Smart Villages: When Affordable Electronics Meets Internet for All The role of Internet and Communication Technology (ICT) in bringing about a revolution in almost all aspects of human life needs no introduction. In addition, with the advent in Electronics and Photonics Technology (EPT), we have observed sustained growth and expansion in computation and display technology. From user demography perspective, urbanized population are the major beneficiary of such advances. Therefore, the benefits of ICT and EPT are yet to be experienced by almost 4 billion people in the world who are still “unconnected or under-connected” and suffer as such from the “digital divide,” a term coined in order to emphasize the lack of ICT infrastructure in many parts of the world. Major challenges for widespread adoption of ICT and EPT in these areas are related to cost, lack of power supply, and complexities associated with learning and usage. However, if we can categorically overcome these challenges, then these technologies can be used for food, water, shelter, energy, environment, education, healthcare, and security. In addition, the wide-spread availability of these technologies, will lead to smart suburbs, smart towns, smart villages, etc., without the need to necessarily live in smart cities. This would reverse the trend and allow a more sustainable world with a more balanced distribution of the population density.

Bio-Impedance: Modeling, Measurement and Applications Over the past few years, considerable effort has been observed in the bio-impedance research area and its applications in medicine and biology. Bio-impedance is a branch of the more general Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). A great amount of research has been directed towards reducing the cost and size of the hardware equipment and/or reducing the time of measurement. As well, a large amount of work has been done in exploring the effectiveness of bio-impedance as a non-invasive measurement technique in various applications to offer a fast yet accurate diagnostic indicator. In this talk, the basic principles of bio-impedance are recalled followed by examples of documented applications in different fields. Focus is put on the instrumentation of impedance measurement and particularly newly developed techniques more suited for fast in-the-field applications including new time-domain and phase-domain measurement techniques. Available single-chip solutions and architectures for impedance measurements will also be surveyed.

Development of Fractional-order CMOS Analog Integrated Circuits for Interdisciplinary Applications Fractional calculus, as generalization of integer-order calculus to its fractional-order, has demonstrated to be a valuable tool in the modeling of many applications in physics, electronic circuits, biomaterials, and electrochemistry. Recently, there has been an increasing need to merge the fundamentals of fractional calculus into many engineering applications in an interdisciplinary way showing the advantages of fractional-order relative to conventional integer-order systems. This speech deals with the design and realization of CMOS analog integrated fractional-order circuits, which offer the benefits: (i) capability of on-chip implementation, (ii) capability of low-voltage operation, and (iii) electronic adjustment of their characteristics. The demonstrated applications include fractional-order systems suitable for biomedical signal processing, for neuromorphic applications, for modeling biological tissues, for realizing fractional-order PID controllers etc.