The Hindu Business Line : TechVista highlights research efforts

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Bangalore Jan. 24 The Mahabharatha, waltzing sheep, farmers and cows peppered lectures at the third annual research conference TechVista 2007, held in the city on Tuesday.

While topics remained steady on research and innovation and the gloomy future of our country with its dearth of PhDs, the enterprising speakers contrived to bring some verve into pure computer science research at Microsoft Research India's flagship event.

Demonstrating how assigning procedural textures gives life to virtual actors (image made of polygons, designed using a PC) using simple rules such as walking and changing postures, Professor Ken Perlin of NYU took the audience through the steps required to animate a character, in his speech on `Illusion of Life: Revisited'.

His experiment concluded with an animation of a flock of sheep doing the Waltz. This experiment could someday find an application in controlling and automating vehicular traffic.

Mr Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, spoke on design thinking. "Most companies have a bad track record at developing new products internally," he said. Design, according to him, deserves more importance than it was getting and that the IT industry needed to think ahead and design products for the future.

He advocated a design phase be added before the engineering phase of a software product begins, similar to the policy followed by automotive sector, which only begins production a year after the initial sketch of the concept car was made.

Academicians Mr Jitendra Malik, University of California, Berkeley; Mr Krithi Ramamritham, IITB; Mr Rajeev Sangal, IIIT-Hyderabad, and Mr Daniel T. Ling, Corporate VP, MS Research, discussed how India could become a powerhouse in research, if the flow of PhDs increased and an interest in research was cultivated at the undergraduate level.

Speaking at the event, Mr C.N.R. Rao, Chairman, Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Council and President, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, rued the lack of researchers.

Calling the current value system "skewed and highly commercialised", he voiced his concern over the state of Indian research.

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