A Police Constable, a doctor, a lorry driver ....

A police constable, a doctor, a lorry driver, a software engineer, a mosaic worker, an
electrician, an engineering student, a customs official and some more
were gathered. What place do you think would they have gathered at the
same time sharing the same place and having a word or two across ?

Conglomeration of Control Engineers

Last week, I was back in REC (Oops! NIT), Trichy for a Control Engineering Workshop conducted by ICE Dept. More than attending the conference I was very much excited of going back to my alma matter. But at the end of the three days of workshop, I thought the visit was more to worth it for the learnings, earnings (read contact!) and so on. A quick summary of what happened there (purely my viewpoint and understanding):

It provided the first chance for me to meet the big names in Control in India.
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- Prof. Shankar Bhattacharyya (from Texas A&M University) gave talks on data based (or model-less)
synthesis of fixed order and multi-variable controllers. His current area of research where he works on providing a formal approach to the design (read tuning) processes the industries use for their fixed order controllers (read PIDs). He pointed out to directions where students can pursue their research and benefit both themselves (with the formal approach and rigour) and the industry with the synthesis process.
- Prof. R.Padhi (IISc) talked about gain scheduling, dynamic inversion and neuro adaptive designs and specifically their applications in aerospace.
- Prof.M.S.Bhat (IISc) talked about the Robust optimal control techniques with relevance to aerospace. He also discussed about Variable structure control (or sliding mode control).
- Dr.Girish Deodhar (NAL) provided views on how a number of ideas discussed by Prof. Padhi and Prof.Bhat are utilized by the LCA project. He also discussed a number of difficulties faced in implementation of these to the LCA project. He discussed some of the basic ideas of statically unstable designs and how the fly-by-wire technology takes care of the stability of the aircrafts.
- Prof.M.Chidambaram (Director,NITT) illustrated a simple method for designing PID controllers.
- Prof.A.Ramakalyan (NITT) discussed about how randomized algorithms could help in choosing the right controller from the set of all controllers that any method can provide. He emphasized on the computational problems that would arise after the synthesis of set of all controllers, in the form of choosing one from the set.
- Prof. Siddartha Mukhopadyay (IITKgp) discussed the exciting possibilities of how theory can help the digital testing industry to 'prove' when a design is working and otherwise. He gave glimpses of how the concept of Discrete Event Systems (DES) could bring in immense help to the industry from the theoretically bent academicians.
- Prof. Bijnan Bandopadyay (IITB) gave views on non-linear sliding mode control and their applications.
- Prof.M.Umapathy (NITT) provided with the results of the experiments of application of various control algorithms for the control of Smart Structures.
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On the first day evening Prof.Ramakalyan showed his veena skills by playing a few carnatic classics which was followed by Prof.Shankar Bhattacharyya showing his proficiency with Sarode accompanied on tabla by Gauri Shankar, playing a few hundustani tunes.

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On the second day late afternoon, the participants and delegates took a quick visit to the big temple in Tanjore spending valuable time together discussing other interests.

The temple visit was followed by a banquet in Tanjore where the participants vowed to strive to conduct "Indian Control Conferences". As a precursor to it, a group was to be formed to bring in the control engineering enthusiasts across the country. The core group was decided for this to contain five members: Prof.M.Seetharama Bhat (IISc), Prof.Bijnan Bandopadyay (IITB), Prof.Siddartha Mukhopadyay (IITKgp), Prof.Ramakalyan (NITT), Prof.Arunkumar Mahindrakar (IITM).

Vijay (Research Scholar, IITM) and Ramprakash B (Research Scholar, IITB) would spearhead the framework to bring in the students and others.
A Google group will soon be opened with the aim to integrate the control engineering community in the country.

Among other suggestions, a newsletter as suggested by Prof.S.P.Bhattacharyya looked an important step.

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Apart from the food for the thought, the workshop included amazing food served both at the guest house and at the hotel in Tanjore.

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There are a lot more to say, but this would give a fitting glimpse for what happened over the three days. The workshop wasn't flawless as the books and CDs promised couldn't be provided to the guests at the end of the 3rd day due to the issues with transport strike and other reasons. There were also schedule slippages due to which a couple of lectures had to be shortened/dropped. But overall it was a great three days spent.

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PS: In case there is any mistakes, accept my apologies and notify me so that I can correct it as soon as possible.

The near-death experience ....

Note: Copy pasted from my travel diary of the March 2006 trek along the Kabbinale/Addahole river in the Shirdi ghats of Karanataka.

But for some my own basic instincts and courage and tremendous help from Sunny, I would probably haven't been here to write this. When we hit the first pool-like place on the Kabbinale river, I was the first to jump inside water. Even the swim-know guys were hesistant to get their bodies to contact the ice-cold water, but swimming had never been a necessity for me to get into flowing waters. Being along the wild-stream, the pool had tricky rocks which were both slippery and had deep hidden pits. In my 'try to swim' assignment, I hit upon one slippery rock, whose slope took me to the deepest part of the pool, and I ended up gasping for breath, with the height of water above my head. I tried in vain for a few seconds to climb up the same rock back to safety, and finally decided to call for help. My mates first thought I was just making some funny tries and were just staring at me with a smile on their face. I kept attempting to climb the rock in vain and hit upon a simple idea. I kept one leg on the slopy n slippery rock and another down on rock under more than 6 feet of water. The slippery rock had the coutesy to allow me to keep my leg on it so as to balance myself, but not to climb it. This gave me time to regroup my mental and physical composure and calmly I told my onlooking friends that I might be drowning. They were surprised a bit, but soon Sunny and Rohan removed their shirts to get into water. It was a tricky few seconds, with me standing on my toes of right leg and balancing on algae covered rock on left leg, when my friends learnt that I don't know swimming and how I was standing. Every second streched something on my thigh, but I kept my position. Just then I was thinking to give another try on climbing a different rock nearby, sunny got into water and got me out of trouble.

.... When we hit upon another beautiful pool, I was again the first to get into water when Rohan remarked with a smile, "The people who don't know swimming are those who jump into water first", and the saga continued ...

PS: After this, within a couple of months, I learnt swimming good enough to save myself :-)

What do you do ?

The Intercity Express was speeding towards Bangalore when my neighbour asked, "So, what do you do? ". I was happy to remark, after four years of ambiguous answers, that I was a student doing my M.Tech. It was another matter that I struggled to explain when I was asked what specialization I'm working on.

For the last few years my travels have seen me giving an array of different explanations for this question, "What do you do?". It ranges from absurd to brilliant and have brought a range of expressions of smile, anger, confusion and what not. Many different reasons can be stated for this, ranging from the ability of the person who asked the questions to my own knowledge of what I do. But invariably, it has only caused me to rethink how I identify myself.

The old day perception about the term 'engineer' and 'engineering' to the common man was civil engineers running around in the construction of bridges and dams. There have been a couple of instances, while traveling in villages during my college days, I have had to rush to rescue myself being labeled a 'builder'.

Today things are changing and any working engineer is labeled to be staring at the idiot box all the time writing software codes. But in Villages things may not still be so, though they may not necessarily term you a builder. For they might have heard some of their relatives studying strange engineering courses like instrumentation or telecommunication in the ever growing pool of engineering colleges. Once we had been trekking in the western ghats of Kodagu district of Karnataka with a number of IT friends. We were passing a village when a villager joined us for a chat. The initial introduction contained the familiar question, "What do you all do?" (Of course in Kannada!). One of the friends tried to give the answer in a clumsy way with terms of computer thrown here around when the villager remarked, "So you guys are in IT?", he continued, "I know a friend's son working as software engineer in Bangalore ...."

If the case with the general public can confound, then learned people can perplex you. I have had hard time to convince that I spent four years in an IT company without writing a single line of software code. I don't know if they think that I lie, but hey, I'm not lying, please believe me! (Well, I'm bullish here not to consider assembly code as a software code)

Forget about others, our own team mates can sometime confuse you. Often, a hardware design team member like me would be approached with some astonishing requests, by the software guys who write code which run on this very hardware. "Hey, I have a hardware problem for you to solve", would he (or she!) come with the 10"x12" PCB, "This board won't work". "What happened?", I would ask for which would come a perplexed reply, "I thought you can find that out" as if I was a magician. And then, there are cases we could be mistaken for repair center workers, "My team member says there was some smoke and this board doesn't work after that, can you make it work ?"...

After all this, you can still be disappointed. Returning from a tedious affair at work, my manager took me for dinner at his house. We were welcomed by his wife (who is a doctor) with a strict instruction, "You people go and wash your hands properly. I know the lead in the soldering station is very dangerous". We could only give a wry smile and remark, "We do a lot of things apart from soldering".

Even after so many years, I haven't figured out how to answer this question "What do you do?". I doubt if I will ever.

PS: Inspired by Robert Lucky's 2002 article under the same title in IEEE Spectrum Reflections Column.
PPS: This article is deliberately incomplete, especially in its inquisitiveness to explain specific situations.