About Us
The Center for Internet of Ethical Things (CIET) was established with a clear mission to drive research, innovation, and development in the rapidly evolving field of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. As IoT continues to integrate into every facet of our lives—from smart homes and cities to healthcare and industry—the importance of addressing the ethical and moral implications of these technologies has become increasingly vital.Recognizing this need, CIET is dedicated to not only advancing IoT technologies but also ensuring that these advancements align with ethical standards and contribute positively to society. The Center aims to create a framework where technological progress does not come at the expense of human values and societal well-being.A key focus of CIET is to support and accelerate the achievement of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as set forth by the United Nations. By aligning IoT innovations with these global goals, CIET endeavors to ensure that technology serves as a force for good—promoting sustainability, equity, and prosperity for all.Located in the heart of Karnataka, CIET is positioned to foster a thriving innovation ecosystem within the state. The Center actively collaborates with academic institutions, industry partners, and government bodies to nurture talent, stimulate research, and develop solutions that are not only cutting-edge but also ethically sound.In essence, CIET stands as a beacon for responsible innovation in the IoT domain, championing the development of technologies that are mindful of their impact on people and the planet. Through its initiatives, the Center seeks to build a future where technology and ethics go hand in hand, paving the way for a better, more sustainable world.
Meet Our Team
Dr. Ekroop Caur, IAS
Additional Chief Secretary to the Government, Department of Electronics, Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology
Dr Ekroop Caur is an Indian Administrative Service Officer of the 2001 batch. After doing her BA (Hons), MA and PhD from Punjab University as UGC Junior Research Fellow, she did her Masters in Public Administration from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore. She has 20+ years of experience in various fields of public administration including general administration, implementation of development programs, and planning and public policy making. She is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s award for Excellence in Public Administration for her work in implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.
Shri Darshan H.V., IAS
Managing Director, Karnataka Innovation Technology Society (KITS) & Director, Directorate of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka
Shri Darshan H.V. is an IAS officer of the 2016 Batch. He completed his IEM (Industrial Engineering and Management) from JSSATE College, Bangalore As Director, Electronics, IT, BT and MD-KITS, he is spearheading the implementation of various schemes and programs of the Department in the sectors of Information Technology, Biotechnology, Electronics, Animation & Gaming and Startups.
Prof. Debabrata Das
Director, International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru Member
Prof. Debabrata Das is serving as Director of IIIT Bangalore (IIITB). Before joining IIITB, he had served at G S Sanyal School of Telecommunication at IIT Kharagpur and later at Kirana Networks in New Jersey, USA. He is PI and nodal officer of project under National Mission for Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems in the areas of Advanced Communication System, from DST, Govt of India.
Sindhu Gangadharan
Vice-President, NASSCOM
Dr. Veerappan
Chairman, IESA
Dr. V Veerappan brings over 40 years of extensive experience in spearheading operations, strategy, and innovation within the technology sector. Renowned for his ethical leadership and adept handling of mission-critical programs, Dr. Veerappan is an alumnus of the highly esteemed Annamalai University.
Shri B.V. Naidu
Chairman, KDEM
Shri Purushottam Kaushik
Head, Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution India, World Economic Forum- Mumbai.
Dr. Madhav Rao
CEO, CIET
Shri Darshan H.V., IAS
Managing Director, Karnataka Innovation Technology Society (KITS) & Director, Directorate of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka
Shri Darshan H.V. is an IAS officer of the 2016 Batch. He completed his IEM (Industrial Engineering and Management) from JSSATE College, Bangalore As Director, Electronics, IT, BT and MD-KITS, he is spearheading the implementation of various schemes and programs of the Department in the sectors of Information Technology, Biotechnology, Electronics, Animation & Gaming and Startups.
Shri Bhaskar Verma
Regional Head, Karnataka, NASSCOM
Bhaskar is Regional Head of Karnataka at NASSCOM. In this position, he focuses Driving various NASSCOM Forums and Initiatives for Global Capability Centers (GCC’s), IT Services, BPM and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
Shri Krishna Moorthy
President, IESA
An accomplished Electronics Engineer with over 40 years of global experience in hardware system design, ASICs, SoCs, and wireless telecommunications across Asia-Pacific, the USA, and Europe. Renowned for leadership in cross-functional teams and expertise in developing and launching wireless and broadband communication systems for defense, aerospace, telecommunications, and semiconductors. He has held senior roles such as Director of Engineering, Managing Director, and Corporate VP, with significant contributions in ESDM, high-speed IP and product design, secure communications, and aerospace systems. As a former Chairman of IESA, he played a key role in shaping industry policies and initiatives. Currently serving as the CEO and President of the India Electronics & Semiconductor Association, he is a recipient of the IEEE Technologist of the Year award and has the distinction of designing India’s first ASIC that went into volume production for strategic electronics.
Prof. Anjula Gurtoo
Chairperson, Centre for Society & Policy, IISc.
Dr Anjula Gurtoo is a Professor at the Department of Management Studies and Chairs the Centre for Society and Policy at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. She is leading several national and international research projects in the domain of public and urban systems.
She obtained her master’s in psychology from the University of Delhi in 1992 and pursued doctoral research at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1998. She has been a Fellow of the International University of Japan, Niigata (2015), University of Leeds, United Kingdom (2006), and Social Science Research Council, Washington DC, USA (2003). She has authored three books and over 70 research articles in leading international refereed journals. She is a recipient of various national and international recognitions. She also has expert membership of various government and academic committees.
Shri Madan Padaki
President, TiE
Madan Padaki is an Indian entrepreneur and business executive. He is the co-founder and director of Sylvant Advisors, in the field of education management; CEO and MD of Head Held High Services, a social enterprise for rural youth, and former co-founder of MeritTrac Services, a skill assessment and testing company. Padaki holds an undergraduate degree in engineering from the National Institute of Engineering, University of Mysore and an MBA from S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research. In 2011, he was conferred The Young Education Leader Award by EDGE Forum – a forum of leading educationists and educational institutions in India.He serves as a senior advisor to Tata Trusts, serves on the Governing Council of TiE Bangalore, Indo-American Chamber of Commerce, Karnataka and also serves on the Governing Council of DOEACC, an organisation of the Ministry of IT, Govt. of India to evaluate IT education in India.
Shri Sanjeev Gupta
Chief Executive Officer, KDEM
Prof. Trilochana Sastry
Professor Decision Sciences,11M-B
Professor Sastry is a faculty member in the Decision Sciences Area. His interests and work, however, include supply chain and operations, as well as social entrepreneurship, rural development, and good governance. He was the Dean at IIMB from 2008 to 2011.
Dr. Madhav Rao
CEO, CIET
Dr. Madhav Rao
CEO, CIET
Mr Kannan
Programme Manager
Mr Kannan holds a Post Graduate degree in Mathematics with specialization in Operations Research. Prior to joining IIITB he was a Program Manager in Advanced Computing and Communications Society (ACCS) with responsibilities of directing such activities like Pan India Design Challenge for students of Engineering colleges, Tutorials with the help of faculties of IISc, PES University, KSIT, SJBIT, GAT etc to name a few. He is also the associate editor of the Society’s flagship journal – “Advanced Computing and Communications”.
He has been teaching Mathematics at secondary and senior school levels . He has 30 years of experience in Pharmaceutical sales management , personnel management and training.
Jyotsna Bapat
Professor
Professor Bapat received her Ph.D. from Penn State University. Her thesis was in the area of semi-blind equalization applied to communication systems. After graduation, she worked on design and implementation of voice-band (V.34) and DSL (G.lite) modems at Ariel Corp and Lucent Technologies respectively. Her area of interest is Digital Signal Processing as applied to communication systems. In particular, she is interested in semi-blind identification as applied to OFDM systems.
Ramesh Kestur
Professor
Ramesh Kestur has 17 years of experience at Infosys Technologies Ltd, India’s premier IT firm. He served as the Group Project Manager at the Product Engineering division of Infosys. He was a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®). In his tenure at Infosys, he led R&D and product development activities for multiple telecom and datacom product development clients of Infosys.
He holds a Master of Engineering (ME) degree in Electronics and Communication from UVCE, Bangalore and Ph.D from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi. His doctoral research was in the area of drones and deep learning for agriculture. In his doctoral research, he collaborated with the Department of Aerospace engineering at IISc, Bangalore for the drone experiments and flight campaigns. The experiments were carried out in his own farm.
His research interest is in the area of Machine Learning (ML) approach to Computer Vision (CV), primarily in agritech and Healthcare. In agritech, he has applied machine learning in analysis of aerial imagery acquired by remote sensing from Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), also known as Low Altitude Remote Sensing (LARS).He has carried out LARS applications for agriculture in areas such as vegetation analysis, yield estimation in open field crops. He is a reviewer of several SCI Scopus indexed journals in the domain of remote sensing and machine learning. In healthcare, his interests are in Computational Neuropathology. His work includes applying AI/ML for detection of malignancy in meningioma, a type of tumour in human brain. Further, he has applied ML to solve real world problems across railways and power sector verticals.
Chandrashekar Ramanathan
Professor & Dean (Academics)
Professor Chandrashekar Ramanathan is a faculty member at IIIT-B (International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore) since 2007 serving as professor, researcher and administrator. He has been working in the field of Computing for over 25 years in various capacities across industry and academia. He has been associated with IIITB for over 15 years where he has been teaching and carrying out research in diverse areas. His expertise lies in the fields of data science, software engineering, and large scale application development. He holds a Ph.D. degree from Mississippi State University, with his research focused on object-oriented databases. His teaching interests are in the areas of data modeling, data analytics, database design, and software architecture. His current research focus is Data Science, Model-based Software Engineering, and Technology for Education. He has authored several research papers and supervised thesis work of four PhD students, who have now graduated from IIIT-B under his guidance. He is currently heading Machine Intelligence and Robotics Center (MINRO) and Center for Technology Research and Innovation – Digital Governance (CTRI-DG), both of which are funded by Government of Karnataka. He is passionate about the use of technology for improving the quality of education. He serves on the Technical Advisory Panels of many departments of the Government of Karnataka including the Department of Education, Finance, and Center for Smart Governance. He also serves as a subject-matter expert on the Board of Studies of several HEI (Higher Educational Institutions). Dr. Chandrashekar was a Board member in the “Board for IT Education Standards (BITES)” between 2013 and 2023. He was recognized in the list of “Top 10 Data Science academicians of India” by the Analytics India magazine for the year 2018 and again in 2019.
Vinu E Venugopal
Assistant Professor
Dr. Vinu E. Venugopal is currently an Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India. His research interests include various aspects of data management and have focused on scalable Big Data processing architectures, large-scale knowledge graphs and ontologies. His work has a technological focus and includes building systems for high-velocity stream data processing, distributed deep learning and reasoning.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering (Dec 2017) from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), India. Before joining IIIT Bangalore, he held positions as a Research Associate (Post-doc) in the Big Data, Data Science, and Databases research group at the University of Luxembourg (Mar 2018 – Dec 2021), and as an external lecturer for the Master in Data Science Program at the Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany.
He is a recipient of the IITM Institute Research Award in 2017 and has been selected for the Leonardo Research Fellowship in 2020. He has authored several international journals and conference publications, and two of them were nominated for the best paper awards. He has served as a PC member, a reviewer and an organizer for several international conferences, workshops and journals, including VLDB, SIGMOD, SWJ, CIKM, ICML, and many others.
More details about his broad industrial associations and educational background are given on his webpage (https://sites.google.com/site/vinueviitm).
Dr. Madhav Rao
CEO, CIET
Amit Prakash
Professor & Dean (Academics)
Amit Prakash is a Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB). He serves as the Convenor of IIITB’s Centre for Accessibility in the Global South (CAGS); he has also been involved in establishing and managing the Institute’s Centre for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP) and E-Health Research Centre (EHRC). His interests lie in Information Systems and Public Policy, particularly as they intersect with development sectors such as public health & nutrition, education & skill development, and food & livelihood security. The focus of his research and consulting efforts has been equity and inclusion in matters related to technology designs and policy choices.
Prior to joining academia, Amit worked for over fifteen years on advisory assignments involving IT and Governance policies and Digital Technology designs – at Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). He has chaired and served on national, international and regional committees and working groups tasked with formulating digital governance and development policies and has anchored the design and development of large award winning e-Governance projects.
Amit serves as a resource person for the United Nations Asia-Pacific Centre for ICT and Development (UN-APCICT) and has developed training content and conducted capacity enhancement sessions for senior government executives and political representatives across countries in the Asia-Pacific region. He is a Co-Founder and Trustee of Vision Empower (http://www.visionempowertrust.org/), a not-for-profit trust working on accessible education for visually impaired and a Co-Founder and Director at Vembi Technologies (https://vembi.in/).
Amit has a doctoral degree in Information Systems from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore and a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee.
Dr. Sasirekha GVK
Solution Architect ( Wireless Communications & Network Technologies)
Over 20 years of research & development experience in wireless communications and networking technologies. Currently working on IOT solution for smart buildings using various types of IOT sensors and Raspberry Pi single-board computer. Good understanding of hardware interfaces, communication standards and protocols stacks. Developed Physical layer baseband encryption/decryption algorithms, network layer encryption algorithms and intrusion detection systems as part of cryptography systems. Extensive experience in requirement analysis and prototyping using leading edge 5G technologies. Used opensource technologies for implementing bigdata analytical systems. Exposure to SaaS development.
Passion for innovation & fundamental research in 5G wireless communication resulted in more than 20 publications in IEEE and other international conferences and journals, with a special focus on cognitive radio networks. Associated with IIITB and BITS Pilani for research and academic activities. As part of Industry collaboration, undertook consultancy and training activities with Defence Research Labs, Robert Bosch, Pace microsystems, EMC2, SAP labs and Huawei.
Pavan Patil
CEEMS Lab in charge
Deepa Austin
PhD ( Information Systems and Digital Health) from IIITB
Education:
- Certified tobacco cessation counsellor (NIMHANS, Karnataka)
- Master of Dental surgery (Public health Dentistry, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Karnataka)
- Master of Hospital Administration (ICFAI University),
- Bachelor of Dental Surgery (Govt. Dental College, Calicut, Kerala)
Project work includes ICT-enabled tracking and managing of malnutrition for the Government of Karnataka and Working on an ethical assessment framework for IoT/AI in domains like smart cities and digital health
Work Experience: Has more than 13 years of experience as clinical practitioner, served as lecturer in Dental college (MBDC, Kerala) and management studies (Marian Institute of Healthcare Management, XLRI, Goa and MARC Business school, Bangalore). Also worked as NABH co-ordinator and Public relations officer at ISIS Medicare and Research centre, Bangalore.
Aravind Reddy V
Student at International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore
ECE student at IIIT Bangalore.
he build electronic systems and software applications.
he is working with Nimhans (http://www.nimhans.ac.in/) in building surgical and assistive devices. I built a surgical robot for minimally invasive neuro and cardiac surgery. We presented it at the CII – Confederation of Indian Industry summit 2020. I’m building a system to track patients of dementia in hospitals. They tend to wander away and it’s difficult to locate them, so a he is building a device that finds their location from nearby wifi access points and reports it. My friends and he built a visible light communication system inspired by LiFi. Using light to communicate, it’s orders of magnitude faster than wifi.
Swati Ganeshan
MS by Research @IIITB
Experience:
Working on an ethical assessment framework for IoT/AI in domains like smart cities and digital health and MOSIP project
Projects: Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP)
PIs: Bidisha Chaudhuri and Amit Prakash
Research interests: ICTs and Urban Governance
Education:
B.Tech Civil Engineering, Shiv Nadar University
Prashanth Jonna
Researcher @ Sony SSUP'22,23 | Mitacs GRI'23 Intern @ UNB | Intern @ UA
He is a graduate researcher from IIIT-Bangalore with a Master’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. He has worked in the field of rehabilitation robotics for over 3 years and am currently working on patenting a robotic system that ensures cost-effective arm, leg, and gait rehabilitation. His research interests lie in the areas of biomedical engineering, robotics, and wearable systems. Solving real-world problems by developing innovative solutions that make practical and economical sense excites me.
DURAIARASU E
Electronics Engineer, Researcher at IIITB, Product Developer, Embedded Devices-VLSI-IoT, Founder - Elrush tech company
Embedded Systems & SoC Designer | VLSI Enthusiast | IoT & Edge Computing Specialist I am a passionate and skilled engineer specializing in Embedded Systems and System-on-Chip (SoC) design. With a deep interest in AI-based VLSI chips designing and the intricacies of embedded system design, I thrive on developing innovative solutions for complex hardware and software integration challenges.Alongside my core expertise, I bring additional skills in 3D printing, edge computing, and IoT analysis, enabling me to contribute to the development of cutting-edge, connected devices and systems. My approach focuses on delivering efficient, scalable designs that push the boundaries of current technology while ensuring optimal performance and functionality.I am always eager to work on exciting projects at the intersection of embedded systems and VLSI, where my technical capabilities and creativity can shine.
Purva Jain
Research Assistant at Surgical and Assistive Robotics Lab IIITB | undergraduate | Research Intern at Human Centered Robotics Lab IITGN
I am a highly passionate and self driven student, I strongly believe in learning practically with diligence and intend to make a difference through my research work.
Darshan Ramakrishna Hegde
Dantu Nandini Devi
PRACHI SANJAY NAIK
MAHATI BASAVARAJU
PIMPALKAR YOGITA ARUNRAO
Yashwant Moses
Aniket Mitra
Phani Pavan Kambhampati
Our Partners
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an independent, non-governmental, non-profit organization that aims to improve the world by involving leaders from business, politics, academia, and other areas of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas. The WEF was founded in January 1971 and is based in Cologny-Geneva, Switzerland. It’s primarily funded by its 1,000 member companies, which are usually global enterprises with more than $5 billion in revenue, as well as public subsidies.
This organization helps the Department of Information Technology and Biotechnology in facilitating and promoting the Information Technology and Biotech sectors in the state by organizing as well as participating in Road shows, Trade shows, Conferences, Symposia, Seminars held at National and International levels. This enables to project the State and its potential for investments, implementation of its policies and programmes, assisting industries in getting quick clearances, administering incentives and concessions announced in state policies, etc. Vide Govt. Order No.ITD 02 PRM 2001, dated.19.09.2001. Karnataka Information Technology Services has been renamed as”Karnataka Biotechnology and Information Technology Services (KBITS)”.