TSA: You have studied Engineering at Oxford University. What was the motivation behind transitioning to Science Journalism as a career?

AS: I did some student journalism at Oxford and really enjoyed it. Although I love science and engineering, my personal passion is writing, so I decided to give journalism a shot when I left university. It turned out to be a good choice, because there are few reporters out there who are comfortable enough with science and maths to report on these kinds of issues effectively. Today, I love my job.

TSA: While researching for Geek Nation, what were the examples of scientific insight (if there were any) from India that stood out as particularly revolutionary and path-breaking? I think the most unusual was open source science, which is being used to develop a new drug for tuberculosis. This disease kills two Indians every three minutes, and yet there hasn’t been a new cure for around 40 years. So it’s exciting to see such a radical approach to drug discovery being used to come up with a low-cost, effective solution. I just hope it works.

TSA: In your book, you mention a peculiar combination of science and pseudoscience that seem to go together within the Indian Scientific establishment. How do you think this contradiction can be resolved?

AS:Well, it’s not so much a combination of science and pseudoscience as a sitting of the two next to each other. It’s certainly not the case that serious laboratory researchers or engineers turn to superstition to air their work. On the one hand, I think tolerating a broad spectrum of views and ideas is a good thing because it removes intellectual limits. but on the other hand, there does need to be a stronger scientific establishment to take a stand when there is hokum
or fraud.

TSA: Your visit to IIT Delhi must have given you a glimpse into how IIT’s function. How do you think they compare with the best of the world? What can be done to transform them from a hub of ‘drones’ to a hub of ‘geeks’ ?

AS:I think it’s already happening – I met many inquisitive, entrepreneurial IIT students on my travels. The key is to transform the IITs from plain teaching colleges to outstanding research institutions, and to some extent, there have already been moves by the faculties to encourage that. Students need to learn that staying on to to do a PhD and further research can be good for their careers.

TSA: Are IIT’s and IISc at the forefront of technological advancement in India, as it it widely believed or is there more to Indian Science then just these premier institutions?

AS:While the institutes are great at producing talent, they’re certainly not the best at producing research and innovation. That honour belongs to organisations like TIFR, CSIR and other private and government laboratories.

TSA: On a macro-level, is the institutional mechanism to promote scientific research, in place in India?

AS:Well, I think more could be done to remove hierarchies and promote a culture of reward that truly promotes young talent. This would make research institutions a more attractive place to work. Also, of course, funding into research and development needs to be ramped up across the board.

TSA: Finally, now that ‘Geek Nation’ is on best-seller lists, what are your future plans? Any book we should watch out for?

AS:I’ve been thrilled with the response to Geek Nation, and I definitely plan to write more books in the future. What they will be about and when the next one will come is a mystery for now. I’m still mulling it over! In the meantime, I would love it if IIT Kharagpur students would join the Geek Nation Facebook page so I can hear see their thoughts.

TSA:We would love to have you here. Are you planning to visit IIT Kharagpur anytime soon?

AS: If that is an invite, then consider it received! I would love to come and visit the campus… Just let me know when.

I woke up at six today, it was way too early. I looked outside from my room, the sun was orangish. Why had I never noticed this particular brilliance of the sun before? My head was swimming, last night had been momentous. I was close to a breakthrough. Most people who needed to be placated seemed close to being convinced. Sitting around in that circle late at night, it felt like I could finally belong somewhere. There seemed to be great responsibilities to shoulder and glorious parts to play. If I play my cards right I could be through. I was thinking I could actually turn out to be a gymkhana post-bearer.

The next few hours passed in a blur. I took a quick bath, picked up some breakfast and walked briskly to class. If I’m late again – I’ve had it, I thought. I did manage to catch a few winks in class though; they would prove to be handy as the day progressed. Going to class is important, I get to meet my batch mates – they will remember me and vote for me. I’ve to grow up now, none of this juvenile thought process will do. I need to be on the top of my game. I leafed once again through the all-important diary which was to be my bible for the coming days. I practiced my introduction: confidence is the key. It was almost four thirty and my day had just begun. I looked into the score of the ongoing world cup, another world far away. Today, I had a date with three important people and then another ‘Hall day’, and it seemed to me that these meetings could be the key, I would have to impress them with my malleability and adaptability, because that’s what the job’s all about – being mentally strong and dealing with a hundred things without losing your cool. I had heard strange, wonderful stories about these people. What feats they have achieved already, already I could see success crowning their heads and their names take wing in fame and influence. There’s a path laid out in front of me, I can recognize it and this is the road I must travel on.

I met with two of the three people I had planned to meet today. This time, my companions were not walls and fans; they were the open sky, the crescent moon and the twinkling stars, such perspectives. This took longer than I thought. It was tougher today, I’m not sure I won them over. What strange people you meet serves as good lesson for life, I’m sure. Some of the questions you’re asked really baffle you. I mean, what is the point of these questions; is it essentially a test about your resolve in front of the absolutely ridiculous? How far does one have to travel to actually ask such questions with a straight face and expect answers? As I walked from one bastion to another, several thoughts flew through my mind. What if I lost? What of it then, I would have learnt. No! I must not think of losing, this is where mental strength comes into the picture. All the hard work, everything, is it worth it? Yes of course, I am different, I have drive, and I want to get somewhere. I picked out the doubts from my head and eliminated them. There’s no place for doubts. I was almost there, the final one today. I noticed the strange painting on the foyer, a regular feature here and it gave me goose bumps. This was going to be not very pleasant. I had heard stories, anyway. Giddy glorious waterfall, down I went.

I don’t know how many people I’ve met. Is that really “meeting” though I wonder? How much of each other did we recognize, what did we exchange and by ‘we’, what I mean essentially is me and the other, the vast majority. Then you have these functions that are orchestrated for our benefit – vast gatherings, with music and gyrations, with ‘frolic and fun’. On these days, everyone has their own games, the only difference is – some have rules, some don’t. You walk through the same people, over and over again. They have slightly dissimilar features, their faces morph a bit, their hairstyles transform, their costumes are different and their memories have been altered, but the people, they remain the same.

Today’s been a strange day. I have travelled so far in the span of such a short time; every day’s a revelation, every day the realization of the foolishness, the grand catastrophic foolishness of yesterday.  A man used to science, to parameterize results cannot rest comfortable with the premise of elections. There are way too many things to take into account. Apart from the rough cut of the present, there’s the nasty greenish fermented past. There are spices and herbs and deceit and lies and nobility and truthfulness. There is egotism and apathy and there is me. Trudge on. Trudge on. Tomorrow’s another day. Such is life.

Uttarayan is being jointly organised by Sahaj Padma, in collaboration with Rathnakala Padmakuteera Trust, from Hassan, Karnataka. Uttarayan is one story told through three different tales from Greek, Egyptian and Indian mythologies; rendered in Indian classical dance styles Odissi, Kathak, Bharathanatyam, contemporary dance & performing Yoga; and woven together in pantheistic English poetry.

The play is written and directed by Mirajur Rehman, (KGP alum) and scripted by Hardika Dayalani (4th year, OENA), and harnesses the talents of many noted classical dancers and musicians. For more details and the invitation card, click the image.

Yet here we are, in the year 2009, and the intricacies of PCBs these days make the best planned townships appear appallingly chaotic. The questions beg askance – when you are working with millions of logic gates and switches, each interconnected in their own complex fashion, how do you begin to verify if the circuitry is performing exactly the operations required as per specification? What kind of architecture do you follow? How do you optimize such a vast design for the little bit of space on that silicon wafer? This of course brings us to the domain of CAD and Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

The 22nd International Conference On VLSI Design, held in New Delhi from 5th – 9th January this year saw two groups of researchers from IIT Kharagpur capturing centre-stage at the EDA Software and Design Contest. Under the Software category, Chandan Karfa, Prof. Dipankar Sarkar and Prof. Chittaranjan Mandal of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering bagged the 1st Prize worth Rs. 20,000 for SAST: An Architecture Driven High-Level Synthesis Tool. In the design contest, Prof. D. Mukhopadhyay placed second for High Performance Elliptic Curve Cryptographic Processor for FPGA Platforms; his team was awarded Rs. 15,000.
We are now going to take a closer look at these papers and the technologies they are based on.

More On SAST
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is the design process of taking an algorithm for a given desired behaviour, say encryption or encoding, and converting it into a hardware implementation; manufacturers can concern themselves with the overall design, leaving the nitty-gritties to the software. As noted by the authors, HLS systems today must be optimal regarding the total size of the hardware, speed, power and other factors. Of crucial importance is interconnections performance – while the connections contribute to 50% of delay in .35 micron technology, it is expected to increase up to 70% in .25 micron technology. The paper presented the concept of an architecture-driven HLS tool to reduce random interconnections.

SAST, or the Structured Architecture Synthesis Tool, allows the designer to finalize the overall architecture of the job at the start of the synthesis procedure, while leaving interconnection to the final stage. Data paths are organized into architectural blocks called A-blocks, each with local storage, a functional unit and a local bus. A-blocks also have access to global buses and memory. The underlying idea is that the data paths are highly reusable and have a regular organization, thus removing random interconnections while giving the designer full control over the final architecture at the same time.

Elliptic Curve Processors

“It is possible to write endlessly on elliptic curves. (This is not a threat.)” -Serge Lang

While gaining notoriety as a formidable component of mathematics, Elliptic Curves have proven indispensable in the world of number theory; apart from applications in cryptography and integer factorization, they play a crucial role in Andrew Wiles’ famous proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In their paper, Chester Rebeiro (of IIT-M) and Prof. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay have proposed an efficient implementation of an Elliptic Curve Crypto-Processor targeted for Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platforms.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has been accepted as a highly secure and efficient standard. Taking the set of all (x,y) solutions of an elliptic curve y2 = x3 + ax + b in a finite field (ie. a field containing a finite number of elements), we find that multiplying an element of the group (our private key) with a curve parameter forms a very secure public key. If we pick a large enough finite filed, reversing this process without the private key involves a computationally difficult dicrete logarithm problem – so much so that a Blackberry operating on a 2.5 V battery can generate a key during a one-second handshake for secure communications that would take all the computing power on Earth thousands of years to brute-force. For a given level of security, ECC has much shorter keys and computational steps than its contemporaries.

FPGAs are devices that can be configured by customers after manufacturing, hence the name “field-programmable”. They possess several logic components, while the interconnections between the logic blocks are decided after manufacture, either by a circuit diagram or code in a Hardware Description language like Verilog or VHDL. This allows customers to wire together the logic to their liking for specialized purposed. From their origins in programmable read-only memory, FPGAs have found extensive application in digital signal processing, aerospace, medical imaging, computer vision, bioinformatics and of course, cryptography. Implementing a cryptosystem requires efficient finite field operations such as addition, multiplication, inversion, etc. Using highly efficient algorithms for addition and inversion, the authors developed a processor on a standard FPGA that showed promising results in several benchmarks.