Dr Gowri Ramachandran

Biography

Gowri is a research fellow in distributed systems, IoT, and blockchain at Trusted Networks Lab, School of Computer Science, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) under the mentorship of Prof. Raja Jurdak. Prior to joining QUT,  he was a postdoctoral researcher at Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California (USC), where he was associated with Autonomous Networks Research Group (ANRG) and Center for Cyber-Physical System and the Internet-of-Things (CCI) under the mentorship of Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari. Gowri's research interests are around resource management, data marketplaces, distributed data and payment management systems, edge computing, blockchain, and systems for Internet-of-Things and Smart Cities, with a focus on problems related to performance, self-adaptation, trust, and scalability. He has received best papers awards as an author or co-author at the following venues:

• Best Student Paper Award as a co-author at Fifth IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data (BigMM) for A Crowd-Based Image Learning Framework Using Edge Computing for Smart City, September 2019.
• Best Paper Award as a co-author at 14th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (Mobiquitous) for Selective jamming of LoRaWAN using commodity hardware, November 2017.
• Best Paper Award as a co-author at First International EAI Conference on Emerging Technologies for Developing Countries (AFRICATEK) for Developing the IoT to support the health sector: a case study from Kikwit, DR Congo, March 2017.
• Best Paper Award as the first author at 19th International ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) for Building dynamic and dependable Internet-of-Things applications with Dawn, April 2016.

He has over eight years of experience in the IoT with strong expertise in the deployment and management of IoT applications. Gowri is also specialized in low-power wireless communication and was involved in the deployment of IoT applications and testbeds using technologies such as LoRa, IEEE-802.15.4e, and WiFi. Gowri's Ph.D. dissertation focused on cross-layer optimization of dynamic IoT applications, in which he presented self-configuring middleware solutions for increasing energy efficiency while minimizing the management complexity. Besides, he has also deployed testbeds to foster research in the application and network layers of the IoT stack. Lately, Gowri is exploring blockchain technology and its application in IoT and data marketplaces. He has developed decentralized architectures using blockchain for data sharing and monetization. In 2017, Gowri and his team had received the second prize in the LoRa Alliance Global IoT Challenge for their deployment of smart medical fridges in Kikwit, DR Congo. Our team had developed a smart medical fridge to continuously monitor and preserve critical medical supplies such as blood and vaccine. More information can be found here. Gowri's work received several awards at events, some of which are listed below:

• First Prize (out of over 400 participants from 4 continents) at GRMDS Challenge, for creating data-driven risk modeling and prediction to study the spread of CoVID-19 in Los Angeles, June 2020. Our proposed risk-score model was adopted by the City of Los Angeles to convey the CoVID-19 spread levels to the community members: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-02/la-unveils-color-coded-system-to-assess-coronavirus-risk. And, a live risk map of LA can be accessed here: https://grmds.org/risk/.
• Second Prize (out of over 150 participants) at AutoMobility Los Angeles Hackathon for Building Incentive-driven Eco-friendly Vehicle Routing Framework, November 2019.
• Second Prize (out of over 100 participants) at ChainPort's Supply Chain Hackathon at Los Angeles in October 2018, for applying Trinity, which is a distributed and blockchain-based data-sharing framework to interconnect shipping ports.
• Second Prize (out of over 200 participants) in LoRa Alliance Global IoT Challenge for developing and deploying a smart medical fridge for preserving blood and vaccine supplies, February 2017.
• Honorary Certificate of Appreciation from IEEE Communications Society for LoRa Congo: low power, long-range monitoring technology for development projects in Congo, December 2016.

Gowri Sankar Ramachandran received his Ph.D. from imec-DistriNet , KU Leuven, Belgium, under the guidance of Prof. Danny Hughes. He completed his M.Sc in Intelligent Embedded Systems from Malardalen University, Sweden. During his M.Sc, Gowri visited the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands as an Erasmus scholar, where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Reinder Bril and Prof. Johan Lukkien. Gowri completed his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from SASTRA University, India. Publications: Google Scholar