Dr. Girish Varma, an Assistant Professor at IIIT Hyderabad’s CSTAR works in the domain of Complexity Theory, Combinatorics, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. The Millenial academic looks back at the early carefree days that saw the advent of computers and how it shaped his world view and career.
Growing up in the outskirts of beautiful Pathanamthitta in Kerala, tagged as the headquarters of pilgrimage tourism, Girish Varma’s story is a beautiful blend of natural living and being a witness to the quick advent of computers in India. “I came from a very normal family where none were PhD holders or faculty. I got into research, mainly due to my professors at NIT Calicut who were extremely dedicated to teaching, in a manner that evoked excitement in the subject”, says the researcher who went on to pursue an Integrated PhD program in Computer and Systems Science, studying algorithms and Complexity (2011 – 2015) from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.
The researcher has worked extensively on Model Compression techniques using Graph Theory for making deep Neural Networks efficient, applications of Computer Vision in Autonomous Navigation and Transportation Problems. He collaborates on Interdisciplinary problems with faculty and partners in medical imaging and mobile computing domains. A major collaboration is with DRDO on data sets for Indian traffic road scenes in diverse weather conditions and remote geographies.
Finding his mojo in complexity
It was a course in complexity theory in his final year at NIT Calicut that was a game-changer for Girish Varma. “I found direction and purpose in doing something logical. I was inspired to pursue my PhD by my professor, a well-known academic, who has encouraged scores of students towards software research” says the researcher followed up his PhD from TIFR with six months of postdoctoral research at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science.
“After six years of working in an environment that was highly mathematical and theory oriented, I realized that I wanted more exposure to applied research. I looked at some research publications from IIIT Hyderabad and realized that the Institute was doing very good work in applied areas. Many of the data sets published by IIITH were being used and cited by top universities across the world and that was very impressive to me”.
From Pathanamthitta to life on a verdant campus
On a trip to Hyderabad to meet his then girlfriend and now wife, Girish visited the IIIT Hyderabad campus and “got to see the work being done by Prof. Jawahar, Prof. K Madhava Krishna, Anoop Namboodiri etc. I joined as a research scientist and worked on diverse projects with Prof. Jawahar. Three years later, I was converted to a faculty position, working on theoretical research at CSTAR along with KCIS and the Machine Learning Lab. Guiding students and teaching large classes with 300+ students was initially a challenge. Over time, I am settling into a rhythm, understanding how to put forth the right incentives and knowing when to step back”.
In international collaboration, Girish is partnering with an ophthalmologist friend and clinical researchers from the University of Leicester on Fight for Sight, developing the prototype of an artificial intelligence-based eye tracker (A-Eye) for the diagnosis and monitoring of eye movement disorders. As Co-PI, Girish and his team of students and interns are using applied ML programming to clinical work in medical imaging, with some publications. A student paper on graph theory to make neural network algorithms efficient was very well received. “In a collaborative study with Prof. Kishore for which we hope to build a prototype, we observed that a good theory could be used to improve very practical algorithms. Our work was cited multiple times by top researchers, the likes of Google, DeepMind etc.” He adds that in academic communities on the world map, IIITH is working deeper in this domain but not everybody knows this. The same work out of Stanford, Microsoft research or Google would have received more traction. “But if you look at universities in India, we definitely have visibility. It has been very fulfilling work over the last five years and we want to now work on commercializing it in the near future”, he mulls.
“Recently, I met a faculty who has actually changed the publication model on its head. He launches a product and gets real world feedback from users and vendors, fixes those issues and then looks at publishing. I am actually inspired to move towards that kind of model” explains Girish who has taken up a few consultancy projects over the years, like Manjeera Digital Systems on efficient Implementation of Text to Speech on a specialized Processor. He worked with Adtech Corp Technologies on automated Seed Quality Estimation using Computer Vision and with Intel Bangalore, building data sets for autonomous navigation research in Indian traffic conditions.
Along with his workload that includes teaching courses in computer programming to undergraduate batches, Girish has been assigned a few administrative responsibilities on the IIITH campus “to fix issues that crop up in a growing community like ours”. He is working closely with the Mess committee to upgrade the system and is part of a committee that has been tasked with making undergraduate courses more exciting. He is also working on the structure and content for IIITH’s proposed online degree courses.
Simple living and complex thinking
Girish completed his schooling from Seventh-day Adventist in Pathanamthitta. “I was very fortunate to have had a very carefree childhood”, he reminisces. “We lived in the outskirts of the town where both my parents worked. My father was an advocate and my mother was a bank employee. Growing up, we spent every vacation in our maternal and paternal grandmothers’ houses. We were always welcome in every house in that neighborhood that resembled a large extended family. Cousins would play in the pond for a few hours early morning and then our grandma would call us in for breakfast. Those were good memories; of living in such open spaces, amongst nature, trees and ponds. It is sad that our future generations will never know these simple standards of existence and experiences”. He adds, “Computers started becoming popular, possibly towards 1998, and that was the age when my fascination with computers began. My dad being an advocate, got a computer very early on and we started experimenting with manipulating photos and even did some 3D editing”.
Back at that time, electronics was the favored stream for students but Girish opted for computer science, making him the top-ranked student of his batch. In college, he was a prodigious reader of Malayalam literature but also enjoyed leafing through Popular Science magazines and Asimovian science fiction. “During my PhD, I read a little more serious literature but these days, I can hardly make it through a book. I prefer podcasts, movies and television series on OTT”.
Post-marriage, Girish admits that he enjoys visiting places of worship with seniors in his family. “I try to apportion equal time for work and for my family. Typically, I spend 2-3 days completely dedicated to my work and then an equal amount of time, with family. Nowadays, my morning schedule is more structured, with toddler-duty and juggling my work schedule. My fitness regimen includes suryanamaskar, though not as regularly as I would like to”, observes the researcher whose music choices range from Indian classical and western rock to baby tunes in recent times.
The nice thing about being in academics, points out Girish, is that you get to travel to conferences and workshops world-wide. Among the many countries visited, he has fond memories of the ICCV conferences at Seoul and Kyoto. “I was always struck by the cleanliness and how organized they are and the local cuisine. The museums in Madrid and Germany were simply amazing”.
The pandemic years were a bit tough on Girish since his family was scattered. “My parents and in-laws were in different parts of Kerala, my wife was doing her post-doc in Israel and trouble broke out there. I had to do quite a bit of travelling. To top it all, I had just joined IIIT Hyderabad. Academics is also about networking, knowing your teams, writing joint proposals, thesis reviews etc. I lost out on valuable academic networking in research and in applied research areas, and I hope to make up for it now”, he observes. “When I joined IIITH, I wanted to head in the direction of building or incubating a startup. In the years ahead, we have some ideas that we could spin into a startup and hope to work on getting some patents”.