M Tech/ME and B Tech/BE Projects Available in Pune (Mech., CS, etc.)

Biswajit,

0. It would have been nice if you were to get in touch with me while you were still in India this year. Or was it the case that I had *already* scared you off? :)

Anyways, I had shown that projects document to a friend (a former prof.) here in Pune, and he had found it pretty normal... Ditto, for a similar document I had sent out last year to COEP... (Though all the projects had been finalized already, by that time.)

1. About your first * point: I beg to differ about the characterization of these projects. They are not primarily practical. They just try to hit the sweet spot between three different things: academia, currently published research and advances (mostly but not exclusively, academic), and what is regarded as practical in today's industry. ... Now, I am not sure how successful I was in getting to that spot, though... In any case, basically, I am keeping it all in a very fluid state at this stage... Let the student row, is my attitude... If he is passionate about practicality, we could always increase that touch...

I don't want to do an overkill, but here's a fast one. Let's take an example. What I say I propose to do (in that document) is a simulation of an OS. What the institute has just finished teaching a year back or so is Silberschatz' text (without any code or simulator to go with it.) What academic research does is something like improving small parts of MINIX. (See Prof. Tanenbaum's Group at Vrije Uni.---they produce PhDs and publish papers just as in any other academic set-up.) What the industry wants today is Linux. In this context, what I can allow the student to do, in case he really grows passionate about the practicality aspect of it is, for example, to increase the project's emphasis on the file system design, and, perhaps, even drop the simulation nature of the project and let him directly implement a new file system itself (I mean, accessing the real hard disk) on his own. (That was just an example. In place of file system, he could take process management etc.)

Sorry, that was CS, not mechanics, but it was the best example I could think of... (Guess, as a programmer, you would know.) A quick one on the mechanics side would be the following:

The student has finished just the Shigley a year back. I propose an experimental/software toolkit (or library). What academia publishes on is, say, XFEM. What the industry wants is, say, modeling of flutter of wind-mill blades. I can permit the student, if so desires, to take the project away from the simple design of a general toolkit and specialize in nonlinear dynamics--to the extent he wishes to go.

2. As to your second * point. Well, as a student I did the same too, at IIT Madras, about 22 years back. Remarkably, not a single one of the colleagues or friends of my guide had complained---then, or at any point of time later on.

About your closing paragraph: You are right. It *is* hard to find hard-working students. Yet, my experience has been, so far, somewhat different than what you anticipate.

At COEP in particular and in Pune in general, in every batch, I guess there certainly are at least tens, if not hundreds, of students (all branches put together) who *are* that hard-working. And they work that hard primarily because they *are* (or get) that very interested in their project work. It's a minority, but it's a significant one... For example, my document does speak of two MCS and one ME Metallurgy student. That guy had worked pretty well. Not only them... There were a couple of BE (CS) students from COEP in 1995-96 too who I had seen work at close quarters (though I didn't guide them then)... They worked fairly hard. Why, last year, my nephew was in his final year of CS and he wrote thousands of lines of code (emulating a network stack) for his project. Many such people are still found in Pune.

At the same time, what you caution about has also been corroborated by my friend who is currently on the faculty of IIT Bombay. He observed that since everyone these days gets into IT industry, at least at IIT Bombay, no UG student is bothered about working hard on the experimental side of it (in a non-CS dept.). They do the project only for getting their degree, that's all. You tell them something and they will complete only that part. They won't take it further. They won't think about their project. ... Of course, the observation should not be seen as a sweeping generalization. (After all, the same fellow also got award for innovative work done along with his UG students.) And yet, there seemed a lot of truth to it when he spoke. He clearly had seemed *worried* about the trend---not just complaining in a routine teacherly sort of way...

3. About Nobels and all. I do care about Nobel prizes. But I care more for the achivements indicated by those prizes than for the laureates as such. (This is a thoroughly honest statement. It's very natural for me to think that way....)

And so, sometimes, I do not really care as much for the Nobel laureates as I do for the Nobel *non*-laureates. (Mahatma Gandhi for Peace, Ayn Rand for Literature, a few others in Physics.... The list is not terribly short, I am afraid...)

Also, sometimes, one wonders why someone got a Nobel. For example, Perrin for Physics. (Even though he was a pretty good physicist, it still seems to me that probably the work was not as great as other laureates' work...)

So, overall, just the fact that a Nobel prize winner A has got excited about a student B really does not do too much towards improving my estimate of B---that is the point. At the most, I become curious, that's all. And that too, not about the student, but about what small increment he is going to add to the laureate's main thesis of his lifetime... One gets curious from that angle alone.

4. About your last point. Last semester (Nov. '07), one professor of CS at COEP had indicated a concrete interest in at least one of my BTech project proposals. (Several other professors were generally interested in my ideas too, esp. from Mech. and Met.). But then, last year, as I said, the projects were already in progress.

This year I hope I am not too late. I hope to get a couple of MTech/ME students and a few for BTech... I am not sure how many I could handle, though. I will update in August / September when everything is finalized. In 2005 and 2006, a couple of MTech students had on their own approached me.

5. Last minute addition: I also have projects in both architectural and technical acoustics and their applications... Architectural Acoustics: To predit reverbations and quality of sound inside a theatre. Technical Acoustics: (i) Study of acoustic deflector for a cell-phone: experimental, and computer simulation. (ii) Computer modeling for a novel design of automobile muffler / silencer. (This will be a follow-up on some experimental work which was supervised by my friend who is on the faculty of VIT, Pune.)... All other conditions apply...

Also, still some other ideas...

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Anyway, I promise not to reply for a few days here---this reply itself has grown that big.

[PS: Scary, is that what you said? Hmmm.... Seems like some people do not have to bother wearing masks at Halloween times... :) But then, who does those Halloween things here in Pune, anyways?]

-- Ajit