Q. First of all, how did you find the
campus and hospitality of the college?
A. The day, today, was a
very pleasant, in a beautiful campus. The campus has very nice architecture,
many different varieties of beautiful flowers, so much greenery around here and
very peaceful and calm environment.
Q. What was your inspiration behind your decision
of choosing the field of speech processing?
A. The field speech
processing is definitely a bit different from other fields. My reason was that
It is basically an inter-disciplinary field. It is an area which includes
various aspects of engineering and science. One needs signal processing
techniques as well as aspects of artificial intelligence techniques, and
programing skills. One also needs linguistics and phonetics skills. It involves
biological aspects also at higher levels. I was in my Master’s degree in
electronics and I did a project under supervision of some person who worked in
the field of speech therapy. I found the field interesting, it was a bit
difficult from others and very few people were working in the field. I had a
fascination of Hindi language as it is my mothertounge, I started working in
speech processing of Hindi language, So the beauty of Hindi and field were both
my inspiration.
Q. With a lot of difficulties in the
journey what kept you moving ahead on the path?
A. There were some ups and
down but fortunately I got opportunities to tackle them down. Firstly,
immediately after my Master’s degree, there was an economical pressure to do
some job for the livelihood for the family, I got some options as a lecturer in
a college, but I wanted to do research. I got research opportunities but there
was no fellowship in the beginning. My family supported me for the period.
After six months, I started getting fellowship and things went ahead. Second
time was when I finished my job as lecturer in university, fortunately I got
the appointment as a scientist from Govt. of India. And I worked in the speech
processing field there, around thirty years, I got many projects, worked as
head of institution and retired.
Q. After completing career as a scientist
for the government, you are still working in the field, tell us about the
journey after retirement.
A. Even after the
retirement, I got an opportunity to work with an American scientist as a
researcher. Later when I joined a group of institution, but as you know in
private institutions the research is not permitted at a high level as
scientists do, so I moved on from there, I started working for my own and now
we have a group of faculties and delivering projects to many big companies like
Nokia and some government supported projects too.
Q. In this long journey, you have visited
researchers and institutions from many country, how was that experience?
A. In the meantime, I’ve
been to many countries under different fellowship schemes, I have visited
various institution, worked as visiting researchers in various institutes as
MIT California and others. I was in Europe for a period as a researcher, the
experience was very good, in other countries I saw a bit upper level in
research than us but our country is working very hard to excel.
Q. As u told us, institution does not
support research at higher levels, what are your suggestions for the
institutions so that they could adopt better policies?
A. There are two things
associated with this, first is the university with which the colleges are
affiliated. Higher education needs research at higher level, one needs to
innovate from the knowledge gained in his life. If the universities are
confined to only syllabus and few exams in higher education, the students will
not grow much, they will not innovate. The universities need to support
research and they must think about it. Second thing is the management of
college and their vision, what they want to achieve and deliver from the
college, if they focus on delivering better to the society they must provide
valuable atmosphere and facilities for the researchers. The quality of
professors and supervisor for researcher affects a lot in higher education so
the management should ensure better faculties to promote research there.
Interviewed
by: Surya Pratap Singh and Pragati Baheti
Edited
by: Vipul Barodiya and Oshin Malviya
