My Podcasting Experience (Part III): Student Participants
“Podcasting is a great way to have a message and have your voice heard in the world.” — Khoa Bui, author and chief editor of YouBeRelentless.
This is part 3 of the series, and I am back with some more snippets from my podcasting sessions to give you a peek of all the interesting conversations to come soon! This time the guests are the students who participated in the IRISS, the ACM-W workshop, and the ACM- Annual Event 2020, recently hosted by IIT Gandhinagar. This write-up is about their views, ideas, and understanding of the different aspects of computing.
Let’s begin!
Jatin Batra: Ph.D. from IIT Delhi and the ACM-India Doctoral Dissertation Awardee 2020
How would you explain your research to the people who are from a non-CSE background — to the general audience out there?
Imagine you are a student, and you are struggling with juggling all your homework assignments. You are unsure which one to do first and when to switch from one to another. At this time, if you use my research results on scheduling well, then you should get better grades. Basically, my research area is mostly about optimization. Whenever you have a setting when you have limited resources to work with, and you need to find the best way to utilize them to accomplish your objective, then my research area will come in very handy!
What is your message to students who are currently pursuing Ph.D. or who plan to pursue it in the future — what do you what to say to them?
Do what you find fun and do what you like. If you follow this mantra, your Ph.D. will be enjoyable. Currently, the value of computer science in the world is highly underemphasized. Take, for example, the school education — we don’t get to see any of the cool stuff, either in theory or applications, that computing offers. You can make music, create art, and pretty much change the world. You get the chance to explore all this during later education, so take advantage of that. Even the school curriculum should be such that the students know about the wonders of computing from an early age — it would help in setting up a strong foundation for their careers in the future.
Nidhi Rathi: Ph.D. Scholar at IISc Bangalore
You gave a contributed talk during the IRISS 2020 event organized at IIT Gandhinagar on 13th — 14th February. Can you explain it to our listeners in simple words?
I work in the domain of theoretical computer science. In spirit, it is mathematical and abstract, while it derives its motivation from everyday, practical uses. My main research interests lie in the area of Algorithmic Game theory, which deals with the process of modeling strategic interactions among players in a setting that consists of certain rules and outcomes. In particular, I work in the area of allocating resources in a fair manner, under various settings. At the IRISS event, I presented our work on the classic problem of rent division, where you have to allocate some indivisible resources at specific price values to a group of people. The critical point is that there should be no envy, and everyone should be happy with their share of resource — it is one of the most robust notions of fairness. While envy-free solutions are guaranteed to exist under reasonably general utility functions, efficient algorithms for finding them were known only for a very specific sub-class. Our work addresses this notable gap and develops approximation algorithms for fair rent division for the most general utility classes.
What are some challenges which you faced during your Ph.D., and how did you overcome them?
The biggest hurdle which I faced was my transition from the field of mathematics to the area of theoretical computing. I did my bachelors’ and masters’ in math, and hence, for a very long period, I was trained to look for proofs and theorems. But, when I started in computer science, I had to think beyond all that, beyond the non-constructive proofs. I had to build constructive proofs, and that too effectively on time. The way I overcame this challenge is that I always kept at it, read a lot of books, solved many problems, and am still in the process of thinking newer and newer ways to perform better in my research.
Shreyas Singh: Final Year Undergrad in CSE at IITGN
What are your views on these events organized at IIT Gandhinagar recently?
All the events hosted a series of highly educational talks and sessions by some of the most eminent minds in the field of computing and its allied areas. They had people coming from different domains, and I learned a lot from them. Apart from this, I also got some quality feedback, from researchers, scholars, and faculty, on the work which I am currently pursuing. Such events provide an excellent platform for students to have direct interactions with experts in their field of interest and acquire an understanding of the latest buzz and updates in that field. For example, in the ACM-Annual Event, we had an enlightening lecture by Shwetak Patel on the use of cell phones for healthcare. It is something I did not know of but found really fascinating.
What is your take on the future of computer science education and research, what all do you think is possible?
As a student, I have always liked hands-on education, such as coding. Efforts in promoting such an approach would be a good step forward. If you look at the current scenario, a lot of quality research is happening at the intersection of several fields and domains. I am interested in computing architecture, and I am aware of the various research works where people are designing systems for machine learning applications. Then there are projects which focus on developing ML solutions for systems. Similarly, interdisciplinary research is becoming extremely crucial, viz., computing with healthcare or humanities or other engineering branches.
There is a need to go beyond the confinements of a particular area and network with multiple disciplines for breakthrough research. The future of computer science education and research is collaborative.
So, friends, you will soon get to hear the detailed versions of these podcasts. The next part of this series will involve insightful sneak peeks from some more sessions providing yet more perspectives of these events. Till then, stay connected and enjoy life!
(Part 2 of this series can be found here. For Part 4, please visit here.)
