‘You market yourself by building something’

Bedabrata Pain, the IIT-Kgp old boy who was part of the team that invented the active pixel sensor that is now ubiquitous in digital cameras, has one foot in the arts and another in the cutting edge of science
Is the distinguished alumnus award from IIT an addition to the numbers for you? I guess it was a bigger deal for me because of my father. He had wanted me to go to IIT.It was a ‘3 Idiots’ kind of a scenario, where I didn’t want to go to IIT, while he did.
Where did you want to study? I had wanted to pursue basic sciences. I had the rank to go to any of the IITs but he had insisted that I go to Kharagpur. Maybe that was because of some ‘Bengaliness’ of not letting me go too far from home. He would have been very proud if he had seen this. When he was alive, I was invited to give a talk at my department in IIT and he was very proud. That was one of the reasons why I decided to come down in person and take this award. There was a bunch of screenings of ‘Chittagong’ organized by second-generation Indians in the US during the same weekend. It was an interesting social phenomenon, where this generation was telling what their parents didn’t know. Yet, I chose to come down personally to accept the award instead.
How was the response? Overwhelming, though I found that the students were a little diffident. In our times, we were more brazen and would have also wondered, ‘Who is this fuddy-duddy coming to get an award?’ I am sure we would have felt that and shown it too. Here, the students were looking at us with a fair bit of respect. Didn’t you expect that? No, I didn’t.
Are you saying that IIT-ians are a tamer bunch now? [Laughs] There was a big turnout. I began my talk by saying I don’t know if I was really at IIT, because the students were in pin-drop silence. I was not hearing any catcalls. All I heard were the occasional cellphone rings. So I started off with the slogan ‘KGP-ka tempo…’ and that did the trick! It eased the tension. ‘High hai!’, the students roared back in unison.
Did you find future film-makers at IIT? They definitely have an interest. They wanted to know about the technology of digital film-making and whether they can participate as technologists and artists to take the work forward. This is an important matter because human vision is not just eye but brain as well. Actual sight of image formation is about 10% of the vision. The rest is the brain, interpreting what we have seen. Our cameras today are 90% image formation and 10% image processing. I foresee a huge amount of work to be done in image-processing. Since one is entering a zone of inter-subjectivity, I foresee a lot of invention happening from the arts side.
What’s your take on diversification? I am a big fan of it. Many feel it can weaken your strength. But I feel we need to see things in their connection and depth. Biology, robotics or climate study — these are all very cross-disciplinary. But where IIT-Kgp is going back on, is that there are fewer tools today to build something or physically produce something. I went to the ECE (Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering) department and understood the problems they have running a semiconductor micro-fabrication lab with so little money. One of the biggest strengths of the US is that they are very hands-on. We aren’t. That’s the problem India has to overcome. It’s strange that India still doesn’t have a proper foundry despite being the 10th largest economy in the world.
It’s a national problem… IIT is symptomatic of that problem. We somehow think everything is in our head but hardly do something. Isn’t it funny that one of the first things that happened as a result of the ‘Make in India’ slogan is that it created a mad rush for FDI and joint ventures? That’s because we don’t have the expertise, the technical-manufacturing base. We talk so much about knowledge economy but there is nothing to it without a manufacturing base.
Why is it that many who do well for themselves at IIT eventually need to go abroad to do pathbreaking work? Is it truly an infrastructural problem, or an issue to do with Indians having a thing for celebrating works of people only after the West recognizes them, even when some of them aren’t that keen to explore their Indian roots any further? Well, both. For instance, Prof Amal Kumar Chaudhuri. He had done pathbreaking work on general relativity and cosmology. Or Prof Partha Ghose. Yet, very few people are practically aware of it.
Is it because Indian culture teaches academicians to cultivate apathy towards marketing? True. When I was inducted to the US Technology Hall of Fame in 1999, no Indian newspaper covered it — either in India or in the US. But a kid winning a math Olympiad got covered because he took the trouble of sending the press release. I never did. Frankly, I had to make a movie for my Nasa achievements to be known! Once it happened, I caught on to it. Indians belong to the culture of not doing public relations well. In the US, if you are in any kind of high-end research, your ability to survive depends on being an entrepreneur. At Nasa, I had to raise 10 million dollars every year to ensure that there is enough money to do the research by the group. You have to look out for yourself. The institute will look for you to the extent that you bring something to the university. It will give you a platform from which to operate. The rest is up to you. That means you have to make sure that you become the chairperson of a conference or serve in some committee. That happens in India as well but it doesn’t happen at the international level. You won’t find that many Indians, in comparison with Chinese, in conference committees and workshops in my field of semi-conducting devices. At Nasa, it is important to acquire the ability to speak.
But here, marketing is looked down upon… The way you market yourself is by building — building something and putting it on the table. We have grown up in India knowing that we have to produce and give the most perfect and flawless thing. We have to give up on that. If a picture is a thousand words, a demonstration is worth a million. Really, if someone has given me the money, I have to show that I have done something with it and then say where I am going to take it. But, at the end of the year, if I just produce some PowerPoint slides and formidable equations, nobody will care. There is nothing better than seeing something in front of our eyes that has been built, even if it’s a prototype.
Will you take up an offer to teach at IIT? That offer has come. The IITs are trying to recruit us back and create something more. I don’t know if we have the infrastructure to do that. Don’t forget that US universities and research institutes can go far in terms of infrastructure. I had a chat with the IIT-Kgp director, and he is keen to get me back. What he had suggested is that he can start with a two-week course. IIT has instituted something like micro-credits. This is part of the diversification. I don’t yet know how practical it would be to learn anything in a two-week course. But it can also turn into something significant. In today’s world, you may excel in one area but you need to know about 10 different areas. My expertise is in semi-conductors. I went to the EC department and saw the lab. To an extent, I was disappointed. It’s not that they aren’t trying. But the infrastructure is lacking.
Have you been able to make them understand that? They have a certain understanding of it and I know that money is a big issue.
So, what can you bring to the table at IIT-Kgp? We have computers here and maybe, we can run some algorithms and programs. IIT-Kgp has a reasonable strength in medical image processing. Unlike the US, Indian research isn’t tied with the needs of the industry. If these students can come up with a new algorithm for creating film grain for digital, I will be very excited.
Would you want the students to contribute in subjects related to post-production of digital cinema? With digital technology, a lot more can be done with post-production in terms of the final image. IIT-Kgp is very competent in signal processing. Perhaps they can use their expertise to better reproduce colour with wider gamut or larger latitude. Perhaps they need to work with actual footage and see how they can make it better. Another big area that is coming up is compression. Very soon, we will get 4K (resolution) images on our mobiles. That can’t happen very well unless we can compress the signals very well because we don’t have the bandwidth. I am not happy with the existing standards of the international community. Can IIT-ians come up with a different technique of compression that would be more efficient? Maybe we can start with a two-week course and talk about issues like image processing in film-making, introduce students to some idea and have a brainstorming session with professors. We can identify a few problems and then see if a masters’ student wants to work on it.
When do you plan to start it? Doing the course is not difficult. It will, of course, take a bit of time for me to prepare the course. But I don’t want it to be a flash in the pan. I want to sit with professors and identify the students who can take it forward from there. It will take six months to a year to begin.
Has some honorarium been offered to you? It is some kind of a paid position.
Will they be able to afford it? Obviously, no. I will like to do it for my alma mater. But I won’t do it for free. I want to have my engagement with India. I do a lot of consulting in the US. That pays my bills. I want to see what consulting I can do in India. If IIT is willing to explore, I am ready to explore too.