History and legacy of the EE department (since 1958)
25 May 2021 | Rohit MA, Ritesh Botcha
Imagine yourself walking the department’s corridors 50 years from now. Maybe you are visiting for the first time since you left the place, or maybe you are an alumnus who has been in regular (and possibly generous) contact and are coming back for one of your routine visits. Or maybe you have been employed here for a while now, bearing witness to several of the changes that the place has gone through. In any case, you might wonder about what the department used to be “back in the day”. You might marvel at all that has changed, still finding some of it unbelievable. You might try hard to jog your memory to recall just what stood in the place where an expansive server room now stands, engulfed in quiet, uninterrupted air-conditioning, with flashes of light emanating from the large devices inside. How nice it would be if we could capture every living memory of the department in a ‘Pensieve’ that one could revisit at any time. Well, that was the intention behind envisioning this article, although we have to admit that this is but only a humble attempt at capturing some of the changes that have come over the department over the last few decades. A secondary goal was to also understand the legacy of our department in terms of what it has been a symbol of, and what it has come to be over the course of its lifetime.
A quick round-up
A glance at the department’s history on its webpage tells us that it was formed in 1958, along with the establishment of the institute. The population has increased more than 10 fold since then, going from about 50 undergraduate and 40 postgraduate students to nearly 500 and 550 of them, respectively! Naturally, there have been changes in several other avenues such as the faculty population, research and teaching environment, infrastructure, and so on, some of which we take a closer look at below.
Has the ice thinned?
The changing population has been a harbinger of change in student-faculty relationships and interactions. “As a student, one tends to have more association with their hostel, and lesser with the department”, says Prof. Juzer Vasi. This is true of most, if not all, undergraduates, and possibly many postgraduates too. “But gradually, over the course of the degree, the bonding between students & faculty tends to increase. In fact, I might even add that in comparison with today, this bonding was perhaps more back then, simply because of fewer students!”, he adds, recounting his experience as a B.Tech student in the batch of 1969 and as a faculty member, 1981 onwards. “The faculty knew most students by name back when I was a student, but it’s obviously quite difficult now, due to larger classes”, opines Prof. Vivek Borkar, who graduated from the B.Tech. program in 1976.
The increasing focus on research in the department has also had an effect to this end. “My interactions as a senior professor have been more with PG students, most of which have been of a technical nature. In my early years, on the other hand, interactions with UG students were more social. This was facilitated in part by the weekly movie nights which the faculty also attended enthusiastically, and bonded with students over”, recollects Prof. Vasi. Although movie nights are still quite popular in the institute today, the scale of attendance naturally limits the chances of close social interactions. So, to all the EE dept. students reading this, maybe it is time to think about having some regular social events within the department (a shout out to the EESA for already having been trying to facilitate this!) Along similar lines, Prof. Borkar hesitantly adds, “I always enjoy attending cultural and social events, but I have a crib to voice here - events on campus almost never start on time any more! As far as I can remember, most events adhered to announced schedules when I was a student.” Now, this might just be one of those “oh, kids these days!” kind of a crib, but we all know that he does have a point there.
The department has also been home to an endearing tradition of students returning to join as faculty. “Of course, there’s nothing unique about that. This can and does happen in a lot of universities, and it has also been a tradition here. What I’d like to add is that when you join as faculty, you become a colleague to people who had once been your teachers..”, says Prof. Vasi. While it would feel quite strange to think about working alongside your former teachers, Prof. Vasi has a nice thing to add about this, “.. they are very welcoming and make you feel part of the department. This helped me overcome the feeling of looking at myself as part of a strict establishment, and gain more insight into the research activities as well. As a UG student, access to department research was fairly limited back then.”
To teach or to research? Both!
Our institute has gone through a transformation from being a primarily teaching institute to one with emphasis on research as well as on teaching. This has also carried over to our department, which has seen increased faculty and funding for research and growing external collaborations. “I have seen the department get newer faces with similar interests over the years, and it has given me the opportunity to communicate my research with more colleagues”, says Prof. Borkar. “Interacting with colleagues, talking about your work with them helps improve research. And a lot more of that is possible today. This has certainly improved over the years”, concurs Prof. D. Manjunath.
For some faculty, especially for those with research areas closely allied with their teaching material, this has led to one influencing the other - results from research making it into the classroom, and discussions in class leading to further research exploration. The same way as we are currently living through a period with revolutionary advances happening in fields like machine learning and quantum computing, 30-40 years ago was a time of revolution in fields like digital signal processing and MOSFETs, which some of our faculty lived through as students or young professors. Some were even conducting their own research in these areas. “Research and teaching, therefore, became quite interconnected - research advancements helped provide live examples in class. And the occasional question by a student leaving a professor stumped led to the professor exploring the field in more depth”, remarks Prof. Vasi, and jokingly adding, “And of course, there was no better way to wake the whole class up than finding the instructor unable to answer a student’s question!”.
The influence of research on teaching has also been more direct, in terms of introducing credited research-oriented components into the teaching curriculum, such as, having project-based components within a course, R&D projects equivalent to credited elective courses, introducing research paper reading assignments, etc. “Active participation of undergraduates in research projects has given a chance for more interactions in a scenario where the large class strength made it harder”, says Prof. Borkar. “And this in turn has had an interesting effect on my research - I now end up diversifying my projects and choosing some of them to be in line with the background of UG students. This helps better facilitate their participation.” Prof. Manjunath is of a similar opinion - “R&D projects and various new courses have indeed aided more interaction with undergraduate students”, he says.
From punch cards to paving paths
Infrastructural development is perhaps one of the most inescapable changes that an educational facility undergoes during its existence, and our department has also, of course, had its fair share of that. It is, however, still remarkable to take a moment to appreciate how certain aspects of our lifestyle that we take for granted today, used to be quite different. Computing power, for instance, was one such. “Our batch was probably one of the last ones to use the EC-1030 - a punch-card based computer system. We had to first write all of our code on a sheet of paper, get the corresponding punch cards made by a person trained to do that, check them for errors and get them redone if any, and then finally submit the deck to be processed by the computer. Our courses on logic and programming were already interesting enough, and this activity certainly made them even more so!”, recalls Pravil Gupta, fondly, who graduated in the B.Tech. class of 1988.
The internet, an outcome of the digital revolution, has been another key enabler in the last few decades. Its rise and spread have led to increased research accessibility and collaboration, making it possible for researchers to stay more updated and aware of all the work happening across the world. “As people get older, they generally tend to fall behind on recent happenings, but it’s probably the opposite in my case. As a young researcher, I was a lot more outdated than I am today, thanks to the internet!”, remarks a witty Prof. Borkar.
Imagine picking up a seemingly important research problem and pursuing it for years only to find, at the end of it, that, with easy and timely access to progress by others working in the same area, you could have saved a huge amount of time, money, and effort! Such was the predicament of researchers until only two to three decades ago. “We normally turned to published journals to pick up challenging problems to work on. But such material would typically reach us by surface mail about 3-6 months after publication. Before that, the article would have already spent 6-8 months in the reviewing and publishing processes. And prior to that, the research work itself would probably have taken about a half to one year to complete. So, essentially, by the time I was reading it and deciding to start down that line, I was already about a couple of years behind!”, says Prof. Borkar. A lot of this has changed for the better now, thanks to e-print journals, pre-prints, and easier access through the internet.
“However”, adds Prof. Vasi, in a prudent tone, “the internet has had its downsides. I remember when we went to a library in search of published material as students, we would soon end up getting lost in the sea of resources available there. You’d find things that you had no idea about. But now with the internet, looking things up is a lot more efficient. While that saves students a lot of time and helps them progress faster, they are probably missing out on spending hours just exploring other kinds of topics.” While we agree to some extent with Prof. Vasi, he is probably blissfully unaware of the hours that we students still end up spending on the internet, as we descend one rabbit hole after another, browsing and reading about the fascinating research happening around the globe.
When it comes to choosing topics to conduct academic research on, we naturally tend to pick topics that are active, or are unexplored but of importance to the community.
Wrapping it up
When we set out to plan and write this article, we were a couple of students, looking at the department as outsiders, trying to study it under a microscope. We were looking to build this two-column table with headings that read ‘Back then’ and ‘Now’, fill it with an exhaustive set of interesting facts, and leave the reader staring in awe at the contrast. Although we may have only barely succeeded in achieving that goal, we did come to see, over the course of interviewing alumni and professors for this article, that the identity of an establishment such as an academic department is essentially shaped by the people associated with it. It also humbles us to think that we may also be involved, in some way, in our department’s evolution - if not already, then perhaps sometime in the future. The exercise of tracing the steps that the department has taken ended up making us feel closer to it, and we hope that you share this feeling. We would like to extend our sincere acknowledgement to all the interviewees for having given us their time and making this possible.