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...

I was genuinely surprised recently when someone told me they didn’t believe there was a real distinction between fundamental and applied work. They asked, “What do you mean by fundamental? You keep implying that some of us don’t do it.” I tried to explain that “fundamental” does not mean “superior,” and that my point wasn’t a criticism but simply a statement about the type of science we were discussing. I wasn’t successful in convincing them, so I’m writing this post in the hope that it will clarify the distinction for students and for anyone else who may share that misconception. The distinction between fundamental/basic and applied science has a long history. While I'm sure we can find some references to such distinctions in ancient philosophy, most people trace the distinction back to Vannevar Bush, who made the distinction when coming up with policy advice for the US president. This article , for example, describes that distinction and identifies an issue with how " basic...

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...

We finally have the sanction letter for a 2 year grant that will support 2 PhD students. It will also help us get some very minor equipment to implement a very applied project in collaboration with a startup and 3 other universities. It is a good start but we still need to fund some of our exciting basic science work.  On that note, I recently heard a rumor that a cogsci-specific grant (the only one of its kind in India as far as I know) received 12000 applications this year. I sure hope that's just a rumor that isn't true because that was one of the few grants that people in my field could count on. I've had other grants rejected for very strange reasons that suggested that they were not sending them to appropriate reviewers who understood cogsci but this one always gets sent to experts in the field within the country. This time, I suspect that people from other departments applied given that the lines between cogsci and AI have blurred some more in the recent past and eve...

Previous posts have reported on various failures to get grants. Several people on Twitter and elsewhere told me that they were all stepping stones to success. Of course, we've all heard that, but it is quite difficult to believe it when you face rejections.  I'm glad to report that we have finally begun to taste success. The DBT-India Alliance Intermediate Fellowship that was the most heartbreaking rejection for me despite a positive final round experience has now come back to help me, just as people predicted back then. I was able to repurpose some of the ideas in it, and together with colleagues from the department, we submitted a departmental grant application last year on a cohesive theme (which was missing from our previous attempt that was unsuccessful). The panel seemed quite happy with our presentation that was spearheaded by the dept chair. We just got news that we were successful! With DBT-IA, one of my primary goals, in addition to supporting PhD students, was to get...