Three Really Good Questions

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet and interact with engineering students from Regional Engineering College, Rewa (MP). At the end, they asked three really good questions. Frankly, I didn’t have good answers to any of those questions but was pleased that students did ask deep, meaningful questions:

Q1. How do I find right information on any technical topic in internet without a lot of trial and errors?

Q2. I don’t like math but want to go for higher studies in computer science streams such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. What can I do and what are my chances of being successful?

Q3. USA and western countries lead the world when it comes to innovation, new technology and advances in science. When would India start leading from the front and how can that happen?

I admit upfront that I don’t have good answers to any of these questions but I tried and here is what I think.

A1. Start with Wikipedia article if you don’t know anything about the topic. For course materials, try MIT OpenCourseWare (https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm), NPTEL (https://nptel.ac.in/) lectures. Google and TED tech talks for new topics in science and technology. Selected youtube videos, khan academy videos. For technical papers, google scholar, conference and journals’ proceedings. I guess some trial and error will be needed but you will get better at it!

A2. Math is the language of universe. You don’t have a choice to not like it. However, if you don’t want to delve deep in mathematical equations, complex derivations then work/research on some abstraction where not much math is needed. I don’t really know if one can completely avoid math fundamentals for any core stream of computer science.

A3. This is a really loaded question. One can spend whole life writing about it, yet it won’t be enough. Unless we invest enough in research in terms of resources, man hours and if it is not backed by govt policies and private sector partnership — we will always lag. In short, you have to create a culture of research where new ideas are explored and incentivize to be able to lead the world. We will continue to be the emerging market but never be considered a serious player when it comes to innovation and contributing in pushing the envelope.

Finally, it was a great session and I learned more than the students learned from me :)