The MANDA Lab Odyssey

Today (July 1, 2025) marks the 4th anniversary of the MANDA lab (www.mandalab.org). Some quick reflections.  I had many apprehensions when I started a lab at IIITH. What sorts of memory research can be done with primarily undergraduate researchers who spend 1-1.5 years seriously on research? Can one make meaningful contributions to the field working in a low-resource environment ? Can we build local capacity for doing more ambitious work, especially in cognitive neuroscience, which is what I was trained for? Can we get motivated PhD students who can help us achieve more ambitious research goals, given that they can stay for longer periods of time?  I'm happy to report that the answer to most of these types of questions is trending in the positive direction. Working with IIITH students Our dual degree and MS students have managed to publish in decent conferences ( WACV , CoNLL , Interspeech , CogSci). Two of them have graduated with published papers. One of them is still workin...

The ever-smiling David Huron, an intellectual giant that walked amongst humans pretending to be an alien. I received sad news about Prof. David Huron 's passing yesterday. My one-on-one meetings with David at The Ohio State University were among the happiest and most intellectually stimulating of my life. Let me backtrack a bit.  When I was in my final year of physics studies at IIT Kanpur, I had grown a bit disillusioned with how we were taught science and engineering and had gradually lost interest in pursuing research in physics. At around the same time, I had developed a serious interest in cognitive science through taking courses with another important mentor in my life, Achla Raina . Due to my serious interest in music as an amateur pianist, I considered doing a PhD in music cognition. Since I didn't know where to start, I decided to cold-email a bunch of eminent music cognition researchers. David was one of them, and he responded with the advice to opt for a m...