation from Academic Senate, IIT Kanpur for my performance as a Tutor of ESC101N (Fundamentals of Computation) during the 2005-06-II Semester. * Secured 1st rank in 2nd All India National Science Olympiad (12th class PCM category) 2000. * Was selected for National Chemistry Olympiad after securing rank in top 1% in Indian Chemistry Olympiad (IChO 2000), national examination to choose representatives of India in International Chemistry Olympiad. * Ranked 19th - Regional Mathematical Olympiad (RMO), state examination to choose representatives of India in International Maths Olympiad, in MP state in the year 1999. * Ranked 31st - MP State Science Quiz 1997 (Was selected in standard 9th itself for a competition open for standard 9th and 10th). * Placed 1st - in the 12th ISC 2000 board exams in the school. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Term/Course Projects _____________________________________________________________________________________________ * Synthesis of an 8051 microcontroller core using Verilog and FPGA, Spring 2005 (Dr. Rajat Moona) We designed a basic 8051 core using verilog and synthesized it on a Xylinx FPGA board. * Routing in Wireless Sensor Network, Spring 2005 (Dr. Dheeraj Saanghi) A comparison of various prevalent routing methods currently deployed in sensor networks was studied. * Emergent Adaptive Lexicon, Spring 2005 (Dr. Harish Karnick) We studied and followed Luc Steels Model of lexicon development in artificial softbots. * Compiler for Scheme, Spring 2004 (Dr. Sanjeev Agrawal) We developed a primitive and limited working compiler for LISP like language Scheme. * Online Academic Registration System, Spring 2004 (Dr Harish Karnick) An primitive online registeration system was developed. * Nachos OS modifications, Fall 2003 (Dr. Deepak Gupta) We added and improved various modules of the educational nachos OS. * Automated Career Counseling, Spring 2003 (Dr. Harish Karnick and Dr. Amitabha Mukherjee) A combination of Bayesian and Neural Networks was used to model a Career Counselor which tried to predict whether a person will be able to adapt to IITK campus life or not based on a Psychometric questionnaire. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Coursework Details _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Graduate Graduate Courses CS623 : VLSI Design for Parallel Architecture CS625 : Advanced Computer Networks CS628 : Computer Systems Security CS784 : Language Acquisition CS697 : Special Topics in Computer Science - Wake-on-WLAN Graduate Seminars CS699 : M. Tech Thesis - Design Issues and Experiences with BRIMON Railway BRIdge MONitoring Project. Networks Reading Group Sensor Network Reading Group Undergraduate Senior Undergraduate Courses in Computer Science CS698 : The Computational Brain CS350 : Principles of Programming Languages CS674 : Knowledge Discovery CS719 : Data Streaming: Algorithm and Systems CS497 : Special Topics in Computer Science - Corner Point Detection using Support Vector Machines Other Undergraduate Courses in Computer Science ESC101: Fundamentals of Computation CS210 : Data Structures and Algorithms - I CS201 : Discrete Mathematics CS220 : Computer Organization CS365 : Artificial Intelligence CS425 : Computer Networks CS330 : Operating Systems CS355 : Programming Tools and Techniques CS340 : Theory of Computation CS345 : Algorithms - II CS335 : Principles of Compiler Design CS315 : Principes of Database Systems Other Undergraduate Courses TA101 : Engineering Graphics TA202 : Introduction to Manufacturing Processes ESC102: Introduction to Electronics SE421 : Introduction to Modern Biology ESO212: Fluid Mechanics SOC173: Introduction to Indian Society SOC171: Introductory Sociology SOC473: Indian Society and Culture SOC720: Research Methods ESO208: Earth Science _____________________________________________________________________________________________ High School _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Examination: ICSE(Class X) Year: 1998 Percentage: 85.5% Institution: Christ Church Boys' Senior Secondary School, Jabalpur Subjects: English, Hindi, Mathematics, History, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Computer Science Senior Secondary Examination: ISC(Class XII) Year: 2000 Percentage: 90.5% Institution: Christ Church Boys' Senior Secondary School, Jabalpur Subjects: English, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Other Interests/Extra-Curricular Activities _____________________________________________________________________________________________ * Department Representative for Dual Degree Students in Student Placement Committee 2005-2006. * Twice elected as member of COW committee for governing institute wide student hostel's Messes for year 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. * Accounts Secretary, Hall 1, IIT Kanpur for year 2004 - 2005. * Member of the Student Placement Committee 2004-2005. Initiated a C programming language short course for students sitting for placements. * Mess Secretary of Hall 3, IIT Kanpur for year 2002 - 2003. * Member of Hall Management Committee for governing and maintenance of Hostels for year 2002-2003. * Assistant Event Manager Robotics in Techkriti 2003, technical festival of IIT Kanpur. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Skills _____________________________________________________________________________________________ TinyOS, Tossim, Java, nesC, C, C++, perl, php, Verilog Last Updated: 16th November 2006