Akshay Nambi

I am a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research India. Prior to joining MSR, I was at the Delft University of Technology (TUDelft) in The Netherlands, where I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science.

My research interests are broadly in the areas of Internet of Things, Artifical Intelligence, Cyber-Physical-Systems and Smart Grids. I am particularly interested in the end-to-end design of IoT and AI solutions for societal problems. To this end, at MSR I am currently working on projects related to road safety (HAMS) and agriculture (FarmBeats). My current research focus is:

Edge Video Analytics: Millions of cameras are being deployed worldwide for surveillance, traffic monitoring, and other applications. Transferring all the data to the cloud for processing is not feasible due to bandwidth, cost and privacy reasons. We are developing efficient video processing algorithms that can run on the edge or sub-edge devices in real-time. We are currently focusing on both supervised and unsupervised techniques to identify events of interest automatically from these video streams for traffic and agriculture verticals. For more details see HAMS.

IoT sensor design and development: By 2020, 50 billion IoT devices will be installed across the world. These devices are generally deployed in the wild to monitor the ambient environment and hence are prone to failures. We are currently working on building a universal sensor pod that is low-cost, reliable and supports multiple communication technologies such as LoRa, Bluetooth, and WiFi. I am also constantly exploring innovative and novel IoT solutions across various domains such as energy, transportation, agriculture, air pollution, and healthcare. For more details see FarmBeats.

I am always on the lookout for bright PhD/MS students with ML, CV and IoT background, email me if you are interested to work on any of the above projects.