From Bombay (Mumbai if u prefer so)

It has been exactly 20 days since I posted last blog, and 12 days since I joined IIT Bombay. Things moved really fast and luckily there were people to help me keep pace with events. Chirag and the gang of Hostel-12 B-wing landed a helping hand and made my naturalization at IITB appear very ‘natural’ to me. Hostel life at IITB is indeed different from other institutes… though not as much as I had thought before coming here.

At the same time, my project guide Prof. Preeti Rao invested a great deal of time and effort in getting me started with research. The work is indeed challenging and *REAL*.

Just to share, currently I am looking at a very low bit rate speech coding technique. The codec (coder-decoder system) can compress human speech to 1.5 kbps while maintaining good intelligibility. And this is really LOW. There is an effort in taking it even down may be by a factor of two. All these techniques rely on complex but realistic signal processing methods. It’s good to see such things implemented. Though, sometimes it is my gut feeling slightly simpler *techniques* (underlying ideas are robust- they don’t change with techniques) can be employed to achieve same results. Seems perfect material for research.

And there are so many (other) interesting things going on around me, there is definitely a lot for me to learn and explore.

Few thoughts on doctoral study

Yesterday, I shifted most of my stuff from Gandhinagar to Ahmedabad (with great help from my uncle and aunt)… in few days I will be off to bombay.

I still need to tidy up (infact write few things for the first time) my M.Tech. thesis. It is becoming slightly boring these days.

I can explain my boredome thus:
In M.Tech. we concern ourselves with a difficult but a narrow problem.
I sometimes wonder whether our higher education ( i mean graduate and doctoral level) systems miss the sight of wood for the tree. In Ph.D. one is expected to do something that no one in the world has done. But that reminds me of one of my favorit quips:
“All the intelligent ideas in this world have been thought, what is needed is to rethink them.” This means that in the quest of doing something new, a large chunk of scholars is wasting their time on useless things.

On one hand, I think Ph.D. is a way to stay in technical field for lifetime- and do what I like the most – tinker and design things and at some stage help people in their life using technology. Ph.D. can give one an opportunity to develop independent thinking and add depth & maturity to the thought process.

But on the other hand, if one gets engrossed in a narrow problem with no direct relevance to real-life, I am afraid one loses sight of real problems. By real problems, I don’t mean open problems that originate from the hunger of generating more revenue for a software/hardware giant. I mean the problems that affect our day to day life and its quality.
Ph.D. thesis titles sound so obscure and irrelavent to daily life, one feels that it will be tiring to think about them.

This brings me to the point of what I think is a good ph.d. programme.
So my dream Ph.D. programme will involve a thorough survey of basics – why things are the way they are and how to make things behave the way you want, a deep study of wide subject area and application of this knowledge to solution of a real life problem that is waiting to be solved.

One such thing that is on my mind is that of designing a system that can allow blinds to see the objects around them using auditory input. Braille system relies on tactile sense to compensate for absence of visual input. And I have read about systems in which visual information is translated in audio signals. Just as one learns new language, one can learn to understand this language of translated sounds and make out what are the objects around them. If some of the reader happens to know a place where such work is going on, please inform me.

Hello World!

First POST!! Hurray.
I am Shalin from the land of enterprise and peace – Gujarat of India.
I thought Blogging will be a good way of sharing my views on motley issues with the world.
I read a blog from an IIMB student and found the idea interesting.
I think blogging will also allow me to look back at my thoughts in future.

Just to inform, I am about to complete M.Tech. in Information and Communication Technology (rather long name for a degree programme) from DA-IICT (too long when expanded, visit www.da-iict.org) and going to joing IIT Bombay as a Research fellow.
My technological interests include (but are not limited to) electronics, embedded systems, dsp, applied mathematics, wavelets and multi-resolution, communication systems and communication theory, algorithms and logic architectures, vlsi desig and related areas.

More to come soon!!