My IISc Experience

My life at IISc taught me a lot many things, most of them about life itself. Most importantly, I came to discover myself. I entered IISc thinking something about myself and IISc has helped embolden by strengths and show me my weaknesses. It turned out that what I thought about my interests before I joined couldn't be any further from the true me. 

I joined IISc thinking of myself as a guy interested in theoretical CS and that I would make a bad coder. I was indeed interested in mathematics, but wasn't ready for the rigour. I did well in math olympiads and had a taste for number theory and geometry. I do love trying to imagine the intuition behind complicated mathematical truths. But I could never pick up the rigour required to work in algebra. I discovered that I'm a far more hands-on person than what I previously thought I was.

I joined IISc in July 2010 after topping GATE'10. My first courses were on probability, linear algebra, computer architecture and algorithms. I totally messed up probability and developed a love for computer architecture, which remains till today. That single course made me an overclocker today, setting a world record last year in the 3DMark11 hall of fame. The second sem took me away from the rest of the bunch. Almost nobody else took algorithmic algebra and combinatorial geometry. I enjoyed both the courses and opted to work on algorithmic algebra for my masters. In the third semester, I took automata theory, graph theory and discrete structures. I got placed in Nvidia Graphics by then. I totally sucked at graph theory, but enjoyed the other two. The course on automata answered many of my long-standing doubts on the subject. Fourth semester introduced me to computer graphics. I took that course solely for completing a pool obligation. But I ended up enjoying it. It introduced me to GPU computing and the concepts I learnt back then stay till today with me and I consider it amongst the most valuable learning I had at IISc. I later went on working on one of the assignment problems for hobby and it got published in ICVGIP'14.

My masters' thesis involved creating a parallel algorithm for quantifier elimination over real closed fields. It went really well and ended up in a submission to ACM TOMS. This easily gave me a 8/8 in the project and I decided to continue in the lab for PhD.

The first semester of PhD was interesting as I had taken up program analysis. It taught me a lot of new things and I'm fortunate to be using them in my job at MathWorks at present. Second semester was incredibly boring for me as I discovered that I'm not wired for work in pure algebra.

Somewhere around this time, I founded the IISc Robotics Club along with a few of my geeky friends. We attracted the geek Illuminati of IISc and my greatest learning experience at IISc was with them, sitting for late nights at Gym Cafe. Everything was discussed, from molecular biology to chemistry to nuclear physics and computer science. There were people from all corners of science and engineering and this is when I discarded the notion that 'I'm a CS student' and threw the gates of my mind open to knowledge in all its forms and shapes. This helped me apply my work on computer graphics to protein folding and in modelling ribosome structures. And now I'm able to appreciate the application of my work at MathWorks to control systems. I became a very versatile engineer, thanks to this group.

A hostel room automation system which actually made our lives much better (by synchronizing the room lights with, say, movies). Quadcopters and aircraft. Astronomy and astrophotography. Accelerometer-based digital pen. A DIY Roomba. An aquarium with a DIY autonomous feeder. A hamster with a hall sensor on his wheel. Non-invasive measurement of water flowing in a pipe. A DIY 3D printer. Bicycle turn lights. A CNC milling machine. Workshops on Raspberry Pi. A record-setting liquid-cooled desktop. Self driving R/C car. 3D mapping of a hostel room using Kinect. A homemade EEG device. We built a variety of things in the robotics club. It was a very steep learning curve. I gave up Ubuntu for the intricate simplicity of Slackware on a tiling window manager (something that manager loathes at MathWorks).

I had discovered the inventor in myself and the rigour in hardcore linear algebra and algebraic topology stopped interesting me. I still had very clear intuition about Betti numbers and other concepts in algebraic topology. It was just that I didn't feel like working with the rigorous math. It was around this time that my work on computation geometry (on GPU computation of voronoi tessellations) got published and I realized I'm in the wrong area. This was further confirmed when I did really bad in a viva by math professors. I had to either get out or change my field of research. I chose to quit and join MathWorks in a team which works on formal methods and program analysis.

While at IISc, I discovered the athlete in me. I always thought of myself as a lazy couch potato. I ended up clocking over 20,000 Km on my bicycle in 2011-12 and even raced in time trials and road races. My crowning achievement was the 300 Km ride from Bangalore to Ooty in August 2013. I always thought of myself as a nature lover. I still do. But my friends at IISc taught me to love design and architecture. Rationalist groups such as the IISc Freethinkers helped make me very rational and developed my scientific temper. IISc Astronomy Club helped me find my way in the sky, recognizing constellations and predicting meteor showers. We even attempted to capture the majestic beauty of the cosmos on CCD. One such attempt resulted in the shot of the Sagittarius arm of the milky way shown below.

Sterling engines in the physics dept. Artificial lightning in the electrical dept. Little green mice in molecular biology dept. Supersonic wind tunnels in aerospace dept. Friction stir welding in the mechanical workshop. Tilting room in the civil dept. My friends gave me a very sound introduction to science. I'm glad to be a part of this great institute, which made me better than myself and showed me the 'way'.