Demo

We asked all the presenters to be available at 8:15 a.m., 15 min. before the actual class starts. This was the 4th Week of the Signals & Systems Course. The task was to develop a real-time voice based gender recognition system as a part of mini student projects. We had 12 systems ready for demo, 2 from girl students and 10 from boys - a ratio in favour of the girls compared to their presence in the class. Since it was a gender recognition system, I am trying to give a gender based performance stat. too. Hope to generate some competitive spirit!

We decided to put the same set of boys and girls for trial of each prototype. Since these were laptop based systems, its screen was made visible in a large screen format for the entire class of 90 students. What followed was a great experience! Six of the twelve systems got it 100 percent correct. Each time the developer got huge applause from fellow students. Whenever there was a failure, out came an 'Ohh!' from the class as if one Indian batsman got out in a crucial moment of a cricket match. The developers and the rest of the class as audience, all deserve appreciation. (pics of this great class of Signals & Systems ECE 2011 is attached : addition of a new pic at top - why should great ECE batch of 1990 be missed! I am somewhere there. This completes all characters of yesterday's class, me included and as a student like others...but who among that group of 29?)

There were moments of fun, too. Gopich... was getting frustrated when few consecutive trials in not-fully-perfect systems detected him as 'female'. Then he started submitting phrases like "I am male" or "Cheeka-Cheeeka". The prosody of Debolee...'s speech on some occasions (Hi [Developer], I am ..) was such that the developer would have not written another piece of code, if the system erred (I am joking!). Quite a few systems failed to recognize Pava... as human being, something developers decided to put as an output if input is anything but speech!!!

As a whole, it was a nice experience. For the statisticians, both the demo from girl students were 100 percent correct while 4 of the 10 demo from boys came unscathed. Does the same persist in other fields too? There is something positive for boys here, more number of them dared to come forward and subjected their systems (themselves ?) to trial which always had a probability of failure.

Never mind failures. It is important to make attempts and also to learn how to handle failures, if it is there. Fear of failure is something which needs to be overcome.

Level 2 description of the system level development task has been published. (i)To make this system robust against noise. For applications like gender based suggestion of content, one may not experience any attack. However, applications like automated voice based toilet (male / female) door lock system one has to consider impostor attacks (male trying to speak like female). (ii)Speech recognition based real-time application (limited vocabulary). Deadline is extended to 10th Feb. as asked by the students.

Took the opportunity to make a quick 5 min. presentation on IP generation, patent search, patent filing, patent defence. Gave one demo of a patent defence from our research group. This we had presented before experts the previous day and the PPT was at my desktop along with lecture slides. Wished that the students who have completed only 1.5 year here and 2.5 year (4-year program) / 3.5 year (5-year program) to go, can have some innovations in their portfolio when they leave IIT kharagpur.

Waiting for another round of fun-filled demo session and expect wider participation that time with larger number of students coming to the front as developers. Meanwhile theory, application, tutorial, MATLAB .... will continue.

What a week!

What a week! After a tumultuous week that preceded before (undue stress at office, spilling it over to my family, forcing me to send a kind of SOS to my friends, batch-mates, seniors, ex-students that perhaps it is time to rethink about IITkgp) it was a great, great relief! And what a way to end, few hour back Su... gave me a ring. Our paper in a leading Elsi.. journal got accepted in full. The joy is all the more because this is the output of one of the two new research teams I started building up in two new areas after joining IITkgp. Now that the gestation period is over, this will give a shot in the arm of our speech group which was lagging little behind the biomedical group in terms of quality international journal publications.

But the turnaround was initiated by Vinayak and Chiranjeev Maharaj’s visit (previous post), subsequent reading of ‘Inspired Talks’ from abridged edition of Vivekananda’s complete works and inspirational replies/telephone call from friends. Also I got whole hearted support from my two senior colleagues with whom I shared the problems. I am very grateful to them. But for them it would have been much more miserable! I am sure more support would have come but I didn’t want to talk to others on a request to contain the issue and giving it time to resolve by itself. I believe that was the right thing to do in larger interest though mental duress was almost unbearable. Anyway, that is a matter of past and life always says – Move on.

Coming back to the week that it was -

(i) the classes went very well, covered lots of ground in theory as one student termed it ‘heavy duty’, the other spending more time on this subject in the daily schedule he mails to me; I will be on time to finish the syllabi.
(ii) played my small role in tech. tr. gr. of students and April workshop where one of our invention HSA will be showcased.
(iii) MO... signing and receipt of 1st year’s funding from a renowned physician who besides providing clinical facility, hospital trial is also funding our new three year long research project towards a new innovative product for a 50 percent ownership of the would be IP. It is a significant amount of funding and coming from a person (and not usual funding agencies) for a futuristic product shows the confidence he has on our team. We feel honoured and it is a great morale booster for us. The outcome of two sponsored projects we finished in a different area were also very highly rated by the two funding agencies - DST and ISRO.
(iv) received lot of accolades for whatever small work I did for big interdisciplinary IITkgp team looking into a multidimensional problem; the team leader who was not known to me even a month back (I was included in the team by another senior member of a different department. In that dept. I took some classes 3 years back which was received very well by the students) now places lot of confidence in me.
(v) my team members prepared two slides to give an overview of our group’s work in two areas for Adv.. VL.. Con... presentation which was termed ‘too good’ by any standard. Our involvement there is through a kind of invited project which too generated lot of confidence in our young team and faith in our work.
(vi) received royalty cheque, quite a significant amount of money :) from General Manager of a publishing house who few weeks back commented "I sincerely appreciate your dedication towards every single project you take up. Working with you has been a great honor and a learning experience in several ways" at the beginning of my new project with them. I would say, it is an honor and fulfilling experience for me to receive such comments from the leading most technical book publisher of the country.
(vii) had interaction with three different groups (two inside campus, one outside) on how are they working towards social upliftments and their need; had discussions with students who are not yet in any of them but are interested; also I was humbled to receive a telephone call from Chiranjeev Maharaj of Belur Math.

When I was thinking that there are seven wonder-ful reasons to feel great about the week that gone by, got the telephone call from Su.. this morning, the icing(for an academician) on the cake, the elsi… paper. As I end this post I recollect and try not to forget what Vinayak told as his favourite from Vivekananda - “Manifest your divinity (i.e. good qualities) and everything around will be harmoniously arranged for you.”

A rejoinder being added on 21st March, 2008 : Sa…, the PhD student of Biomedical group, rang at about 8:30 p.m. Visited ‘Author Centre’ of a Elsi.. journal having impact factor more than the one where our speech group’s work got accepted one week back. Our work is ‘Accepted with minor modification’. If it is a fight like this, to excel one another, great to be a part of that. Wish both the speech group and biomedical group scale newer heights!