One of the heartening aspects of the third international conference on computer, communication, control and Information Technology (C3IT-2015) was that it was conducted in the remote location of Adisaptagram and graced by the Who&’s Who of both academia and the industry. Organised on 7-8 February, at the Academy of Technology and hosted under the guidance of chairman trustee and foun­­der Professor Jagannath Banerjee, it was supported by the Institute of Electri­cal and Electronics Engineers and the Institution of Engineers and chaired by Aca­demy of Technology director Dilip Bha­ttacharya. The guests included NS Par­thasarathy, president of Mindtree; Sanjoy Sen, divisional CIO at ITC, India, Limited; Debatosh Guha, chaiman, IEEE, Kolkata section; SC Dutta Roy, former professor at IIT, Delhi; Professor Bhabatosh Chanda of ISI, Kolkata; and Sambuddha Gupta, former executive vice-president, Wipro. 

Over two days, around 123 technical pa­pers were presented along with the keynote address, five invited lectures delivered by guests and the inaugural address by celebrated professor and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awardee Dr SC Dutta Roy, who more than once enthralled the audience with his humour. “If not anything else, the conference will at least make you aware about who is doing what,” he said before adding that he would like to reserve energy for a talk scheduled for the latter half of the first day. 

Parthasarathy&’s keynote address provided a sense of what he called a “speed of ch­an­ge” of current trends. From connecting dots or topics like GDP, touch screen technology, food security, space colonisation and “Internet of Things”, he talked about real time collaborations and the need to equip the next generation to make the crossover to the industry. “Courage, a sense of responsibility and curiosity” were qualities he wished to see in every youngster. 

A series of invited talks began with San­joy Sen&’s “Digitisation of business” where he made the point that basically all businesses were being digitally remastered and that digital adaptation was the key to survival. Since business models were changing, digitisation was the “new normal” because it also embodied “product reinvention” and “next generation commerce and customer engagement”. He covered social media analysis and security challenges where “end-user awareness” was a vital requirement. As an example, he credited US President Barack Obama&’s second term victory to some 200 scientists who worked round the clock over the Internet storing and analysing data during the campaign. This established that the importance of data was soaring and businesses needed to be reimagined.
Professor Bhabatosh Chanda shared insights on “Mathematical models and their applications in image processing”, where he explained how by using mathematical operations on pixels one could fine-tune images to get the desired effects. Techniques like binary erosion, proximity filter and binary opening used mathematical operations, he said. Then again, noise cleaning could be achieved by placing less emphasis on smaller parts. Another realisation wa to extract objects from images by removing portions of it using an “open” operation.

The afternoon session, however, witnessed a stark distinction with Professor SC Dutta Roy&’s talk on “Resistive Network — Simple but fascinating” enlarging a very simple idea incorporating a resistive ladder circuit and Professor Bhaskar Gupta&’s talk on “Research on RF MEMS at Jadavpur University” expanding on an advanced topic. Three unsolved problems as open challenges were left for the audience and the takeaway involved the pleasures of simplicity.

The second day pushed the pace up with a different appro­ach. It was devoted to a disciplined review and presentation of some 84 papers and a talk on Brain-Computer Interface by Pro­fessor Amit Konar of Jadavpur Univ­ersity, a one-of-its-kind initiative that has applications in rehabilitative robotics, cognitive failure detection in driving and olfactory perception ability detection. 

The technical sessions spread over the two days with five parallel sessions on the first day itself (data mining and pattern recognition; wireless sensor networks and networking; devices; DBMS and data warehousing; control and instrumentation) and two further rounds each consisting of five parallel sessions covering a multitude of topics.