Research Outlook: IIT, IIEST

Scene 1, IIT Kharagpur

The person who introduced you to the alphabets of your subject stands right in front of you, a picture of elegance. His assistant whips out a deck of cards – he’s going to perform magic! The assistant hands the deck over to five random people in the audience, who pick five cards. All five are shown to the audience. One card is returned to the audience, and the assistant places the rest, one by one, in front of the magician. Voila! He predicts the suit and number on the fifth card accurately!

‘He’ was Dr. Naveen Garg from IIT Delhi (ask NPTEL fans of CST about him).

Scene 2, Final Year classroom

One of us, the five who attended Research Scholars’ Day at KGP, pulls out a deck. The self-appointed magician sees his assistant fumbling and quips ‘he can choose any five cards!’ The ‘assistant’ takes out several 5-tuples, but none of them would execute the trick. A second magician enters and snatches the deck ‘like a boss’. He calls a second assistant, who ponders deeply before choosing the cards. A viewer cries out ‘how on earth is this random?’ The second assistant, refusing to give up, sacrifices himself in the altar of bravery by dropping the whole deck on the floor. Ultimately, the trick ends with the second magician predicting the fifth card wrong!

The above card trick (which I’ve hyped up several notches) represented a Bipartite Graph Matching problem, the topic on which Dr. Garg presented an engaging lecture. Just on the previous day, we had participated in a captivating Research Promotion Workshop there.

Imagine you’re on a long drive, supersaturated by scenic beauty on both sides of the road. You turn on the wi-fi on your smartphone (yes, I’m brave enough to imagine an Indian city dotted with wi-fi access points) and Heath Ledger starts threatening Gotham City in your phone screen. Or let’s deal with something less glamorous and more necessary – type a Facebook comment in roman Bengali, and the red crinkled spell-check lines do not appear. Instead, clicks on the roman Bengali show more word suggestions. Your relative is ill and has received an expansive test report which s/he can’t comprehend. Scan and upload it to your desktop and view the salient points, related information after few clicks.

This is a zipped snapshot of research at IIT. Talk about research at our home turf. I, myself, was interested in projects since 3^rd semester. Now I’m working with a software (whose author is senile, and no one uses it any longer) which runs only on the ancient OS installed in the CST Department server. Our faculty has to be explained ‘what is Twitter’ every time the students working on Social Networks give a presentation. Students get asked ‘what project on data mining have you done if you don’t know how rand() function in C works?’ and ‘what work in chemical bond-prediction have you done if you don’t know everything about all the types of bonds? That’s XII^th standard chemistry!’

I’ll wrap up here. After all, ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’, as all Potter-fans know too well.