KOCHI: To an ordinary visitor, the cyber physical systems (CPS) laboratory at the electronics department of Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) may appear to be a run-of-the-mill computer lab.But this one-year-old facility, in the first floor of the electronics department incorporated in 1975, is a hotbed of research in the realm of cyber security of internet of things (IOT) and machine learning.While the research and academia-industry collaboration currently happening here can in no way be compared to the level of activity in Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs), their capability to demonstrate complex technologies have won tremendous industry goodwill."If we look at the IITs, we have a long way to go. But there is lot of potential," said Cusat electronics department head C K Aanandan.Ruksin Kamal, a MTech student, is currently engaged in training a camera to recognize people wearing safety helmets as part of a technology demonstration project for Kitco, a leading technical consultancy organization."We have already trained it to recognize various objects such as chairs, keyboards and helmets. But we need to train it to recognize a human head with helmet," said Bijoy A Jose, assistant professor, department of electronics, who guides research projects in the CPS lab.The CPS lab was recently in the news after their team won the embedded security challenge held as part of Cyber Security Awareness Week CSAW 2018 at IIT Kanpur.While the algorithm developed is unlikely to be utilized any soon, Kitco officials said they intend to do so in the future. " They have demonstrated us the capability but this is still in a conceptual stage," said Kitco senior project manager Sunil Mathews.Greeshma Unnikrishnan, another CPS lab researcher, is helping technology major Intel to develop an IOT solution for monitoring and profiling of roads. The project aims to create a road profile with information like potholes and temperature that may be useful to logistic companies who own a fleet of trucks, said Jose who holds doctorate in computer engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, USA.The electronics department is also aiding entities like the Indian Navy through their research."For the past one year, we have been working on a naval research board project to develop an algorithm for underwater image enhancement, object detection and cable tracking," said Arun Balakrishnan, assistant professor, department of electronics.The project received a fund of Rs 32 lakh.Jose, a recipient of early career research award by department of science and technology in 2016, has also industry experience as software architect and chip performance engineer at Intel."The central government is now promoting interdisciplinary research. We need to associate more with IITs," said Jose.

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