Doctor Fake

“I did my engineering from a fairly decent college in Coimbatore and then joined the industry just like everyone else. However, I didn’t find the job intellectually stimulating and wasn’t keen on pursuing it for a long period of time. It so happened that I visited the IISc campus one day by chance and fell in love with the place. I felt I should spend some time there. I had not thought about a PhD or had an idea what higher studies would look like. But I wanted to give it a shot. I got into the MS program of IISc and got my first exposure to research there. I had a very strong interest in mathematics and computer science was the perfect amalgamation of mathematics and applications. My broad area of research was in the area of statistical machine learning, a topic that was not sought after in the Indian context in those days. But nevertheless, I found it interesting.

I initially got hooked to the subject in my college when I learnt about theory of computation. Artificial intelligence was one notch higher than that. I wanted to work on a similar line. I did get a job after my Master’s, but I thought if I didn’t explore my interest in machine learning then, I would never get a chance again in the future. So I took a leap of faith and joined IISc for my PhD.

I was my supervisor’s first PhD student. She had just come back from MIT and had joined as a faculty at IISc. Obviously, it was a gamble because…