RBI finanace education initiative

RBI explains fundamentals of monetary policy and banking basics in a comic strip format.

Viterbi and other gurus

Prof Viterbi has been one of the most remarkable academic industrialist in American telecom sector. His famous algorithm to find the most likely sequence of emitter states given an observed sequence of events has found immense application in not only telecom, but also distant fields such as bioinformatics. Coming to US in 1939 as an Italian refugee, he went to MIT to study electrical engineering. After his MIT masters, he went on to U Southern Calif for PhD in digital communications. During his UCLA lecturership, he formulated the Viterbi algorithm which was then so difficult to execute on a computer that its significance was not recognized. But as Moore's law caught on and world became more interconnected than ever, Viterbi's contribution has been recognized. Now he has an Engineering School named after him, a few companies, an emeritus professorship and also a venture capital firm.

Sometimes luck smiles on you and you get to meet most exceptional people effortlessly. Yesterday was one such day when I could spend some time with Viterbi. It so happened that Viterbi was invited to deliver a lecture at the IISc Centenary celebrations, after which he met up with the IISc director Prof Balram and got pointers regarding places to visit in Bangalore. One place was Strand, amongst others like Tejas Networks, NCBS and Infosys (unbelievable to be mentioned in the same breath as the three). I was essentially assigned the job of being with him during his Strand and NCBS visits. So I got to attend his meeting with the Strand top brass. Viterbi was clearly impressed with the variety of ideas we are investing and selling. Perhaps he would someday put some of his VC money in Strand. Then Viterbi and myself went to NCBS to meet the director and a professor there. Thanks to Bangalore traffic, both to and fro journeys took 10x more than they should and I could talk with the telecom guru one-on-one for almost 90 minutes. If only I had known about this for a day in advance, I would have prepared properly to interview him and posted that, yet the extempore conversation was also quite valuable for me. Prof Viterbi came across as a deeply content and happy person, with keen eye for all that is changing our world. Telecom of course, and healthcare, manufacturing, space travel, globalization's impact on the poorest, traffic decongestion, urbanization, construction workers and so on and so forth. He was extremely polite in entertaining my blabber as I am a nobody for him really. Big guys never lose sight of the fact that dignity begets respect in return. When we reached NCBS, we first went up to meet the director Prof Vijayraghavan who gave a nutshell view of his institute. Then he sent us to the eminent neurobiologist Prof Upinder Bhalla. Prof Bhalla has a composite lab with both computational modelling and experimental rigs. His work has been making news in big science journals of the world. Viterbi was most impressed by the rigorous analytical and engineering approach he has taken to study mice brains. This was my first interaction too with Prof Bhalla and it was a pleasure.

In summary, an unexpectedly great day spent with gurus of various worlds.

Ban single-commuter 4 wheelers from Bangalore roads

Anyone who has lived in Bangalore for 6 months would know the plight of the city's commuters. Public bus transport in India's silicon metropolis is way too crowded and slow for its populace. Metro rail will surely take 2 more years to arrive and it certainly would not cater to traffic on all the routes. Autorickshaw-wallas are not catering to the public, most are arrogant extortionists not quite eager to work hard to earn their money.

Thus, bus transport remains the only option for the commuting public in the immediate future. How to make their life better during the transport? How to make sure they reach their destination on time, with least amount of standing time in a smelly sweaty crowded unhygienic bus?

Many fancy solutions can be suggested: redesigning the buses, increasing their numbers, more flyovers and underpasses, expediting the metro etc etc. And the contractor/politician nexus would like all of them! But the single most effective solution is banning single-commuter 4-wheelers (SC4Ws) on road. Or at least taxing them prohibitively.

A small car can seat 3 passengers and a driver. An equivalent area in form of a bus can seat 6 passengers. A small car is such inefficient use of road space that I dont have to rant against larger SC4Ws. It is criminal insensitivity of SC4W users to block roads and give miserable time to bus commuters. And such insensitivity can be tolerated only in India. We don't protest because nobody cares and nobody cares because we don't protest!

Many would argue that it is the government's job to make wider better roads, more comfortable buses with more frequency etc. That is just shirking away from one's duties and conscience. Is empathy not part of good citizenship? Is accommodating other's needs not the basis of peaceful coexistence? How long the 1% rich would misuse 99% of state resources? Is it not simply inviting violent trouble?

And make a minute of yours green by thinking of petrol wastage due to SC4W usage on city roads. Clogged city roads can diminish the mileage of vehicles by as much as 50%! So its not good for the city's health too for so many SC4Ws inefficiently burning gallons of petrol everyday.

If it is too much legal trouble to ban the SC4Ws, there should at least be a heavy tax on such users. I am talking to the tune of lakhs per year! Let them understand the true cost of the luxury that comes by discomforting so many. That money can be then used to fuel the flyovers, underpasses, metros, better & more buses and the works.

How to keep publishing.

Introduction

The phrase "publish or perish" is frequently used in academic circles. Life in the ivory tower is judged primarily by the work one puts in the form of articles and gets published in peer-reviewed journals. But journal articles are no less important in high-tech industry as they are the most respectable advertisements of your products or services.

High-tech industry is full of former academics, yet not all such companies produce publications on a regular basis. Granted that publishing is not the primary focus of the guys running the show, but it simply does not seem to be there even at the bottom of their TODO list. It seems that companies are not leveraging the academic medium at all to forward their cause.

This article will highlight the importance of publishing from the individual and organizational viewpoints, and suggest a strategy to ensure a consistent flow of publications. I will also argue that publishing should positively impact patenting.

Why publish?

• Publishing is generally to make a point. And making a point effectively is quite an art. First, you need to have a point that is valuable to your audience. Then you need to make your readership realize the value of your ideas in the larger scheme of things, and of course, convey the idea precisely. So in order to publish, you need to do well thought-out focussed work.
  
• Publishing is the best advertisement for a knowledge worker. No need to emphasize the fact that undocumented work is generally forgotten, even by the worker herself. The only way to ensure longetivity of your work (and reputation!) is to put it in a journal or an archive, and make it accessible and searchable.
  
• Peer-review is free! Journals will take care of obtaining reviwers' time to do a critical analysis of your work, so you get free opinions and chances to revise your work. This reduces client criticism and client loss.
  
• Articles add credibility to your offerings. Talks and client pitching is also important, but their impact will multiply with articles. Articles get you respectability, take you to the right audience, lead to talk invitations and get you connected into the right networks.

Strategies to get published

• Hire a technical writer. The role of technical writers is often underrated in organizations full of intellectuals and innovators. Little appreciated by them is the fact that inventions need to be communicated, offerings need to be clearly advertised. A technical writer takes the writing burden off creative minds and lets them do what they are good at, and more importantly, stops them from finishing in hurry what they are not good at.
  
• Appoint a Publications Manager. Someone needs to be officially responsible to initiative in identifying publishable stories and instruct the technical writer on getting in touch with the relevant people to develop them fully. This guy would ideally have worked in editorial capacity in a publishing house. She would have contacts in the publishing world as well broad knowledge of the relevant field and market.
  
• Make working papers part of the process. This is really difficult. Employees are already burdened with meeting targets, busy innovating, delivering services. But it needs to be done. Perhaps ticket-based job assignment, a wiki-page per assigned task and uploading of all relevant documents on the wiki would be priceless for preventing loss of information relevant for publishing. The Pub-Man and TechW can then mine what they need without bothering the employee too much.
  
• Collaborate with academics. This is an easy way to get published if you have projects that permit academic collaborations. Academics will take care of publishing while you take care of all the interesting stuff. Publishing is their job!
  
• Network with editors. Publications Manager should ideally do this, so also the scientific management team that goes to conferences. Editors need articles to fill up their issues and they may not always have enough matter. Well-networked organizations will get invited to contribute a review, an opinion article or an article. A working paper can easily get published when its invited.
  

Publishing and Patenting

Patenting is crucial for not only getting first rights to exploit your invention, but it also gets you noticed when competitors and potential clients mine patent databases. Publications from a company are generally seen by the world only after the relevant patent has been filed. Patents Manager and Publications Manager have a lot of synergy to exploit. Filing a patent requires a belief that you have discovered something valuable that has not been done before. Patent document and publication manuscript are essentially similar in spirit - you are claiming a novel and useful procedure. A workplace process oriented towards doing publishable work will certainly lead to more patentable work.

Conclusions

Publications finally depend upon the organizations quality of work and a spirit of innovation. They indicate organizational willingness to go the extra mile for that additional ounce of value. To conclude, an ambitious high-tech company must have publishing ingrained in the organizational culture, and must find formal mechanisms to keep publishing.