An Interview With Dr. Jayanthi Sivaswamy
Posted on: Wednesday, 20 February 2008, 03:00 CST
By Landsberger, Joe
Learning by Design Editor's note: From June 26 - July 1, 2007 I attended and presented at the 14th International Conference on Learning at the University of the Witwatersrand (Witt U), Johannesburg, South Africa. There I met Dr. Jayanthi Sivaswamy, Professor, Center for Visual Information Technology, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) (www.iiit.ac.in), Gachibowli, Hyderabad, India.
Spelling follows British tradition.
Joe: Welcome, Jayanthi. Can you place the International Institute of Information Technology for our international readers?
Jayanthi: HIT, an educational institution in Hyderabad, India, started in 1998. It was started to address the need for producing trained professionals in the new area of information technology.
Joe: What is the nature of HIT? ( public/private, undergrad/ grad, reputation, etc.)
Jayanthi: We offer undergraduate and graduate programmes. It began with seed support from the state government (Andhra Pradesh), and despite the short period of its existence, IIITHyderabad is rated by Dataquest as one of the top 10 technological institutions in the country. It has about 1200 students, all of whom reside on campus.
Joe: What are its major academic programmes?
Jayanthi: It offers BTech (Bachelor in Technology) degrees in Computer Science and Electronics and Communication Engineering. Postgraduate (PG) programmes in the same areas include MTech, M.S.(by research) and PhD. We also offer specialised PG programmes in VLSI, computer aided structural engineering, computational natural sciences, and so on.
Joe: How are students selected for study at HIT?
Jayanthi: The entry at the undergraduate level is via a national competitive exam called the All India Engineering Entrance Exam. This is an annually held common entrance exam to gain entry into many engineering institutions. For entry into the MTech programme the institute conducts its own entrance exam. Entry into M.S and Ph.D. programmes is done throughout the year via interviews.
Joe: What percentage are "local" Indian, or international?
Jayanthi: At the undergraduate level, 100% of students are Indian. Of these about 40% are from within the state of Andhra Pradesh, whose capital city is Hyderabad, while the remaining students come from all over India. At the postgraduate level, we have a real mixed population with some international presence (about 2%).
Joe: How would you describe the Centre for Visual Information Technology?
Jayanthi: CVIT is a research centre focusing on research in the areas of graphics, image processing and computer vision. There are four faculty members and nearly 80 students at the Undergraduate (Honours) and postgraduate levels.
Joe: Are there commercial relationships?
Jayanthi: We do have funding from Microsoft research, Phillips research, HP Labs, GE, etc.
Joe: What is your role or specialty within the Centre?
Jayanthi: I am one of the four faculty members in CVIT. My research area is image processing.
Joe: How did you begin your academic career and the discovery of your specialties?
Jayanthi: I discovered I enjoyed academic life when I was doing my graduate studies. I worked as a TA, which I enjoyed, and for my research I was looking at biological vision from the point of view of visual information processing. Trying to understand how natural vision works and modeling it for developing algorithms is something I thought I could do only in an academic setting. So I decided to opt for an academic career. I don't think there's another career in which you get to work with a new and young set of people every single year!
Joe: How did you come to study at Syracuse University in the U.S.?
Jayanthi: I did my undergraduate studies in Rochester at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was about 100 miles down the highway and came to know of it.
Joe: How would you describe your interests of teaching versus research?
Jayanthi: I enjoy both. The latter is driven by my curiosity about various things. Teaching keeps me in touch with young students, who have the greatest potential to think fresh. They also constantly challenge you to think of new ways to look at old things by questioning things you take for granted.
Joe: What are typical courses you teach?
Jayanthi: I teach courses related to electronics and signal/ image processing.
Joe: How would you describe your work in developing IT resources for school science education?
Jayanthi: It is quite interesting, as we work with school teachers to understand their experiences while dreaming up solutions aimed at both teachers and children. Though our aim is to improve the quality of science education and make science more exciting and interesting for students, we consider the teacher as a key figure in the entire process and keep the focus on them.
Joe: Why did you found the Centre for IT in Education?
Jayanthi: I was interested in exploring what IT can do to address problems in education at the schools level such as quality, access to the same. Given my background (technical), I also chose to explore these aspects in school science education.
Joe: What are examples of on-going projects?
Jayanthi: Developing authoring tools for 2-D and 3-D virtual experiments is a major project at the Centre. The tool is intended to help teachers and school students create virtual physics experiments without the knowledge of programming languages like Java, C, etc. Besides this we also do content development for school science education and literacy.
Joe: Given the prominence of "technology" in the university's title, are the pedagogic standards for using technology high?
Jayanthi: There's a fair amount of use of technology in managing and running courses. For instance, many course materials are put on the internal network and assignments, projects are disseminated, and submissions are accepted only via the network. We have portals for large (150+ students) project-based courses and a digital library where both software and learning materials are available. Our undergraduates are trained to work with technology as early as 2nd and 3rd semesters in some innovative courses in the curriculum called IT/electronic workshops. We also have an MSIT programme which works closely with Carnegie Mellon University in developing courses for self-paced learning.
Joe: How would you describe your students' access to technology?
Jayanthi: All our students have access to shared computing facility across a campus-wide wireless and wired LAN. It is compulsory for the undergraduate students to own a laptop from the 2nd year.
Joe: Can you give examples of your, or your students', research projects?
Jayanthi: One of my group's core project is developing image analysisbased tools for automatic detection of diseases (like diabetes) by processing medical images. Other interesting projects in the Institute are optical character recognition technology for Indian languages, developing search engines, machine translation from English to Indian languages, T\text summarization, Robo soccer and rescue simulation, IT-based solutions for agriculture, etc.
Joe: Have any applications yielded commercial products?
Jayanthi: Some of the technologies have been developed specifically for corporates and a few patents have also been filed.
Joe: You mentioned a collaborative project in Great Britain?
Jayanthi: I am collaborating with a researcher in University of Southampton on developing grammars that evolve to help study and analyse shapes (in images).
Joe: Do you have specific research interests?
Jayanthi: My current interests include medical image analysis, biologically-inspired algorithm development and designing open environments such as virtual labs for learning science and games for science education.
Joe: Can you explain the implication of your study of retinal images?
Jayanthi: Our interest is to develop solutions for automatically processing retinal images. Such a solution can provide a valuable support in the form of a CAD tool for doctors in disease detection and quantification. Diabetic retinopathy is a disease of special interest. Combined with IT, our work aims to offer solutions for disease detection and management in a large populations. Forty million in India are affected by diabetes whereas the available medical expertise is woefully insufficient.
Joe: What is your role with HIT alumni?
Jayanthi: Our Institute is very young (9 years old) and hence the alumni size is still small but growing. I look after the alumni affairs and one key area is raising funds from alumni to support various initiatives in the Institute including scholarships for financially needy students.
Joe: Can you give us an idea of what your life is like in Hyderabad? (city life, family life, etc.)
Jayanthi: Hyderabad is a 400-year old city with an interesting cultural history. It was the seat of power of the Nizams and never a part of the British India. It later became part of the current twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad. It is now a fast growing city, experiencing explosive growth in the last five years which coincides with the time I moved into this city.
Our Institute's campus was set up in what was considered the outskirt of Hyderabad. Today however, it is the heart of the IT and knowledge corridor with companies like Microsoft and Nvidia for corporate neighbours and Institutions like International school of Business and University of Hyderabad for academic neighbours. My husband is a philosopher and is with University of Hyderabad and we lead a very busy life. We try to find time to pursue our interest in classical music by attending concerts. Joe: Thank you, Jayanthi, for your work and this contribution to TechTrends.
Copyright Association for Educational Communications & Technology Jan/Feb 2008
(c) 2008 TechTrends. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: TechTrends
User Comments (1)
| 1. |
Posted by plumenator on 02/25/2008, 10:43 Its IIIT Hyderabad, or IIIT-H not HIT. |
RSS Feeds