VIT students design mobile cyclone alert

Chennai: While India is known across the world for its IT prowess in the service sector, two young engineering students from VIT Uni­versity, Vellore, along with a senior professor have come out with an effe­c­tive alert system using mobile phones to fore­w­arn people about cyclones.

Final-year computer science students Vivek Vidyasagaran (21) of Bangalore and Sandeep Subr­amanian (21) of Chennai, with the guidance of VIT’s School of Mechanical and Building Sciences senior professor Dr Satyajit Ghosh (57), have created image-based mobile phone alerts connected to weather research and forecasting system.

“The two students, as part of their project-based learning method, decided to bring out a computer science application to solve societal problems. Since I was a cloud physicist, the students decided to join me and we planned to process an output from NASA weather forecasting in a simple manner,” said Dr Ghosh.

“We decided to decipher images into a simple MMS and send it across to all people. We wanted the farmers, villagers and even Coast Guard officers to understand our message easily,” said Dr Ghosh.

He added the satellite images would be run on a laptop and after processing, the client would be sent an image with alert in Tamil language.

“We have started with Tamil language and are planning to introduce alerts in Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam so that local fishermen in the southern region can understand the messages,” he said.

The research was published in the online edition of Royal Meteorological Society, UK, in the third week of December.

Through this alert system, people with access to mobile phones can get information on cyclones and the place it is expected to cross, two days in advance.

“We are planning to file a patent for this research within three months,” said Dr Ghosh, who hails from Puducherry.