Thoughts

Thank you for the kind welcome. I am truly honored and very pleased to be in the midst of this august gathering—both on the stage and in front of me. More importantly, I am delighted to be in front of the young minds present today. I am also thankful to Professor Choudhury, who made my coming here possible through the invitation and the follow‑up communication. Thank you, ma’am. I have a couple of thoughts I would like to share, simply because of my years of professional experience may offer some perspective. One thing that strikes me is the title of this conference. The fact that it is held every two years and continues to grow indicates the energy and enthusiasm of the organizers. I am sure the conference has seen many leaps in the quality of presentations and in the novelty of the work showcased. While I have only had the opportunity to look at the titles—not the full papers—I can easily imagine that the presentations must have been valuable. Coming back to the title, it is very apt...

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These day...

"can you hear me", "can you hear me now", "your voice is breaking", "can not see your presentation", "can all of you who are not presenting mute yourselves", "looks like he is having network issues", "may be she should login again" "network issues" "server issues" Several months ago when I was invited to chair one of the two tracks in an International conference, I readily agreed to be the Session Chair because of its relevance to the work I do additionally it was on a Saturday and it was a one day conference so a morning flight out of Mumbai and evening into Mumbai from Delhi so it suited me and was not going to interfere with my work work! Then the entire world was more or less on its knees with extensive travel restrictions and stay at home directives. So the physical conference turned virtual. So now I was to chair a virtual session! Google Meet was the virtual venue which I was using for t...

Year after year you get the call for papers (CfP) emailed to you asking you to submit a paper which is sufficiently novel and which has not been published elsewhere. The "good conferences" get loads of submission, they go through a stringent process of review and the the committee sends out accepts and rejects. The registration of accepted paper, the travel and stay arrangements and finally the travel to the conference, presenting the paper (oral or poster), listening to the other researchers or keynote speakers and then back to work. This is an annual ritual, and if you are regular to a couple of conferences, then this turns out to be happening several times a year. Invariably the conferences are held in "tourist cities" and in most cases the most expensive venues (read hotels), giving one more (only?) reason to attend the conference. Rightfully, you see that the attendance is generally sparse (compared to the the number of people registered for the conference...

Does God Live in Argentina? An accepted paper in the IJCAI 2015  workshop meant one of us had to travel to Buenos Aires to present our paper. Because of the circumstances it was decided that I would travel to present our paper which spoke of a bio-inspired approach to correct the speech recognition output. The first impression you get when you scan of BA on the web is that of an unsafe place with loads of information about where to use the ATM, worry about counterfeit notes, leeching taxis, variable currency conversion rates. Add to this the travel. Mumbai to Buenos Aires is equivalent to almost 21 hours of -actual- plane travel. A short leg from Mumbai to Doha (3.5 hours), a long stretch from Doha to Buenos Aires (17.5 hours) with a short breather at Sao Paulo to stretch your legs. This is a journey that seems less enjoyable and more of a punishment if you traveled economy! Reached BA around 830 pm and hunted for a place where I could convert my USD into Peso. ...