Title: Plant Electrophysiology for Monitoring Environmental Parameters
Abstract: Plants produce electrical signals, when subjected to various environmental stimuli. These electrical signals in essence represent changes in underlying physiological processes influenced by the external stimuli. Thus, analysing such plant electrical signals may uncover possible signatures of the external stimuli embedded within the signal. The stimuli may vary from different light conditions, burning, cutting, wounding, gas or liquid etc. This opens up the possibility to use such analysis techniques to turn a green plant into a multiple-stimuli sensing biological sensor device. If such an association between the external stimuli and the resulting plant electrical signal could be made, then it may serve the purpose of holistic monitoring of environmental constituents at a much cheaper cost (because of abundance of plants) thereby eliminating the need to install multiple individual sensors to monitor the same external stimuli. In this work, we attempt to explore the possibility of classifying three external stimuli - Sodium Chloride (NaCl), Sulphuric Acid (H2SO4) and Ozone (O3), from the electrical signal response of plants as the first step towards that goal.
Bio: Dr. Shre Kumar Chatterjee passed his B.Eng (Electronics and Communications) from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum, India in 2004. He worked as a trainee consultant and soon headed a newly formed division (which included training students in Microprocessor/Microcontroller programming etc., and liasing with corporates and educational organizations for recruitment of engineering graduates). Thereafter he pursued an MSc in Nanotechnology at University of Southampton during 2005-06. After the successful completion of his MSc, he was involved in several high profile projects in the industry in the microfabrication domain, specializing in Organic Thin Film Transistors (for active matrix flexible and rollable displays). In 2012, he left the industry to pursue a full time PhD under Dr Koushik Maharatna and Dr Srinandan Dasmahapatra to pursue his interests in Machine Learning and Signal Processing. He has worked on Image Processing, EEG Signal analysis and currently working on a short term contract under Dr Geoff Merrett in project PRiME.