Commenting on the industry-academia gap and the need for better training, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore’s Director, Prof. Debabrata Das, tells Yashasvini Razdan from Electronics For You, how IIIT Bangalore is enhancing its curriculum to create better engineers who can contribute vastly to the Indian ESDM sector.
Q. What is the goal of setting up an institution like the International Institute of Information Technology?
A. It’s a very good question, as you are going straight to the fundamentals of why IIIT was created. IIIT Bangalore was started in 1998. At that time India was poised to take a spring into the information technology industry. This was in the last century, and at that time, the Y2K problem was very large across the globe and a lot of manpower was needed in the information technology sector from India to solve the Y2K problems across the globe. Hence, the government of India and the state governments of India found that more manpower was needed in this niche technology area.
So, to give importance to information technology—industry and academia—this new set of institutions was set up at that time, called as IIITs. The main aim of these institutions was to focus on the broad areas of information technology (IT), because IT can be used in agriculture, space, education, and health for the upliftment of society, businesses, banks, and finance. These institutions mainly teach to uplift or train new members and also do deep research.
Q. Why did the government not just set up more Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) focused on the same instead of establishing a completely different set of institutions?
A. There have been more IITs set up after 2000. Before 2000, there were only six IITs, but 17 more IITs were added later on. IITs are much larger because there are at least 10 departments ranging from mechanical, chemical, civil, electronics, electrical, computer science etc.
The major difference between IITs and IIITs is that the latter are only focused on the broad areas of information technology. Most of the IIITs don’t offer subjects such as civil engineering, aerospace engineering, or chemical engineering. IIITs are mainly focused on computer science engineering, AI/ML, data science, and electronics and communication engineering.
Q. What kind of human resources do IIITs aim to develop?
A. IIITs aim to create professionals who will go into the industry as well as academicians and researchers who’ll build more patent-worthy technologies. The first aim of IIITs is to build highly skilled human resources who can design new products in the areas of information technology in software as well as hardware engineering. These people are trained to develop software stacks and hardware after the design and research on new problems to be solved.
What sets apart these trained and highly skilled individuals from engineers who are trained at other institutions is that it’s only after the former design the architecture, can the latter write codes or design and produce PCBs, or software architecture/software stacks. Major design and development happen because of these highly skilled professionals. There are also many new research problems and innovations that pop up every day and IIITs are working to solve them.
We also train individuals to solve the problems of the citizens and the government and encourage them to come up with solutions that will be used by the citizens. Through our research, we produce patents, publish a lot of papers, and enable startups.
Q. How are the IIITs contributing to the electronics system design and manufacturing (ESDM) sector, which has seen a lot of focus since the pandemic?
A. It’s a good question, I appreciate that. So, you see, information technology has two major hands—the first is software engineering which we refer to as applications or operating systems, but to give the power to the software to be executed and make the software run, we need hardware which is electronics engineering. Looking at that, we have computer science engineering as well as electronics and communication engineering.
At IIIT Bangalore, we have a variety of programmes of integrated MTech, MTech and PhDs in the field of electronics and communication engineering, where we train individuals to become highly skilled engineers for the industry and academia. We also have a lot of research projects in the areas of electronics and semiconductors, where we design a lot of VLSI circuits and VLSI products for the industry.
Q. Engineering is continuously evolving. So how do you develop and evolve the curriculum to stay in tune with technological advancements?
A. I appreciate that you have thought so deeply about the change in technology. I will answer it with respect to IIIT Bangalore. The minimum requirement to become a professor at IIIT Bangalore is a PhD from a good university with a lot of research publications and required experience. The faculty members at IIIT are highly qualified and are involved in a lot of research in their respective fields. Some of their research work precedes the current technology by five to ten years before there is a product like that in the market.
The above research knowledge helps our faculty review our curriculum every year and bring in new technologies to study for our students. Our cutting-edge curriculum design, particularly elective courses, makes our students aware of the new technologies coming in and introduce them to the concepts and fundamentals. Our students are studying a very advanced curriculum.
Q. Currently what sectors do you see students gravitating towards the most?
A. Students are gravitating the most towards AI, data science, software engineering architecture and development tools, security, machine learning, deep learning, VLSI design, networking and communication.
Q. How does IIIT Bangalore enable startups?
A. We provide our students and faculty members with a seed fund for startups. We have a dedicated incubation centre that helps them work on their startup. We have accelerator programs to enable startups incubated under IIIT Bangalore and highly trained faculty also help most of the startups technically as mentors. We also have technology leaders visit the campus to interact with these startups.
Q. How do you counter the industry-academia gap to make more of the graduate engineers employable in the VLSI design industry?
A. We have many Indian startups, SMEs and VLSI design companies that have come up and are scaling their operations. They will absorb many of these engineering graduates. Except for a few top institutes, such as the IITs, IIITs, NITs, BITS etc, which are teaching VLSI design and encouraging research, the knowledge of graduate engineers is limited.
The top companies need highly skilled manpower and that number is not so high in India. We have a lot of people at the ITI (Industrial Training Institute) level. So that kind of value chain has to be increased to highly skilled manpower, in niche technology areas. The number of engineers graduating from the top institutes is not very high and the industry is looking for people possessing that level of skill. The industry people are putting a lot of requests to us to increase the number of highly skilled manpower we are working on.
Q. How are you working on that?
A. For that, we are planning to make many expansions with respect to space and hiring highly skilled faculty members, and building better labs.
Q. Do you believe that we have enough academicians who can aid in creating skilled engineers?
A. As a country, we need more good academicians who have an interest in teaching and research and have a good grasp of basic concepts. Good teaching and research is only possible when we have very creative and hardworking people.
Q. How do we encourage people to gravitate towards academia?
A. We need a lot of policy changes and an infusion of a lot of resources to attract good faculty members, providing them with a lot of facilities for their research and teaching. So, these resources need to be handed over for that. Except for a few institutes, many institutes lack these facilities. Here, at IIIT Bangalore, we have most of the resources and facilities for our faculty.
Q. What are the novel research projects and innovations that are currently under work at IIIT Bangalore?
A. We have been working on advanced cryptography, robotic surgery, data science, theoretical computer science, software testing, deep learning based image processing, 5G advanced and 6G technology, drone technology, digital governance, ethical IoT, and VLSI design, etc.
Q. How do you see 5G technology impacting industrial IoT?
A. Very good question. Let me tell you, industrial IoT is a very large canvas and it has applications in various areas. Industrial IoT, or any information technology, has three fundamental states. I call them the ‘3Cs—Conservation of information, Computation of information, and Communication of information.
Conservation refers to storage. Any information in electronics is stored in the form of ones and zeros where one means high voltage and zero means low voltage.
The second ‘C’ is computation. After the conservation of information, we call the stored information to the CPUs and GPUs, and then we compute it according to our algorithms, such as an artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) algorithm.
Once computed, we need to communicate this information. Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) has many sensors which collect data and compute it, and the data will be communicated to the receiver to take the required action.
5G is the last mile of communication that gives much better performance. If your communication is faster, then your performance will be better and thus more tasks can be automated, ultimately providing a boost to industrial IoT.
Q. Wireless technologies consume a lot of power, so how feasible is it to expect these technologies to fit in the Indian scenario where power is still a huge problem?
A. I come from a networking background and I am aware of what you’re talking about in remote/rural areas. We have solved this problem from 60% uptime to 99% uptime by using solar panels connected to the batteries in remote areas. These batteries are then connected to the communication devices. So our uptime is now 99%. Even with four hours of regular power in remote areas, we can continue work without any problem because of solar and other renewable energy.
