Artwork by Akshita Arora
From conversation on:
Sep 19, 2020
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Trying to understand the trails of the millions of data ‘packets’ we send out every day wrapped with ideas, work, entertainment, love, and what not! Conversing about the field of networking and communications with Prof. B.S. Manoj, who started out in the initial stages of the global R&D of wireless technology - when it was still an idealistic concept, set benchmarks in the field, and has carried out extensive work in multifariously distinct spheres of computer sciences over the years. Starting out as an Electronics and Communication engineering graduate, his career trajectory weaves together interesting experiences from industry, and then a very intentional shift to academia wherein he has deftly brought different worlds together. He candidly speaks about his ideas on education, research, and the virtues of being a lifelong learner by delving into personal insights. He discusses his perspectives of the field from when he started, and at present when the applications of the discipline have affected every sphere of human life as we know it today, and much more.
(In the) late 90’s, the industry was rapidly progressing, particularly in the software section. At that time, I was actually resigning my software industry job to do a PhD.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. B.S. Manoj Professor, Department of Avionics, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Trivandrum
Prof. B.S. Manoj is a professor at the Department of Avionics at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology. He pursued his Bachelors and Masters of Technology in Electronics and Communication engineering, and further went on to pursue his doctoral work in computer sciences and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He then moved to the University of California, San Diego for his postdoctoral work. At UCSD, he also started participating in academia as a lecturer, apart from being an active researcher working on various NSF-funded projects. Subsequently, he took up the position at IIST in 2011. His areas of research interests extend over a vast expanse of the field’s fundamental horizons in computer networks, internet security, wireless mesh networks, cognitive networks, and giant scale computing, as well as in advanced applications of networking, ranging from mobile data networks and sensor networks, to the internet of things and ideas of quantum computing as well. Prof. Manoj has co-authored the seminal text in the field namely, “Ad-hoc wireless networks: Architectures and Protocolsâ€, among other prominent publications and projects, and his work on cyber security and networks is prominent and renowned in the community, serving as an inspiration to many who aspire to work in the same domain.
Transcript
Naman Jain (Host 1) :
Welcome to a brand new episode of zeroing in. I am Naman Jain and joining me today as co-host is Ansuman Palo who is currently a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organization, and in the past has worked closely with our guest for today. Today we are in conversation with the research pioneer in the field of networking and communication, who has carried out extensive work in multifariously distinct spheres of computer sciences. Presently a professor at the Indian Institute Of Space Science and Technology, he pursued his bachelors and masters of Technology in Electronics and Communication Engineering and went on to pursue his doctoral work in computer sciences and engineering at the Indian Institute Of Technology, Madras. He then moved on to the University of California, San Diego for his post doctoral work. At UCSD he also started participating in academia as a lecturer. apart from being an active researcher working on various NSF funded government projects. Subsequently, he took up the position at IIST in 2011. His areas of research interest extend over a vast expanse of the field's fundamental horizons in computer networks, internet security, wireless mesh networks, cognitive networks and giant skill computing.
As well as in advanced applications of networking ranging from mobile data networks to the internet of things and the ideas of quantum computing as well. His work on cybersecurity and networks is prominent and renowned in the community and is an inspiration to many who aspire to work in the same domain. We hope to understand his perspectives in the field from when he started and the present when the applications of the discipline have affected every sphere of human life as we know it today and much more. Extending a very warm welcome to Prof. B S Manoj.
Prof. B. S. Manoj :
Thank you Naman, thank you Anshuman and Shreya and everybody else at TSR for giving me this opportunity to know and talk to you through your new medium. Really glad to know that, you know, that you have initiated the wonderful Idea. Thank you!
Naman :
Thanks a lot to you sir, we are really glad to have you here. Usually we begin with a discussion with our guest about their formative years and how you remember them. Would you be able to explain to us how your childhood aspirations look like and what initially sparked your interest in science, or could you take us through how did the passion shape up for you and how did you remember the future you.
Prof. Manoj :
Ah.. I had a lot of books, all around me during my formative years. My father used to buy a lot of books in Malayalam, particularly, what I liked was the book of biographies of some of the top scientists of the world and I was quite fascinated by, you know, Edison-like scientists, I wished to become one such. When I was very very young, I had no idea about studies - higher studies, Engineering, and particularly of research, but you know the life of scientists had fascinated me even at that age. With the schools what otherwise helped me was science exhibitions. Exhibitions played a major role in shaping my interest in research and scientists. I remember, you know one day when I was a pre engineering student uh I had a visit to Cochin university of science and technology and faculty members of that university explained to me about local area networks, wide area networks and it was in the pre-nineties, and they showed me capturing an audio clip from the speech I had just talked and the signal shape and how, they will be able to further click into smaller and smaller units of sound. It actually made me think in further various aspects. So yeah, childhood made a very important role in the formation, education where I saw real systems as well as masters, PhD and observing how people work around me, especially the professors. Those things, all collectively, you know, made me what I am today.
Naman :
So following up on this and delving a little deeper into your career trajectory shows an eclectic mix of experiences starting from a BTech then a Masters, experience in industry and then going for a PhD and finally research and academia as well. Could you briefly take us through what this journey entailed to you, and how do you describe the choices you had, and how did everyone around you perceive these choices as you were moving forward from your BTech?
Prof. Manoj :
Yeah, I got my GATE score and I also got a job in All India Radio in my hand, with the central govt. salary of a very high amount of rupees 5000+ per month and my father has to decide between these two. He said, “Son, you go for higher studies or central govt job”, so for him there is no question there is no reason to think differently, central govt. job is always the choice, okay, he himself was a teacher, and he had three sons and all three of us did not have any jobs in our hands. But you know, a central government job for a boy from a village was something like an unimaginable goal and I cannot blame my father for insisting me to join that. But I was doubtful about joining a central govt job, I actually wanted to go for MTech. And (for) several days my father was pestering me, and you know I had to resist all this to go for my MTech studies leaving the job opportunity and so if you look at that particular incident, father wanted to ensure his child a better safer future, and you cannot blame him, but I have my plans I was actually going to take a big risk, I was not going to see a guaranteed job opportunity in the future even if I had to take my MTech that time in fact a lot of decisions of surrounding community including your immediate family members will suggest all of us and direct and sometimes force all of us. And I was doing this engineer job as a software designer in Banyan Networks pvt ltd Chennai. The decision to resign and go for PhD was not understood by many people within my family as well as many people who worked with me at that time, because if I recollect that situation of the late 90s, industry was rapidly progressing especially in the software and that time I was actually resigning my software engineering job to do PhD and everybody surrounding me were showing expressions of shock, but I had to take the decision, again you know when I was going to USA after PhD for postdoctoral many of my immediate family members asked if I really want to go to the USA, I can apply at a job here, and I had to take a decision to get that exposure. And even more difficult was to come back from the US, but you know you have to take decision at regular intervals of what you really want to do irrespective of what others actually say because that path that you have walked through is unique to you, your father has not walked the way you have walked, your brothers have not walked, your teachers had not walked, your neighbors have not walked. Based on the path we have walked through and the experience we have gained, we have to take our own decisions. You can take advice from anybody but at the end of the day the decision should be ours, only then you will not be feeling bad about our decision.
Naman :
That was really fascinating for us. It would be really interesting to hear about the work that you did after your masters. And how did you shift into a PhD research position? Was it difficult to have this transition after having worked as an engineer for quite some time?
Prof. Manoj :
Just at the end of my masters studies, I got an idea that I should never become a faculty member. I’d, should become an engineer in software industry and I actually disliked joining as a faculty in those years because I found many of my classmates who are doing very well are getting industry placements with very high salary and on the other side I saw who did very poor with ultra low CGPA joined academics as faculty members, and found that this is not the right job. Uh I should not join as a faculty member and will not do a PhD and so on, and I joined industry and was doing a software engineers job. I was working in accompany called vanier networks and the company was actually a very interesting company, and they were developing and working on advanced areas of computer networking at that time, and they were developing switched routers and other advanced applications, and I was asked to develop a precursor to the tool that we are using for this communication before Skype in my company. I was developing a LAN phone using Ethernet cable for computer to computer communication. I was interfacing a computer to a telephone exchange, so you can actually make calls from a computer, the call will go as a regular call to any other person connected to the telephone network. My key development in this was real-time voice protocol, basically to ensure the timely delivery of voice packets, so that the users will not feel broken pieces of information and will not break within the sound. It was very interesting work, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I looked at how the company was working, always the engineers had doubts and these doubts were created by the profs from IIT who were known to them so whenever you have a doubt you will approach a prof, and he will clear it with years of his experience, and then I realized that I must become a faculty and do research. Then I decided to do PhD in IIT madras and the committee at IIT asked I am willing to do this by resigning job. Then I said yes, I’m going to do that. I have no doubt, but you get paid in the company and this scholarship is actually very less, but still I am going to do this. Then what happened was, these was no guide to guide me. The guide I was planning to do under was unavailable, so somebody else has to guide me. So other prof said you can do under image processing, signal processing VLSI and other areas if you are willing to do that. I said if the opportunity is not in the computer network area, please give it to another student who will be more eligible than me to work in those areas, and I was willing to give up that opportunity if it was not in the networking area. Fortunately at the end of the round another professor who was well known this the research, prof Ramamurthy had agreed to take me. I got really interested in doing research and that has made a big transformation. One of the reasons I encourage many students in my classes to do higher studies is only because of the radical exposure that I myself have received in higher education. You all might think that you have graduated from IIST Trivandrum and that you have a good amount of knowledge. Your knowledge will remain with you until you do higher studies because higher studies will really open up your mind to areas you have never imagined before. Before that I uh did not actually know what was research, as an engineer I was developing something, as students I was studying something and writing exams afterwards but the whole new world of research, innovation, finding new things, deriving new knowledge, creating new knowledge and publishing them, all these were big lessons I could only get from higher education opportunities.
Ansuman :
This was really insightful and your journey portrays seemingly momentary yet immense amounts of courage that have been taken to follow that you are deeply sure of through your transition from bachelors to masters or from industry to research, it just strikes out to me in some sense very very evidently, would you like you throw some light on your doctoral days and the work that you conducted at that time and how has that carried forward to today's perspective and interests as you look at them now.
Prof. Manoj :
So when I joined, I had made up my very own research directions in very advanced areas. My senior Dr. Srinath was doing in optical networks, my super senior Prof. Mohan was doing in wavelength division multiplexing. And I also had the impression that the world is going to be dominated by optical networking and extremely high bandwidth provided by optical networks. In fact, it is partially true also. In fact, your seniors progressing in that direction is also an indication and motivation for you. But my advisor had a different plan for me, he asked me to work in wireless networks. I was a little unhappy about I, I didn’t say anything, but I was unhappy. When I came out of the room my unhappiness grew and over a week, I became very upset and kept away from him for a week and kept feeling upset about everything and did not speak to my advisor for a week. He was unaware and behaving normally, but I was very angry. Having resigned the industry job and wanting to do research and ending up like this. I saw a student graduated from BTech and has written some papers. I was able to very quickly come up with an innovative idea as an extension to his idea. Then I realized that I am able to make progress in this area, and taking advice from other students in this area, professor Murthy suggested me that I work in an area called adverse wireless networks which was just emerging at that time and was in the very early stage. I started working in that area and that proved very productive for me because of two reasons, one, the optical network was already well investigated and a small no of major companies invested in that and a few researchers were working to produce results in that area. Whereas, the other was just emerging without having researched, and it was also integrated with different types of other networks. Tensor networks, cellular networks, multihop cellular networks, hybrid networks, and it had a lot of applications to military kind of networks too, so the next four years I had been thoroughly enjoying doing research and producing several interesting research papers, developing prototypes, and eventually my advisor took me with him in writing his book in the area. And you know it changed me from a software engineer, to a student who is unknown to the world, to a person whose name is on several researches, read by students in universities all around the world. In fact, uh Prof. Rrammurthys guidance in getting me to read research literature and to understand problems and to identify research solutions and directions and above all write about the solution and communicate it in various forms of publications, had given me a very big elevation in the academics as well as research areas. I'm now passing this now to my students.
Naman :
Yes sir, it’s a really fascinating story, how you approached a completely new topic when there were established topics you could have worked on. Maybe we can get to the depths of how you chose the particular fields. We noticed that you spread your research topics across a diverse range of applications. It ranges from purely technical applications like cellular networks and to theoretical concepts like emergency response networks. So what was the motivation for you to select this diversity?
Prof. Manoj :
Yeah, you know these are very closely related topics, just to begin with the topic you mentioned emergency response, that was a new topic unlike anything I had worked with before. That’s because of the US style of working, they fund research and the funded research will determine where the scholars will work. I joined as a postdoctoral scholar in 2005 in UCSD, and since the days of 9/11, Tsunami disaster in India and other countries, and several other men made, and natural disasters were creating a lot of damage across the world and at that time, US national science foundation, had released a lot of research funds to tech, particularly to enable tech that can be used for disaster response. My postdoctoral advisor Prof. Rao was one of the principal investigators of one of the research grants provided by NSF Titled Responding to the Unexpected -Rescue. This project was for developing tech that can be used during a crisis situation, when the additional communication and computing infrastructure was damaged or disrupted. Even though you have optical fiber networks of hundreds of Gigabits per second, around the nation, one earthquake is enough to tear half of the fibers and have big separation between the regions. So you call your cell phone and suddenly your cell phone will not have bandwidth to support and everything goes unavailable. This project required tech that can be deployed in very short notice and my research was in adverse wireless networks. Which was essentially required as a core component of that particular project, so we developed technologies that can be very quickly deployed. We developed wireless mesh routers, rescue mesh, we deployed and operated them in various scenarios in the real world where we could demonstrate the technology and so on. A variety of associated projects arrived, a response pair came at that time, which was infrastructure development for emergency response, then we created our own research areas, to aid communication and networking during disaster situations, for cognitive communication network and so on. So, in fact, most of my research areas are closely related. It's not as divergent as it might appear to you, so for example wireless sensor, wireless adverb and wireless mesh, these three are very very cross-linked, many overlapping situations, their application domain slightly differ, and I also work in cybersecurity where, we had produced several interesting research papers, we had developed detection solutions for malware, bot detection tech and so on. We have demonstrated that. These are closely related. The new area I am now starting is Quantum Computing with aim at big data. What that means is that, I have been doing computer networking with wireless in the past. Now, I have been extending my research area into the computing domain and particularly in quantum computing area which is very important for the future in both computing and communication. So this happens in all the researches, one of the reasons when I myself thought why this change of area happens is because after working for many years, in a specific area, you tend to be less creative, the ideas you develop for new solutions will become less and less novel, and you will get saturated with pre consumed knowledge, and you cannot think creatively in that area. So a small shift in your area will make you a very creative scientist. It will also expand your research scope, in fact I found many professors will not be able to guide more than 2-3 phd students in a specific area, by that time, a lot of work and thinking has been done in that area. And various directions and intellectually new problems will not come out. Similar to a fiction writer writing a lot of fiction will have a real bit difficulty in writing another and will change the area and write another, with a fresh direction of thinking, so that happens in research too. So that’s why I shift a little once in a while too. My areas are specific to computer systems computer networks wireless media, and other media
Ansuman :
That was quite thought-provoking, and the research ideas were wonderful to hear, especially considering that these ideas were considered when the world of internet and cellular data was just shaping up. So, sir, would like to briefly talk about your research directions of your current work that you address with your students as to work further.
Prof. Manoj :
So right now I focus on four different areas mainly, all the four I mentioned are very close areas except the quantum computing. Software defined networking is one of the areas that I focus, one of my PhD student is also working with that, so we have, developed software defined wireless networks, one of the early prototypes. Many of my students in fact Ansuman had also worked in software defined networking, satellite networks, incidentally as the lead of the team designated for developing the architecture for reference models for satellite network for integration with 5g by IEEE. I am now looking into the ideas Ansuman, Sharat, your classmate Suraj and others have developed in our lab, so some of these ideas, will actually go into the reference models and standards that will be developed by IEEE over the years. One example is where to place the controller and the software defined controller will develop the flow rules that can decide whether a satellite should forward that now or later, ok those decisions are very very important, those design aspects are very important, placement of controller and how much time ahead the controller should decide on a flow rule transmission all these are actually important lessons we learned. So every student helps in building an extra brick in a large research volume. My PhD student Sarath Babu has recently, developed medium termed software network or software defined networking architecture, during this conversation itself we have face a couple of minor disruptions in the network, even in our own campus with a lot of bandwidth we have faced a lot of disruptions. While people talk about disruptions lasting for several minutes and highly available network which is never disrupted there is a specific class in between where there can be very short term disruption, so he defined that medium term disruption network and is categorizing and identifying that and developing a new type of software defined network that can handle it. So software defined networking is one, then as part of our movement to satellite 5g integration, one of my PhD students and several of my BTech students work in this satellite networking. So over the next few years we will try to develop some missing pieces in the satellite 5g integration. Space and satellite edge computing which is very much required for ultra low latency communication software and satellite networking and if you look at the way how satellite networking is going to emerge, the influence of dense satellite networks and ultra dense satellite networks, we are going to see a paradigm shift. While everybody is thinking intercontinental internet communications will always be through fibers, you know these mega constellations or ultra dense constellations tell us that we may have low latency intercontinental communication through satellite. So that’s a very different, radically emerging area, actually. We are trying to contribute to development of this area. Besides that I want to work in quantum computing, I have two interests, one is quantum computing architecture for big data applications and quantum internet, so even now people think that a lot of promise exists for quantum computing. It is not 100% sure that it will completely replace classical computing, or it will go in line and merge with classical computing and one of our PhD students has developed an architecture where quantum computers and classical computers work together, in other words the quantum computer's parameters are optimized by a classical computer so that it can work efficiently. Hybrid architectures are actually being discussed in our lab. The fourth area is internet of things, you know that is a very promising area, very rapidly growing area, we have the lot of growth prospects in that area as you see trillions of non-traditional computers are going to be connected to the Internet and those are one of the new evolutions of the internet, so we have several of our students developing and contributing tech for that. So these are the main areas that I work in currently.
Naman :
Thank you sir for giving a brief about your current research, and it feels really good as an UG to know that we have contributed a small amount to this development, and we are sure that all the others also feel the same way. So sir, we would like to end the discussion by asking you about what you think will be the future of networks, considering its rapid growth and growth into different domains of everyone's lives. What do you see perhaps in the next fifty years or so?
Prof. Manoj :
Its really really hard to predict that kind of long durations, because this is rapidly growing, so explosively growing, we cannot actually predict more than two-three years. To be frank, 3 years is a very big generation change, in fact what many people have found is that every 10 years an entirely new generation of wireless networks come into existence. If you see for the volunteers like you and me have contributed through IEEE like professional boards to arrive at this unimaginable 1 Gbps bandwidth to our devices, mobile devices, for 5g we are setting some sort of vision of 20 Gbps. Of course people are able to get hundreds of megabits per second in the real world, so that way if you see the next 10 years we are going to see a rapid change in tech which we cannot easily anticipate, even satellite communication was never thought for intercontinental real time interactive low latency communication, but it is found to be a feasibility and not just a feasibility but going to be one of the predominant ways of communication. Computing side innovation, networking side innovation, AI innovation, and IOT innovation, innovations in these areas are so rapid, so we cannot predict more than 2 three years. It is very interesting to think that our students are able to get access to rich materials, info that they can understand and produce very novel ideas, in 90s and 2000s only in foreign countries It's available to do such research, but in 2000s and 2020s we have the whole world to know about the new development and tech products and services. I have mentioned probably to every other student who has taken my class this, one tech enables another, while it took 50 years for radio to reach 50 million people, TV took much smaller number of years. Many of the services today will reach a much bigger population. If you look, in one year TikTok which is a very simple application service over the internet reached 100s of millions of people, so imagine a tech you developed reaching 5 billion people in a week and having so much of influence on everybody's lives. So we cannot predict the tech, especially in these rapid evolving areas, for that kind of duration. It will be like, 30 years back we had a computer which occupied like one floor of a building, that did not have the capacity that you are holding in your hand today. So in that scale our computing, communication, networking, AI and tech are growing, so the future is all for you to make an impact or your own stamp in that tech growth
Naman :
This was zeroing in with Dr. B.S. Manoj. It has been brought to you by the sounding rocket in collaboration with IIST Alumni association, from the Indian institute Of Space Science and Technology, we extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. BS Manoj. For sharing his insightful journey and his inspirational outtakes in the field of networks with us on behalf of Zeroing in a team which included Fenil Shah, Manish Chauhan Prajwal Patnaik, Shreya Mishra and KVNG Vikram, and I Naman Jain. Thanks a lot for looking into this episode. If you have any suggestions, you can write to us in zeroingin@outlook.in or follow us at our Instagram handle zeroing in podcast or The Sounding Rocket Page on FB. We look forward to seeing you again on the other side of the week.