Postdoc Turned Professor Brings Smart Tech Home

From apple orchards to avalanche zones, the valley-born engineer explains why data is the new crop and privacy is the fence around it.

- Ashiq Hussain Andrabi

Picture this: a farmer in south Kashmir wakes up to a phone alert that the soil under his apple trees is one sip away from drying out, while a traffic cop in Srinagar watches live data that tells him exactly when to let cars roll out of Lal Chowk.

These scenes are not lifted from a Silicon Valley pitch deck. They are snapshots from a future that Dr. Syed Rameem Zahra believes can bloom in her own backyard.

Born and raised in Srinagar, Zahra earned her doctorate at NIT Srinagar, polished her skills at IIT Delhi and now teaches future engineers at Netaji Subhas University of Technology.

She has spent the last decade coaxing tiny sensors to speak clearly and safely on crowded networks, work that matters as much to an apple orchard in Shopian as to a metro line in Delhi.

In a long conversation with Kashmir Observer, she argues that the valley's tough terrain, patchy roads and fragile ecology are not roadblocks but reasons to embrace the internet of things.

Cheap, battery sized chips can track snowfall on the Sinthan Pass, warn drivers of black ice, guide ambulances through traffic snarls and tell a farmer when to water, spray or pick.

The same data streams, she warns, can leak personal habits or open doors to hackers if households keep default passwords and ignore software updates.

My journey into IoT began in 2016 when I read about Kevin Ashton and his idea of the "Internet of Things." He believed IoT could change the world, even more than the Internet. This idea seemed crazy then, but now we see its impact in various aspects of life, from baby monitors to military tech. This inspired me to pursue research in IoT to make a difference.