Author: christian@gavinwillis.co.uk

Am honoured and delighted to represent the UK ICT research and innovation community at the forthcoming 15th anniversary event to celebrate UKRI in India.

Here are some highlights of our existing project.

7 July 2023: Minister George Freeman MP, Minister of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Government of UK visited the ECE Department, Indian Institute of Science, as part of the UK- India Future Networks Initiative (ukifni.org).

Professor Gerard Parr MBE, Lead PI of UKI-FNI also attended the meeting.

Prof Gerard and I shared the objectives of UKI-FNI and the British Telecom India Research Centre (btirc.iisc.ac.in) with the Minister and discussed the opportunities that lie ahead for joint work.

The Minister visited the 5G Testbed laboratory and Prof Chandra Murthy, Sudhakar Balijepalli and Prof KJ Vinoy explained the 5G development activities being carried out in the lab.

The Minister had a live video call with University of Surrey over the private 5G Networks at both institutions. A video call within the 5G private network of IISc and a high speed link using a mm-wave transceiver was also demonstrated.

Lot of potential for joint work in the field of communications between UK and India!

Hosted Prof Huan Xuan Nguyen and Dr Quoc-Tuan Vien, Middlesex University, London, and Ramesh Sriraman, HCL Technologies, Chennai, as part of the EPSRC UKI-FNI Project . Prof Nguyen presented an overview of the activities of the London Digital Twin Research Centre along with the progress on the Pilot project of UKI-FNI.

We presented activities of BT-India Research Centre (BTIRC) and Prof Chandra Murthy and Prof Pradipta Biswas showcased the activities related to Open RAN and AR/VR in their respective labs.

Visit by representatives from the UK National Cyber Security Centre and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to IISc Bangalore and BT India Innovation Centre

As part of our outreach and collaboration with key agencies of government and industry, Professor K.V.S Hari from the EPSRC  UKI-FNI project was delighted to host Andy Sellars, Strategic Development Director,  Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult and colleagues from :

• Innovate UK
• National Physical Laboratory
• Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton]
• Satellite Applications Catapult

at IISc Bangalore on 12^th May 2022.  The visit was facilitated by Prof Nader Azarmi from BT and Prof Gerard Parr- UKI-FNI PI.

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Prof K V S Hari had a visit from the following members to ECE, IISc Bangalore on 30 Nov:

• Karen McLuskie, Deputy Director for Technology, British High Commission New Delhi
• David Russell, Head of Communications, British High Commission New Delhi
• Rebecca Fairbairn, Director, UKRI India
• Arina Cosac, Senior Programme Manager, UKRI India

We had several colleagues of ECE and some BTIRC PIs attend the meeting. We made a presentation on our 5G Testbed and BTIRC activities followed by a visit to the 5G lab where we presented the following demos:

• mm-Wave link using a 64-element array at the transmitter and a 2-element receiver with a 64-QAM signal.
• OAI based sub-6GHz, 5G over-the-air links using USRPs
• video demo of remote driving of a vehicle as a V2X application
• AR/VR demo from BTIRC’s activities.

This was followed by a discussion about UKI-FNI activities.