The MANDA Lab Odyssey

I have made an observation in the last 4.5 years of working in Indian academia. Visionary leadership in academia is a scarce commodity. However, I have found some good examples of academic leadership in my limited experience and will talk about that.  One such experience was the IIT Mandi HCI Foundation/iHub call for proposals. I was shortlisted but when I got to IIT Mandi, the iHub leadership (their CEO, the institute director, etc.) said, "You all were shortlisted because you were the strongest on paper. We are not particularly interested in the specific ideas you wrote in your proposals but our aim was to get the best people together and connect you all so that you can come up with ambitious ideas that you wouldn't have been able to in isolation." And thus was born a consortium project with a startup and 3 other institutions (IIT Rourkee, IIIT Gwalior, and BITS Pilani Hyderabad) with a grand vision that was very different from each of our individual proposals. The DST ...

This year has been the most productive one for our lab so far, but of course, the groundwork for it was laid in the preceding 3 years. This semester, I had a high teaching load but also managed to make significant progress on my postdoc paper that still needs to be submitted. This is the first year, really, where we are able to share with the world some of the research we'd been working away on in the past few years. While we have published some decent conference papers already, we are beginning to submit some substantial journal papers (see the preprints below). I am confident that these will be published sometime next year. Note that most of this work was done with no funding other than institute support for students. Some of our folks are also applying to grad school, and I'm curious to see how their training and work here translate into PhD offers. After my talk at FAIL? '25 and the institute talk I gave about my work on traveling waves (in preparation for my Wave Club...