The IUDX Research program complements the IUDX development and deployment efforts. The IUDX program explores, together with academic partners, the technical, legal, organizational and economic barriers to the use and re-use of non-personal data. While the initial focus is on urban data as collected within the IUDX platform, the focus is broader and encompasses agricultural, industrial, health and educational sectors.
Specifically, IUDX Research will enable us to create domain-specific Data Spaces as described in the adjacent panel. IUDX will help us address both technical and non- technical barriers, by assembling the necessary concepts, tools and infrastructures, addressing issues of security and trust, and by clarifying governance and legal issues. Under the IUDX Research program, we have initiated two significant research efforts
The concept of a Data Space is broader than the IUDX technology platform. It is an aggregation of technology, data, concepts, ideas, rules, and best practices grouped around a particular domain and captures all the necessary aspects to enable the use of data. The IUDX Research efforts, with their broad technical and non-technical scope, will allow us to build better Data Spaces, both for urban governance and for other sectors.
IUDX Research Program is also supported by Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunities for people to improve their lives. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, the organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyse economic and social change. You can learn more here: https://www.omidyar.com/.
Large scale proliferation of data in the previous decade has created numerous opportunities for the market exchange of such data. This data generation has been possible largely due to innovations in digital technology such as the rapid expansion of internet, introduction of smart devices and cloud-based applications. Both public sector and private entities across the world can utilise this data not only for economic, but social welfare as well. This is where the project IUDX comes in. On one hand, it facilitates the creation of a platform where data holders and data users can engage in the exchange of data; and on the other hand, it creates significant disruptions in the existing economic as well as legal structures around data.
Data plays a significant role in tackling large scale urban governance problems like energy usage, public security, transport optimization, and congestion management. Recently, the most prominent use of data has been in the COVID-19 pandemic, where a plethora of public and private data sources have been brought together, often in ad hoc ways, to address critical public health decisions. Decision makers in city planning, agriculture, mobility system optimization, have also increased their use of data toimprove quality in decisions. The use of data mining and AI in data analysis has significantly enhanced the range of inferences and the breadth of data that can be utilized.
The objective of this research program is to understand those disruptions and analyse the economic, policy, legal, regulatory and standardization issues involved in using data. Our focus will be on Non-Personal Data (NPD) which includes IOT data from smart city sensors, video data from surveillance cameras, legal and property records, data from cellular providers and similar. We aim to include sociological and public policy perspectives, legal studies, mathematical models and analysis, simulation models, algorithmic investigations and other similar approaches. The unique aspect of this effort is that it is done against the backdrop of the IUDX platform, which is being deployed in 50 Indian cities connected to real sources of data. The cities will create important use cases upon the platform and provide valuable insights regarding economic and citizen welfare.
We have begun our investigation with studying the importance of data sharing in the health sector and its effects in the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Presently, we are trying to explore the global regulations and policies around NPD to draw important lessons for NPD data governance in India
Some of our other research questions include the following:
Recent developments in India including the Personal Data Protection Bill 2019 (PDP) demand for “secure by design” and “privacy by design” based approaches for applications handling cities and citizens data. Some ‘Smart’ solutions in smart city may require processing and analysis of citizen’s data. But more likely, these solutions rely heavily on non-personal data such as IOT streams, video feeds, aggregated statistics, etc. While security and privacy aspects of personal data have been well articulated in the PDP and related efforts, there is little formal exploration of the issues associated with non-personal data.
India has an excellent infrastructure for citizen’s identity (Aadhar) and digital payments (e.g. UPI) which is expected to boost concepts such as “data marketplace”, where parties can buy/sell data. Identity, Authentication, Authorization, Accounting, and Security of payments, Fraud detection and prevention are also very critical for a successful smart city implementation.
The goal of this activity is to study security and privacy aspects in Indian smart cities. Specifically, the proposal will focus predominantly on non-personal data. The exploration will cover the following topics with applications to smart cities. While many of these topics have broad applicability in many different domains, the goal is to narrow down on aspects that have particular relevance and uniqueness in the smart city context:
This project contains a set of future looking activities (or sub-projects) with a common unifying theme, namely the data security and privacy of Indian Smart Cities. They are based on problems and concerns that have arisen in the Indian Smart Cities deployments over the last few years, and are expected to result in components and capabilities enhancing the IUDX effort across the next 3 years.
The overall coordination, prototyping and experimentation takes places in close concert with the IUDX platform and deployment.
More information about this effort can be found in this recent news article in Digital First magazine.
Chief Investigator
(CEO, IUDX and Research Professor, Centre for Society & Policy, IISc)
(Dept. of Electrical Communication Engineering and Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems, IISc)
(Dept. of Computer Science & Automation, IISc)
To realize the full potential of IUDX, it is important to formally analyze privacy issues arising from the implementation, and provide privacy-preserving mechanisms for data accumulation and data dissemination.
The sub-project seeks to advance towards this on two fronts –
(Dept. of Computational & Data Sciences, IISc)
(Dept. of Computational & Data Sciences, IISc)
The growing ability to collect massive quantities of urban video feeds from city-scale video cameras and drones, coupled with advances in deep learning and high performance computing, makes it possible to perform sophisticated and automated analysis of human and physical activity within such feeds.
These techniques allow deep models to be trained to perform classification, tracking and anomaly detection that can inform public safety and citizen services. However, centralized data collection and training is fraught with the possibility of inadvertent misuse, possible abuse and hacking attempts, compromising personal privacy, government laws and public safety.
This sub-project addresses this by designing strategies for
(IIIT-B)
This sub-project will develop formal, extensible mechanisms for encoding and enforcement of Data Access Policies to reflect data consent and governance models that typically exist within Smart Cities. These mechanisms will be used to implement constructs such as “Data Trusts”, which have been proposed as the preferred approach for controlling data access for non-personal data.
(Dept. of Computer Science & Automation, IISc)
This sub-project aims to develop systems infrastructure for secure data analytics applications, with the aid of commercially available and upcoming trusted hardware platforms.
This has many applications to Smart Cities, for example, to secure processing of video feeds aggregated from city-wide CCTV deployments, which will naturally have sensitive content whose privacy must be protected, even from system administrators. The end results of the analytics (e.g., the license plate of an offending vehicle) must only be made available to the relevant authorities (e.g., traffic police), and all other data must be kept private. Trusted hardware enables this through the creation of secure enclaves, whose contents are protected from the hardware up.
This sub-project explores this approach on Intel TDX and SGX enclave platforms; as well as methods to protect the privacy of machine learning models that may have been trained on sensitive data.
(Dept. of Computer Science & Automation, IISc)
Machine Learning (ML) based on data has showed great potential in many significant sectors including healthcare, finance and resource management. In Smart Cities, data generated is often of a sensitive nature and, in its raw form, may be damaging if misused. This presents a challenge and an opportunity – for example, raw data on COVID cases might be used by bad actors to stigmatize communities or localities. On the other hand, ML-based analysis of such data can certainly guide decision-making for better public health outcomes.
It is therefore desirable to conduct ML-analysis without divulging raw data. This has motivated the area of Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML), where privacy of the data is guaranteed. This sub-project will build a suite of PPML techniques for Smart Cities applications utilizing secure multi-party computation (MPC), a key cryptographic technique that permits data-owners to compute collaboratively, while protecting their data privacy from each other.
IUDX is deeply engaged with a variety of research partners. These are typically academic institutions, independent research organizations, or governmental research entities. They are working on a variety of issues such as data security, data policy, and applications. Key partners include:
Venue: Faculty Hall, Main Building
Time: 15:15 pm
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Shri S S Rajasekhar | Head Applications at Regional Remote Sensing Centres, NRSC / ISRO. |
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Shri Pankaj Mishra | Deputy Surveyor General, NIGST, SOI, Hyderabad |
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Shri Sanjeev Jha | Lead Architect – Government, AWS |
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Shri Sumit Sen | Chief Executive of the GISE Hub at IIT Bombay |
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Shri Prateep Basu | Co-Founder and CEO, SatSure |
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Prof PP Majumdar | Professor. Department of Civil Engineering, IISc Bengaluru |
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Dr Abhay Sharma | CTO, IUDX |
Venue: Faculty Hall, Main Building
Time: 14:15 pm
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Ms Ramadevi Lanka | Director, Emerging Technologies, ITE&C Department, Govt.of Telangana |
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Shri Naveen Kumar V | Founder of NaPanta®| Serial Entrepreneur | Digital Expert in Agri Ecosystem | REX Karmaveer Global Fellow | SLPian | tagged as Social Business Torch Bearer for India |
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Shri Timmana Gouda | Founder CEO, WhatsLoan |
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Shri Vineet Singh | Building impactful products at Digital Green |
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Shri Nipun Mehrotra (moderator) | Co-Founder & CEO, The Agri Collaboratory, Co-creating Digital Public Goods for Agriculture – in Open Source with the Ecosystem & Government |
Venue: Faculty Hall, Main Building
Time: 12 pm
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Shri Mathew Chacko | Partner, Spice Route Legal |
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Shri Parminder Jeet Singh | Independent Digital Researcher |
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Ms Saranya Gopinath | Director, Government Affairs & Public Policy at Razorpay |
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Ms Ramadevi Lanka | Director, Emerging Technologies, ITE&C Department, Govt.of Telangana |
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Shri Amlan Mohanty | Independent Technology Lawyer & Policy Advisor |
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Shri Rahul Matthan | Partner, Trilegal |
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Ms Anjula Gurtoo (Moderator) | Professor – Department of Management Studies Chairperson – Centre for Society and Policy Indian Institute of Science |
Venue: Faculty Hall, Main Building
Time: 11 am
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Shri Narayan Mishra | CTO & Co-Founder at TUMMOC |
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Shri Anucheth, M N | Joint Commissioner of Police, Traffic, Bengaluru City |
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Dr Sanjay Kolte | CEO, Pune Smart City Development Corporation Limited |
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Shri Rajesh Krishnan | Chief Executive Officer, ITS Planners and Engineers Private Limited |
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Shri Munish Moudgil | Special Commissioner (Revenue) BBMP |
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Shri Suresh Kumar (moderator) | VP & Head – Platform Deployments & Applications, IUDX |