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.