Oral-History:Anurag Kumar

About Anurag Kumar

Anurag Kumar, IEEE Life Fellow, was born on 13 July 1955 in Meerut, India, a town north of New Delhi. He received a B. Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institutes of Technology Kanpur in 1977 and the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1981. After graduation, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, Homdel, New Jersey from 1981 to 1988. Since then, he returned to Indian and has been on the faculty with the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, where he was the Director from 2014 to 2020, and currently holds an emeritus position. He has published nearly 200 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conference proceedings, co-authored Wireless Networking (2008) with D. Manjunath and Joy Kuri; and co-edited Communication Networking: An Analytical Approach (2004) with Joy Kuri and D. Manjunath. His area of research has been communication networking, in particular performance analysis, optimisation, and control of communications networks and distributed systems. Recently, he has recently focused primarily on wireless networking. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), the Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc), and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS). He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Networking and IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials.

About the Interview

ANURAG KUMAR: An Interview Conducted by Aloknath De, IEEE History Center, 10 May 2022

Interview #880 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Anurag Kumar, an oral history conducted in 2022 by Aloknath De, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Anurag Kumar

INTERVIEWER: Aloknath De

DATE: 10 May 2022

PLACE: Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

De:

Greetings. Today is 10th May 2022. This is Aloknath De. I have been Corporate Vice President of Samsung Electronics, South Korea and for last decade or so [I] have been the Chief Technology Officer of Samsung in India. Currently, I’m working in the innovation space of cyber physical system. I’ve been an active IEEE member for the last twenty-eight years. I’ve been Chair of the IEEE Communication Society Bangalore and currently [I am] Chair-elect for IEEE Bangalore Section. Today, I am with Professor Anurag Kumar. Professor Kumar has an illustrious career in his undergraduate and graduate studies. He has been an active researcher in the field of communication networking. He also served for the Institute [IISc] in the administrative capacity and has been an IEEE member for forty-odd years.

Professor Kumar, I welcome you and thank you for your valuable time. We are currently in the Electrical Communication Engineering Department in your office at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. We will begin this oral history interview by talking about year early life; where you were born, about your family, about your early educations, if you can tell us about that.

Kumar:

Sure. First of all, I’d like to thank IEEE for organizing this prestigious event for me. I’m honored and I’m grateful. I’m originally from a state in India called Uttar Pradesh. I was born in a town north of New Delhi, the capital of India, a town called Meerut. Most of my life was spent outside the UP, which is a short form for Uttar Pradesh, but the first five to ten years were spent in different towns in UP--- Meerut, Dehradun, Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra. I saw a lot of Uttar Pradesh in those days.

Around 1965, my parents decided to move to a new emerging town called Chandigarh, which is the joint capital of two mega-states in India, Haryana and Punjab. There my parents took up positions with Punjab University. They took positions there as faculty and I grew up essentially on the campus and I finished my schooling there. That’s my early years. My schooling was in a good school in Chandigarh. I remember Chandigarh was really a hundred thousand population, which nowadays is a dream for a city. I used to be able to bicycle all the way from home to work about two or three kilometers and back safely and my parents weren’t bothered about that. So, that was my early life up to schooling.

De:

What were your parents doing and the extended family? And how was the community around if you can tell a little bit more? You talked about growing up in Chandigarh, but if you can, tell a little bit about your parents. What were they doing? the extended family, the community around in Chandigarh?

Kumar:

As I said, I was born in the state of Uttar Pradesh and the early years of my life, the first nine to ten years, were spent in that state. Most of my family comes from there, so many of them were there and all of them were professionals or engineers, doctors, and lawyers. Primarily, our family was comprised of professional people. I grew up and most of my cousins grew up in towns and cities. Although if you look back maybe a hundred years, the people where I come from some village or a small, small town, a district town, but once we moved to Chandigarh it’s a city with really two main activities in those days, administration, there were two state administrations there, and education.

It was a very vibrant education city with a medical university, a comprehensive university, an engineering college, and a few other colleges. There are lots of schools and very quiet sort of a very modern town actually, designed by Le Corbusier, the famous French architect. We used to visit with our family, my grandparents, every summer. That’s where I had the opportunity to mix with my cousins and there was a very important shaping that took place during my early life was interaction with all the cousins. You’d play all sorts of interesting games. We got interested in language and interested in science and technology because there were different influences coming in from different corners. You would hear your elders speak about their experiences and you, as children, hear a lot.

My parents, of course, were professors, and one was a professor of management, one was a professor of sociology, so the dinner table discussion often was in their areas. My father would talk about motivation, my mother would talk about Marx and Gandhi, so it was a very interesting mix. Somehow out of that I grew as a technologist.

De:

That’s interesting and then I recall coming from a middle-class family and having seen the rustic areas as well as migrating to the towns we’ve seen both sides of the world. Have you always been studious because I know your academic achievement and what kind of extracurricular activities you could do in the early phases of this that you were involved in. In our time every parent wanted their kids to be either an engineer or a doctor, so was it [the] same for you? Did you show interest in science, technology, or energy or is it more like your family way of growing?

Kumar:

There were many exposures during my growing up, but [it was] very interesting that somehow in the community I was growing up in, there was a tremendous amount of interest in becoming an IAS officer for some reason. Although nobody became an IAS officer, everybody became a professional, including me and my parents and everybody else I could see, very few IAS officers. Regarding my extracurricular activities, I was very interested in sports. I used to regularly play cricket. I was very interested in football. I used to study a lot, but at one thing I was studying, I think things are a bit different in those years. There were no coaching classes. My son started going to a coaching class when he was entering the eighth standard or something. Nothing like that happened during my time. I think we were lucky.

We would go to school, enjoy a good school, come back, and enjoy ourselves. We would play. But sometime around the mid-1960s, maybe close to the late-1960s, my mother began to give me a lot of books to read. All sorts [of books] and I picked out from them books about the upcoming computer age and the space age. All those things were really exciting for me, and I had my own chemistry kit. I got really interested in electronics. I would go into the market and buy, with a few rupees, a radioscope and then put them together. We had a small radio in those days. I learned carpentry; just played around with carpentry. I was very interested in touching the world and sort of building things.

I got interested in biology, I would dissect animals at home, so it was good fun really. Somewhere along the line, I got interested more in technology than in biology or science, basic sciences.

De:

We could understand well, your parents influence as well as your own inquisitiveness to read things and to pick up things and try it out, because many of the students these days also are looking at books and memorizing things, but obviously doing things has its own importance, so I could see that. As you go into high school from primary and secondary into higher schools, what subject was your most favorite subject and what didn’t you like because many a times there are a few topics that doesn’t interest us. Would you like to tell us?

Kumar:

I used to enjoy almost everything where we could do something at the end of a class. The only subject in which you could not do anything was history. We just had to read, and the way history was taught, it was just a collection of dates and names and campaigns, and there was nothing at the end of it. You just memorize and you answer in the class. Even geography, which would appear to be a very dry subject, you were taught in a very interesting way. You created, I don’t know what to call them, diagrams of crops which grow in different parts of the world, and we showed the crop getting the seed and pasting it in that particular country. Anything hands-on really interested me and mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology were all very hands on. History was something I didn’t enjoy I think because it was not taught well.

De:

In high secondary, what also happens is people are not fully sure whether you want to become doctor or engineer. People studied both biology as well as math, physics, and chemistry. Could you decide in high secondary time? Did you do that? Did you want to become doctor?

Kumar:

Again, at some point I guess the family dropped their demand or whatever you would call it of becoming an IAS officer and they began to somehow make me veer towards medicine. I don’t know why, but we had a lot of doctors in the family. I continued to take biology all the way through until the end of school. I had both options. Either I could get into, in those days it was premedical or something, or you could get into pre-engineering. In those days school ended after 11th standard and then you had the option of appearing one more year which would take you to premedical or pre-engineering. But at the end of that again, I found that maybe again, the way biology was taught in those days.

It was just a matter of drawing diagrams and remembering certain things. There was nothing, there was no system in it, there was no logic to it, things were just the way they were. Things have changed I’m told now and somehow; I enjoyed more the subjects where I could think things through. I did not need to memorize a lot. If I knew the thought process, I could then get the result.

De:

In other words, in childhood itself, you have gone through all these phases and those kinds of decision-making everybody goes through. But you set the orientation for technology, science, engineering. But when the time came more specifically to choose decision-making points and it is difficult, right? Because you are letting go of something else; so, when and why more specifically. I understood your point of natural choice but is there something more specific that attracted from the engineering standpoint and who and what events encouraged you to do that?

Kumar:

I had a cousin who had a lot of influence on me, he was taller. He himself entered Delhi and was training to be a mechanical engineer. He was a little older than me, four years older, and I would interact with him a lot. We used to discuss and play in a way that engineering was a base to what we were playing. Generally, my interests narrowed from biology and other areas, humanities areas to science and technology. Then I decided look, science will be there and technology as well, so I would not be letting go of the sciences and mathematics, but I’ll be able to round out my career by having the ability to touch the world and build the world, but also drawing upon the best of sciences and mathematics.

De:

The foundation is science [and] at the same time applications.

Kumar:

Yes.

De:

That apply—

Kumar:

Interest in application, interest in in building things was very important to me.

De:

We have understood your families and friends and cousin you talked about but were there role models or some influential people or maybe some specific events that also told you that this could be an interesting space, at a macro level.

Kumar:

Yes. Around that time there were some very interesting things happening and I think they drove me to make my choices. The two interesting things that were happening again, exposure that I got, there was no television in those days, at least in India, and there was no Internet certainly, computers were in the very early stages, so that was very difficult for us to get information beyond what you could see in magazines and books, which would come slowly from where these things were happening. The two technologies developing rapidly in those years were computing, and of course, electronics, and computing and space exploration.

The other big influence on me, in fact, was that I used to keep telling people I wanted to go and work for NASA; that was my dream. I’ll talk about dreams later but that was my dream, I wanted to go and work at NASA. I think somehow to realize that dream I had to become an engineer and the excitement was around more, perhaps at the same time, there were discoveries in biology and all the genetics and all that. Maybe I didn’t hear about them that much okay, but I heard more about space and space travel space exploration and computing which probably excited me a lot.

De:

That’s great to know the NASAs event and then definitely even in our younger days those are the bigger things that we could come to know. The Internet was not so much available so only the big news comes. Also, I’d like to understand what moments in your younger life maybe stand out as lifechanging or critical events, if there is any, that changed. Why I’m asking this is basically when you’re young, even though it’s a bit earlier, the World War II happened or India’s independence happened obviously before you, but there must be an influence of that. Is there anything of that nature?

Kumar:

Yes, I think there was one major influence that I had and maybe you also had growing up, which was India had just come out of the freedom struggle and it was still very poor, it was still developing. I think that realization carried through with me and I think it was very instrumental in the way I shaped my aspirations and ultimately drove me back to come to India and work here. I think that was perhaps an important social influence on me. I don’t think anything else really, I told you already about how I chose my career path, and I can talk more about how I chose the engineering college I went to, but I think this was a major thing in those days.

That whole ambience of coming out of independence and being still very constrained. Today India is a milk surplus country.

De:

Yes.

Kumar:

That time very difficult to get to get milk a bottle of milk every day so it was, we were in that stage of life at that time.

De:

Yes. On one hand is this joy of getting the freedom but on the other hand, what to do next as a country and obviously there’s all these great institutes also got started building post-that independence era, but I could understand from that poverty stricken or middle-class families and not just for ourselves but when we have the capacity how do you come back and do things, so thanks for returning and—

Kumar:

No, it’s not just that. It is, even if you are middle class, even if you were in a good town, there were things were just not available.

De:

Yes.

Kumar:

Because India was still in a situation where the economy was quite limited, population was growing and so we were in that state.

De:

Let’s now talk about a little bit of your higher education part of it, for undergraduate you studied in IIT Kanpur. And I know from my own experience of competitive exam to enter then in IIT, Kharagpur, how competitive it was and to get a chance to study there if we can talk about what rank did you have because IIT JEE rank is still a precious metric for people’s success I’ve seen. How did you determine your major, what to take it up, some influential professors, how did you support yourself financially, and academic achievement whatever you’d like to take us through of your four, five years of stay there?

Kumar:

It’s interesting what happened after I finished school. My parents, being very possessive, wanted me to stay in Chandigarh and continue my higher education there. There was a good university there. There was a reasonable, in those days, engineering school there and the way things were in those days is that you finish 11 years of school. You do one year of professional in between college or something. It was called pre-engineering and then you do four years of engineering in the state system. At least there it was the case. I went for what my parents said I took. I said go ahead. I took one year of pre-engineering education in a very nice place.

In fact, this place was so nice, the principal took some of the kids under his wings and got them involved in tennis because he said that you should have a sound body to have a sound mind. Very interesting. It’s called the DAV College and that couple there when you—

De:

Yes.

Kumar:

…- - came from DAV college, the same college that I went to. But then through that one year I realized that although the teachers were good, and I learned a lot from between the time I finished school and I finished pre-engineering, I could see that somehow the ecosystem wasn’t right for the kind of vision I had. Then close to finishing pre-engineering, I think around March or something, I began to prepare for IIT the joint entrance exam. It’s still called the same, JEE, I think it’s called JEE advanced now, and I didn’t take any coaching classes because coaching classes were not there until later. There were in Agarwal or some classes in Delhi and based upon the pre-engineering courses I had taken which were a bit more advanced in schooling in my own study, I appeared for JEE.

I still remember how the JEE was in those days. You got sheets of paper like an exam, white paper, and you answered questions there. I remember still drawing an optical bench diagram on my paper. It was like - - advanced question, advanced exam paper. And I scored a good rank. I was thirty-third in the country, and I was north zone number four. I did very well, and I had essentially my choice of IIT. I remember still going to IIT Delhi, their second hall and the counseling as they call it now, it was there and I was fourth in that role and then I chose IIT Kanpur primarily because my grandparents were in Lucknow so my mother, felt I’d be closer to them, just fifty miles.

In those days getting from Chandigarh to Delhi was a five-hour bus ride or a car ride. That was good because I fell sick in between my five years and my grandfather could come and take me home. Then five years in IIT Kanpur I think it was great experience really in every possible way. The two things that shaped me there were number one, excellent professors, teachers. I think that IIT Kanpur was blessed to have great professors, at least - - engineering and I’m sure it was there for every other, I know chemistry was very strong in those days. Right from chemistry 101 - - all the way to the professional part of engineering, engineering and great teachers. The important that we learned out there is engineering is not just putting things together.

It is not what we call in India jugaad. It is a lot of foundational learning behind it, and I remember very clearly still I was working on electronic circuits in the lab and my circuit was oscillating and this Professor Sarma came, K.R. Sarma, very well-known professor from IIT Kanpur, said look, your pole is on the left—on the right half plane. That’s the way they would think about things, circuits. They wouldn’t tell you OKAY, make this - - ohms or that capacitor or some micro - - so he would tell you so you, makes you think about it, and you correct your design appropriately. I think it was an important learning for us at IIT Kanpur that engineering is about understanding the science behind what you’re building and then building it.

Designing it, analyzing and designing and then building. It’s not just putting together something. Of course, the other thing that was remarkable about IIT Kanpur is that you grew because you had a lot of brilliant people around you, everybody has passed the JEE. Everybody was probably at the top of their schools somewhere in the country. Small class, 200 people only in those days. Now there are a thousand, 200-or something in the top IITs so most of them. We still keep meeting after fifty years. I think the socialization and the very high-quality teaching and the importance of fundamentals in engineering was what, I think it got - -.

De:

That’s great. Like no - - but thirty-third rank that you talked about in your experience of excellent professors the labs that you did. The people thereon they’re all brilliant people so that is great to know. But I’m sure in your studies also you did well because if I correctly remember you were a presidents gold medalist so you must have scored all subjects quite perfectly.

Kumar:

Yes, I think it’s hard to state it definitively. I was the first person to get 10.0 which means that you get all As in IIT Kanpur, and maybe there was somebody else, but at least that’s what I understand. I was the top ranker in the institute that year. I got what’s called the presidents gold medal.

De:

Yes, and definitely but when you study that much to get 10, what’s your message? Was there a time for recreations or vacations or you’re a student member of the professional networks in India? Did you also participate in some of them like this IEEE or other organizations were you a member. Some of those extracurricular how could you spend your time in between study periods.

Kumar:

I don’t think that we were obsessed with our studies. We studied and it was enough. I think the professors were very good, the students were, by and large, understanding the subjects. You need to study enough, and you will do well. I used to help a lot of other students. I remember that as well and they remember most about me that I used to help them so much in their studies. But we had a lot of time for recreation. I remember I used to play badminton. I continued my tennis, which tennis I had picked up in DAV college Chandigarh. I continued through IIT. Actually, I rarely played tennis and we used to go out in the city.

There was something called a tempo, it was a little three-wheeler in which they would stuff you, thirteen people, they were meant for six, so you’d go all the way to the city and have a good meal, come back, watch a movie. We were real people.

De:

It’s more about being consistent than listening carefully, thinking through and then performing. Great to know that. After finishing bachelor, you decided to go abroad.

Kumar:

Right.

De:

Then do further studies. What prompted you to do so. We’ll come to what you did there, but just before that transition part of: can I study in India next or should we go abroad, and which countries and when you decided to go to U.S. how was that transitioning experience and which college did you go. If you could just say that transition part of it.

Kumar:

Okay. As I said about the 1960s when I was growing up in the early1970s, if you look at the late 1970s and 1977 when I was finishing my undergraduate program you compare that with today in India. There is a cosmic change. Not even a sea change, okay, between then and now. I remember as the first Stankov Institute there were only two or three jobs I really was interested in which I interviewed for. One was the BARC in Bombay. And the other one was HCL I interviewed with them. Then I interviewed for an assistantship position, not a Ph.D., but just a project staff position in IIT Delhi. Those were the three opportunities I could see for me in India if I was to work in India after B.Tech.

It was a general trend that most people in IIT Kanpur would apply for a Ph.D. program. I would say 80 percent would apply in those days. It’s very different now, 80 percent applied for a master’s and a Ph.D. program, and I was one of them. The professors that we had, many of them were training in the U.S. They got their Ph.Ds. in the U.S. at Berkeley, Cornell, here and there. We had a lot of advice from them as well.

I wasn’t very sure what I would do eventually, but I did want to not just do routine engineering. I wanted to do something where I could use my mind, do research, implement what I would discover or invent. I really thought I needed to study more, and I could see that the preparation that they had at IIT Kanpur wasn’t enough. I could see the gaps. It wasn’t rigorous for one. Okay. You would learn formulas, you would do certain things, but you have questions which lurk in between, so I wanted to close those questions. That’s what drove me to higher studies and then interestingly I applied to fourteen universities, and I got eleven offers in the U.S. I had the choice and ultimately, I had a short list of Princeton, Illinois, and Cornell. The professor who was guiding my project, Professor K.R. Sarma he himself was a Cornell product.

Information available in those days was very limited. You used to write letters in those days, paper letters, and there was no question of communicating with anybody there to understand how things were. The advice I got, I followed that, and I ended up at Cornell [University]. That’s what happened.

De:

How was the transition part of it as a person coming from Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh where you were born and brought up? Chandigarh, I think it’s a great city experience, but going to another country in food habits and other things, was it challenging? Was it smooth?

Kumar:

No, I don’t think food habits at all bothered me. I think we are fairly modern at home. We are nonvegetarian although we are not aggressive, we’re just not vegetarian. I don’t think IIT Kanpur was already having been supported by the American, I do not know what the system was, American. Each IIT was supported by one foreign government. IIT Kanpur was supported by some American foundation or something, and so I was already exposed to the ambience. Then when I reached Cornell, I remember I took a plane to New York. I had to take a stop in London. My cousin in those days, the same cousin I talked about earlier at that time was doing MBA in London, so I stayed one night there. The change was overnight, so then I changed from there to a flight to New York.

I took a small flight on U.S. Air or something, a flight to Ithaca, [New York], a small plane. The first time I flew all the way from Delhi to Ithaca the transition was actually quite good, at least in terms of my personal life. I found an apartment there. There were three other people sharing that first floor of a pretty nice cottage kind of a building and we had to cook and eat, it was a - -.

De:

I think the mental preparation was high even though you said it’s a first time traveling. Even for me I went McGill after finishing here in IISc (Indian Institute of Science) my master’s [degree]when you move, that’s kind of first trip. Many of us have done that, but if you have the mental preparation well then it doesn’t matter what you are doing.

Kumar:

Yes, and we spoke with English, education was done in English. We wore western clothes at home. Our food it was Indian food, but it was not something you could not adapt to that situation. Breakfast was toast and eggs like it would be there and milk, so it was no big transition. I - - to make it at least there. It was - -. Yes.

De:

One question that is coming to my mind is that you directly went into the Ph.D. program. You did not do a master’s degree?

Kumar:

He was trying to in those days do a very interesting thing which I think is getting real now which is the brain machine interface. It is running the prosthesis on your body. Say I’m missing an arm below the elbow and moving the prosthesis based upon signals from the brain, you think, and you move. Like you do with a normal arm. I attended a lecture just about five years back or ten years back and that’s becoming a reality. It was very long-term thinking in those days. He realized that he needed to learn so more anatomy and, and other things so he left almost towards the end of my second year or maybe first year and went for a, a medical degree.

One professor, Terrence L. Fine, really had a lot of influence on me as a person in the next three, three-and-a-half years. I think in some sense he shaped me the way I am today. He saw my performance in the courses. He taught me a course in estimation and detection, a popular course in the ISCEC department as well. My performance and information - - He said, okay. He would want to have me as a student. Now his idea of work was very abstract, very foundational. It was foundational to probability. Essentially taking a relook at the Kolmogorov axioms and making some changes in them to be able to model certain situations, which he had in his mind we don’t have enough data and uncertainty is not modeled well, the Kolmogorov axioms. I spent the following two years to finish the course, work another two, two and a half years I worked with him in that area, and we worked with something called upper and lower probabilities.

Typically, the probability of an event is a number, but we are working with two numbers, the upper and lower probabilities sort of capturing the uncertainty in the probability itself. And not a confidence interval. It is actually a, a structure which is an extension of a relaxation of Kolmogorov’s axioms. I worked on that, and I think with at least one or two students, both working, me and another person working and that was information and decision theory group. It was Toby Berger, a well-known information theorist. Fine mentors, so I was really steeped in that, the foundational and mathematical aspects of communication information and decision theory. I think that transformed me because although IIT Kanpur gave the importance as I already said of design and engineering, Cornell gave me the importance of foundations even if you’re an engineer.

Okay, they were both professors of engineering, but they were working with foundations. How do you think about a question very foundationally and learn all the mathematics around it and be able to prove things? I think proof concept I learned that by first course and analysis I actually got a zero on the first assignment and then of course I got an A plus at the end of it. Do you learn, really learn things very carefully, very deeply. Since then, that has become my backbone, that what I learned out there. I completed my Ph.D. in four-and- a- half years, from 1977 to 1981. In 1981, I joined Bell Labs.

De:

Oh, that’s great. Because you said you applied to fourteen universities, you got into eleven of them and I’m sure it was a struggle to choose Cornell [University] at the end of it. We just heard about your initial experience in biomedical signal processing and then transitioning. The other important point what you said is also that science as a backbone for engineering but engineering also has its own foundation and that’s what you discovered and brought it to IAC, right?

Kumar:

No, no, no. It was the foundations of information and decision theory, which is a branch of, part of communication engineering. Its foundations are essentially a certain kind of mathematics.

De:

Yes, in the context of communication and theory.

Kumar:

Correct, correct, yes.

De:

After the Ph.D., one dilemma that comes to people’s mind is do I become a faculty or do I join industry. There’s lots of research labs. You just said you joined Bell Labs. Did you think that you wanted to be a professor, or you wanted to join industry? In this case, you did that. What’s your experience and how did you start?

Kumar:

It’s an interesting aspect of my four-and-a-half years there. Cornell is a very interesting campus. It’s all by itself. There’s no industry around it. Apple orchards and hills and lakes. It’s called the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York. I think it’s a university where you can go and really get steeped in the ambience of a comprehensive university, which we don’t have that many of in India. There I spent a lot of time attending various kinds of concerts and what is western and Indian concerts and getting into Indian philosophy. I began to read Ramakrishna and then other books. That reconnected me back with India. And I didn’t realize that I do want to ultimately have my career back in India. That was when I made the switch from not knowing what to do after a Ph.D. I realized that I do want to go back and work in India.

I think at some point I also decided that I want to become a professor back in India. But having gone through a very foundational research program I often say perhaps the only numbers in my thesis were the page numbers and the subscripts. There was no real numerical work in my thesis. It was very, very abstract. I decided I’ll go to the industry for some time. I graduated the end of 1981 and around early 1981 I began to apply for industrial positions in India and in the U.S. I remember, I sent again fourteen applications and applied to all the communication companies in those days. This was also an indication of how communication and telecom has evolved from the time I was applying for a position in the U.S. in 1981 to what it is today. Very few companies and a very, very involved in either defense work, government work or they were monopoly companies, AT&T being one of them.

A few companies but they were like large monopolies, large oligopolies and they were all working with government or sort of nonpublic kind of work. I didn’t get a single interview call because I was not a U.S. citizen. Communication was an area which was very much a government area and not at all a private area. I didn’t get a single interview call. I brought this to the attention of my Ph.D. advisor, who was of course, very helpful always and he contacted— All companies have a representative in universities, alumni of the universities, who were working in the company who then would go back and scout for graduates. There was one lady working in Bell Labs whom he contacted, and she interviewed me. I still remember that dinner. She took me out, interviewed me, and I promptly got three or four interviews in Bell Labs, and I got all the offers from there.

I got phone calls from these different departments in Bell Labs. Why don’t you join us? Why don’t you join us? I then finally chose a department which was a combination of foundational work and applied work. I did want to get away for a while from the kind of abstract work I was doing and get into a work which required application to practice, but a lot of foundations behind them. That’s how I ended up in this department in Bell Labs called the performance analysis department. Performance analysis somehow, it became my foundation for a long time. Essentially, it was the application of mathematics to telecom systems switching, packet networks, and so on and so forth. I really had the opportunity to see telecom evolving from where it was in the 1970s.

I think when I left Bell Labs, we got our first email addresses, and it was really a transition. Really a very revealing and ringside seat as in some sense for the evolution of the first microprocessors being built, the early microprocess, telecom switches, packet switches, ATM switches. I learned ATM was automatic teller machine and somebody wrote me I want to work in ATM. I said this guy’s career is gone. Then I learned it was something else.

De:

Yes, I think the analog to digital world, circuit switch to packet switch, voice data and then wireline to wireless, like a lot of transitions that happened during that. I think this is fantastic to know and specifically is there any specific project that you wanted to highlight out of your whole space of performance analysis. And how long did you work, like six years?

Kumar:

I worked for about seven years, from 1981 to 1988. I joined in 1981 towards the end of 1981. I left in the middle of 1988, six-and-a-half years. This department was very interesting in those days and then it changed after I left. The department got funding from research so the labs research where the Nobel Prizes came was in a place called Murray Hill. We were getting part funding from research and part funding from systems development. Our job was to keep abreast of all the techniques for analyzing systems, whether it’s in queuing or whether it’s in control and be able to apply them as soon as somebody brought a problem to us. Primarily, in those days my work was in telecom switching. That was the early part of my work. There was a famous 5ESS switch in those days which AT&T began to sell shortly about the time I was about to leave.

5ESS was a pilot to an existing system and I worked on various aspects of the performance of that switch. It was a distributed architecture, there was a central - -, various, I don’t know them by the names now, base modules or something into which the telephone lines attached and there were issues of the processors in the system and there were many problems out there. Problems of essentially managing the loading of the central processor and managing the performance of the processors in each of the modules ensuring that the correct capacity was met. A very important term I learned out there was overload control that systems can get overloaded.

In those days the interaction between the human and the telephone was very different from what it is today. I can talk about that some other time. Not the way it is now in cell phones. Human behavior can actually overload a system. That’s something that we learned, and I learned to fix the problem.

De:

To get the history right, in 1977 you finished your bachelor’s degree and then you had four years of study for your doctorate at Cornell. You received your doctorate in 1981 and then from 1981 to 1988 you worked there.

Kumar:

In the labs, yes

De:

One philosophical question; what kind of things do you find most satisfying in a job? When you do something, what gives you the most satisfaction? What constitutes success in the job in your mind when you do anything? What are the criteria?

Kumar:

In a particular job, success is achieving your goal. You set a goal and you have a strategy, and you want to assure that the goal that you have is achieved. But for me, along that path I somehow really enjoyed bringing my foundations to the problem. That is what I learned all the way from IIT Kanpur to Cornell to Bell Labs. By the way I always think of Bell Labs as my third university. I was dealing with stalwarts out there, all around me, even in my own area and I was essentially a rookie. I really went to three universities. I really thought my education was finished only in Bell Labs. I learned in IIT Kanpur that engineering requires foundation. I learned in Cornell how to really make the foundation stronger by learning a lot of foundational courses and learning how to prove things. In the labs, it brought them together into cutting-edge projects and then foundational thinking on those projects. That has been with me throughout. Even till today. There was an experiment in my lab, and they don’t know why things happen the way they happen. I’m able to explain what happened simply by thinking things through a model. I think it is most satisfying to me if I can explain a phenomenon, if we can design something through a foundational approach.

De:

It’s very interesting because people see the metrics and success criteria; as you said the goal setting and you get there, but in your case have you been able to apply those foundations that give you that, the inner joy, right in terms of doing it. Great. It seemed very satisfying in the job and the way you put it that your third university was AT&T Bell Labs. Kanpur, Cornell, and Bell Labs. Then why did you leave? Also, you decided to return to India, [so what was] that path or process? Let us talk a bit now on the transition from the U.S. to back to India.

Kumar:

Yes, as I had already said, towards the end of my Ph.D. degree in 1981, I’d already decided that at some point I wanted to spend some time in industry to be able to bring together the practice and the foundational thinking that I had learned and then move back to India in an academic position or maybe a service position. It wasn’t very clear, but academics was certainly weighed in favor [because] academics was something that I would prefer around 1987.

By the way, in between I got married, [and] 1983 is when my wife, also from Chandigarh joined me. She also came from a professional family. Her father was a professor of biochemistry. There is a very important story out there because he was a Ph.D. from IISc and that is linked to how I came back to India and joined IISc. I’ll talk about that maybe a bit later.

In 1983, my wife Pamela joined me in the U.S. She did her own master’s degree and she joined Bell Labs as well. Around 1987, she was expecting, sorry in 1986, she was expecting, and she came home to India to [have] our first child. Around that time, I decided that now it’s time to move back. I didn’t tell anybody about it, of course, in my job because I wasn’t sure whether I would get [it], and whether [I] would go back. Early in 1986, I began to apply to various positions in India. IIT Kanpur again and IISc were two academic positions I applied for along with two or three other research positions. One was in the department of electronics in those days, it is now called the Ministry of Information Technology, and another was in the Indian Space Research organization in Ahmedabad where they had a communication center.

There was a group company in Hyderabad which I also applied to. When I came back to the U.S. our daughter had already been born and my wife was still in India, towards just after our daughter was born. In early January 1987, she was born and then I came back. Sorry, I had gone along with her, and I interviewed in various places and came back. I got all the five offers. Two from academia, IIT Kanpur and IISc, and three from research laboratories. Then I was thinking about where to go to, [and whether] to go back to my alma mater or to come and join IISc, which was] very far from where my family was at that time.

I think the person who helped me break the dilemma was my father-in-law, because he had been a Ph.D. product of IISc [and he] said that if you really want to do research, IISc is the best place to go. That’s how I ended up at IISc. [I] made a decision and I accepted the IISc offer. [I] declined the other offers and I think it was a great choice for me.

De:

Great. Great. Since 1988 you have been in IISc. At this is a time I was also doing my master’s [in] 1987, so I got you as faculty during the last two semesters for [the] queueing theory course that you taught and also my thesis examinations. From 1988 to 2022, that is a long period and you have served the EC department where we are sitting today. [You served] the EECS Division and the Institute in various capacities in all its administrative positions. This is a long period, [so] before we go down deeper, maybe you want to give a holistic view of this journey.

Kumar:

Yes, it’s thirty-four years since I joined IISc, almost half my age, a little more than half my age. I joined IISc at the lowest rung of the faculty ladder, as a student professor. It was very interesting, but it was a huge challenge at the time. I had never taught. In fact, after I got the offer from IISc, Bell Labs had some internal training programs for their own engineers, so I tried my hand at teaching. I still have those notes with me, and it was good that I spent some time thinking about how to present a subject to students. My last few months in Bell Labs I did spend some time teaching and when I came back to IISc I started teaching, helping another professor because I came in the middle of a semester.

But then something remarkable happened around three months after I came. I had come to work along with a major national project called ERNET, Education and Research Network Project. It was a project funded by a UN development program. I don’t know whether it functions anymore, [but] it helped developing countries with project money. It was a very large program, for that time, I don’t remember the number or not, $3 million or something. It was a collaborative program between six IITs and IISc, the department of electronics, and one laboratory called the National Center for Software Technology in Bombay in those days. These seven or eight institutions were supposed to implement India’s first national academic Internet, sort of similar to NSFNET [in the U.S.] and JANET in Europe.

It was India’s first foray. It was very early actually. It was 1988, and the Internet was hardly established. The first browsers were probably just about to come, XMosaic and all that. We were one of the first customers of Cisco. We actually got the CGS and MGS routers from them. They essentially looked like those old PCs. They were routers and we laid cables [throughout] the whole campus, ethernet cables, the ones we had to punch holes into to connect. Then [we] used to dialup to someplace in New York and get our mail. Those were the days of the early Internet that we were involved in. Gradually, the modems improved, the bitrates improved from 64 kbps to maybe 1 mbps over the next eight to ten years. I was involved in the project for almost a decade, but this was not simply a project for establishing India’s Internet involving institutions. It was also a project to learn and teach networking and researching networking.

The program office in Delhi would give us special funding for doing research in that area. The courses I taught, the books we wrote, and the way we sort of built our understanding of networking all came because of my involvement in ERNET. Each group of ERNET had a different emphasis. My emphasis naturally was in modeling performance, analysis of networks, network management, collecting data, using that to inform other network is working, and building tools for network management. We did a lot of that. I think it really shaped my understanding. If I had simply taught networking from existing books, I would never have had the depth of understanding that I think I have today. At that time, that was a big change.

I was really scared whether I should take up a large project, but then I took it up and it really helped in shaping my vision and enabling contributions to the system and helping my teaching, helping me guide my students in interesting problems. Then of course, gradually, I took a sabbatical at Rutgers University, at the famous lab at that time. I think it’s still very famous. There I got into wireless networking. Until then I used to be a little bit sort of not so comfortable with wireless because of all the modulation schemes and the uncertainty and some of it wasn’t as clean and clear as, as bits on a line, on a wireline. I realized that one could not do networking on wires - - some physical layer. When I went there, I actually interacted with ex-Bell Labbers who by then left Bell Labs and started this lab. Jack Holtzman and a few others [started this lab at] Rutgers.

There I interacted with very good people where I could do various things and - - my understanding of wireless technology. Then began my foray long foray in wireless communication and wireless networking which I am still involved in. I did a lot of work on TCP, on the TCP protocol in those days, understanding how TCP works in wireless. Gradually, [I] got involved in IoT, wireless network design, analysis, all those things. I got involved and made a lot of contributions to that. Wi-Fi, and my interest in Wi-Fi I think that visit to Rutgers really shaped me because I probably have a - - getting the physical layer until I actually met people who are good at it. They were interested in what I knew, and we worked together for a while. Collaboration is so important. I can tell you I think that’s the theme of my life, collaboration.

Then I got involved in Wi-Fi and I work on Wi-Fi until today, Wi-Fi modeling, Wi-Fi performance, Wi-Fi experimentation, [and] building tools for Wi-Fi. Then of course, around 2000, and then because of my many years of practical networking experience, I thought that there was something missing in the books that we had to teach from and for the students to read. Three of us got together, a former student and a colleague from IIT Bombay. We got together to write a book which we thought would be the book at that time. There is an important story behind that book I think that I would like to convey, but it will lead to my Indian colleagues and Indian young faculty. In those days there was a very high-end publisher, Morgan Kaufmann.

Recently, one of my colleagues who at that time had just left IISc to start a company, had written a book. We were really impressed by that book and said we also wanted to publish [with] Morgan Kaufmann. We were told unless you have an address in the U.S. you will not be able to publish [with] Morgan Kaufmann. I said we’ll take it as a challenge. The three of us put our heads together, we wrote the book and sent it to them, and they actually accepted it. We were very proud about that. The book became very popular and became one of the important texts in analytical networking.

Around the end of writing that book, I was asked to take my first administrative position. I was asked to become chair of this department. It’s a very old department. It was founded, just before India’s independence, in 1946, and the building I’m sitting in is that old. I was a bit worried; can I do administration. I took the administrative role. I would always talk to my wife about this, well do you think I’ll find time for the family after this. She said don’t worry, we’ll jump into it. Then I was there for around three or four years as a department chair and [I] got to know all the various roles they wanted us to play, looking after the infrastructure, the gardens, hiring students and the staff, and the department and managing the faculty.

Then I was asked to become the next level, it was called the divisional chair and today it is called the dean. IISc is in six divisions, they are called schools in some universities. IISc is sort of modeled after Caltech in that sense. Caltech has divisions, IISc also has divisions, so I would become the chair of the division of what was then called electrical sciences. Then over time, I got really involved with the institutional administration. I was able to somehow manage my teaching and research as well as administration at the level of a dean.

Around 2014, when so in India we of course call our institutional heads in IIT and IISc directors equal into a president he was about to retire - - at sixty-five. They were looking for a new person to replace him. At some point they thought of me, and I was called to his office. He said that would be interested in this position and I was taken aback so again, I went home consulting my wife and my mother. Said jump into it. That’s how I became director. That’s how it came. And then I think the director’s position is one where you can really, you can get your grips on things. As a dean there’s certain things that you have no knowledge about.

It could be a circle of concern but can be a circle of influence, those things you can then do as director. I think I did my bit for the six years and people appreciate it. That’s all I can say.

De:

Great journey. Fantastic, thirty-four years that you said and everything like not-teaching and then coming into teaching, and you talked about your experience of that, writing books. As you were talking, I could see the book here and this is the book that’s Communication Networking by Anurag Kumar, D. Manjunath and Joy Kuri. Joy was our batchmate.

Kumar:

The second book is also ours. We wrote this in 2008, so this was our book on wireless.

De:

That’s the Morgan Kaufmann book.

Kumar:

The Morgan Kaufmann book, yes. They began to like us.

De:

Yes. Great. I think any such long journey again brings a little bit of philosophical why it’s important because people go through this midlife crisis or when you are there for so long there are not so great moments and people think oh, am I doing the right thing. Am I making the right impact? This kind of question crosses everybody’s mind. Then there are family pressures. I could hear that every difficult moment they jumped in but sometimes maybe some work/life balance. Did you have such moments? I think you highlighted a few of them. If there is anything that you effectively dealt or you wanted to highlight on that.

Kumar:

Well, I think that everybody has challenges. I don’t think there were any challenges which I would say were disruptive, but the challenges sometimes that you undertake. Like around 1992, we built our own house in Bangalore. We were not happy with anything that you could rent or find on the campus, so that’s a challenge but it’s something that we chose as a challenge. Then we had a second child in 1991, so we had to adjust our lives. I think that all the challenges were some things that we probably were prepared for, or we had to prepare ourselves for and take them on. Every administrative position, large project, I think they were all initially they were, you would balk at them but then when you get involved in them you learn how to do it and do it well.

Then you set goals and achieve them. I forgot to mention one, I wouldn’t say it was a challenge, but it was an opportunity which again, when the opportunity mold should I do or should I not do. It’s always a temptation to avoid the opportunity and not do it and continue with life the way it is. I think that’s one lesson that I have learned that that’s not the way one should be. There was an Indo-French call for proposals and which I and somebody I had met during conference visits to Paris, a French person we decided to write a proposal. We did not know how it would go, how it would work, but it’ll be a good experience.

It worked remarkably well. Over ten years we collaborated, and the collaboration actually spread from me to my colleagues in ECE, colleagues beyond ECE to IISc, to IIT Bombay to TIFR. We got very excellent reviews of our work, and it actually strengthened the Indo-French collaboration because of the little thing that we started. I think these are, we called them challenges yes, because it required more travel, it required more time but then you step up and you meet it. That’s all I can say on that. I would say one big challenge that I have, probably should talk about which all professors face, and in fact, they should face otherwise, something is not right.

That towards the middle of every student’s Ph.D. program they begin to get very jittery, what’s happening, nothing’s happening. It happened to me as well when I was a Ph.D. student. Two, three years in the program, things are not going anywhere and at that time, you have to be the most supportive. You have to let them cry on your shoulder in some sense and in every single case, they came out of it. The effort that the professor must put in the effort at that time when things are not going well, and you cannot let the student loose and sort of cry in a corner. You have to be there as a parent almost. So that was a bit challenging. I used to wonder, okay, in fact, I had students coming to my office and saying you’re not doing your work; you’re not being supportive.

You’re helping him, but not helping me. This kind of thing was very frequent, but I think it’s an important process that all doctoral students should go through that dip in some sense in your confidence. You do not know how things are going. They’re not going very well. Then you pick up and then you come out of it. That’s very important learning for me and I’m sure for the student when it happens to them.

De:

Very interesting because I asked the question on midlife crisis and you talked about that but also mid-Ph.D. life crisis right, when the dip comes, and the professors need to support to take them up. The other things that you also highlighted are the opportunity comes and obviously, there are challenges and naturally we think the status quo is good, but that’s not. Once you take up and then collaborate with your friends and colleagues, that becomes very interesting. That’s a very message from you. Let us now spend some time about IEEE.

Kumar:

Okay.

De:

This is an IEEE Life Fellows oral history recording and you became a student member I understand, even an IIT. Then you went to Cornell, so you became at that phase. My first part of the question would be what are your initial reactions or interactions with these professional bodies particularly in IEEE? It used to be known by different names; IRE, I would not know. But I’m not sure in your time those kinds of names were there. When did you become a member and of which societies and councils? Which region were you associated with? Do you have anything to say about the history part of IEEE?

Kumar:

I think IEEE was not very well known when I was a student, in the early years of my undergraduate. Then at some point, perhaps in my third or fourth year, when I entered the professional—so in IIT Kanpur - - there were three years of core study and two years of professional study, five years. Now it’s two plus two in all the IITs. I think it was when I entered the fourth and fifth year of professional study, at that time I began to see posters, IEEE posters, in the department, in the EE Department in those days. Then there must have been some membership drives. At that point, I became a member, but after becoming a member the first time I think I lost interest in it. I didn’t really pursue that. Then when I went to the U.S. and started my Ph.D., sometime around then maybe in my second or third year, around 1980 to 1981, I became a member again. Or maybe I was able to revitalize my original membership. I don’t remember now whether I had the same number, or I had a different number. That’s the time I became an IEEE member and I have maintained my membership ever since then. It’s almost forty years now, a little over forty years actually. I was always a member of the [IEEE] Communication Society and I don’t think I was very involved in the organizational aspect that is the—

De:

We are now in the Council Chamber of IISc, and this is where the apex body of IISc deliberates on its advancement. We have this beautiful campus of 440 acres and this chamber itself has a history since its inception in 1909. Now we are documenting your history and obviously the history of IEEE, so I think when we were discussing before you said history didn’t interest you but I’m sure over time, history has made meaningful sense. We’d love to know a little bit about how you see now and how history has impacted you in a broader sense.

Kumar:

If history is presented as a sequence of dates and people, very disjointed from dates and big people or as the kings and the queens and big names and it shunted from the people who were living in the land, that is when history becomes boring and I think similarly also for history of technology, history of electrical engineering, computer science, if the presentation is done in a way which talks about the way technology evolved, the way it impacted people, the modifications that were brought to technology for the benefit of the people, it’ll be much more interesting than the science that went into the technology. What can I say? I think if you can be more specific, as I’ve given you my view of history as a whole and if you write a history of IEEE’s activities, I think it’s more fun if it is a live history of the people who are involved in it and not just dates and - - mentors and so on, so forth.

They of course are important, but it should be a living history of the technology and the people involved and all involvement in it. That’s when they make it more interesting. I’ve already given you insight into my own history from a time and from the place I was born all the way until I finished my directorship two years back. Now I’m looking forward. I’m now an emeritus professor, what we call honorary professors in IISc, and I have no plans going forward. so that’s what I would—

De:

Yes, so great to know that history, if it is the torchbearers oft as engineering, advancing technology for humanity as we call it in IEEE. Then that’s interesting. But if it’s just the big people then that’s a different story.

Kumar:

It is something more than that. If it is the history of technology as it involved the people whom the technology is impacting that will make it—I’m sort of comparing the dates and kings and queens, we all present in history that put—

De:

The common people that are getting impacted by this technology and how this—

Kumar:

The way technology evolves to take care of their interests that would be also very interesting and if it is only a collection of dates - - mention - - who invented it that’s good, very important, must be documented and must be recognized but along with that the history of people in technology would be also very interesting, very important.

De:

I think you gave us a good sense of your contributions in the department and the EECS division; but specifically since you were director for six years of this institute, I’m sure there are things that you wanted to make changes and you wanted to influence and you got a great chance, so if you want to bring some of those examples or things that you could do during your directorship period.

Kumar:

Yes, I could do that. I was the fifteenth director of IISc. IISc at the time I joined as director, in 2014, was 105 years old. It was founded in 1909 but conceived in 1892. A photograph of the founder is right in front of us, Mr. J. M Tata who was the founder of the very famous Tata group of companies. It finally became a reality in 1909 under a British directly, Morris Travers, and then I was fifteenth in that line of directors. I was perhaps the second engineer or maybe the third engineer. Everybody else was a chemist, biologist or a physicist. I think the current director, the sixteenth director, is a mathematician. It has been the practice that the directors are chosen from within the faculty, at least in recent years, not brought in from outside.

Those of us who became directors of whatever the process might have been, have seen the institution pretty much from the time that we started our career here which would be thirty years, thirty-five years, depending on when we joined the Institute. We had seen what is the great supportive structure of the institution, the independence that the institution gives its faculty to do whatever they want, so long as they do well in their careers. To teach the courses the way they want and the students they would like to have in their laboratories. I did feel there were certain things that I could take forward in the institution and I focused on really four or five different aspects.

The first aspect I wanted to focus on was that we were depending heavily on government funding, and we wanted to have a process of formal fundraising, so I created a fundraising office. We used the American Development Office and starting in 2015, just a year after I took over as director and I understand it’s doing very well, as the news reports have shown us. The second thing I want to focus on, this is in no particular order, was the institution’s performance as an academic institution as a university essentially. How to be fair internationally, how to be fair nationally. We wanted to ensure that what we do is properly recorded and when we fill out these ranking forms we put our best foot forward of course, correctly.

Even the right feedback to faculty is in terms of their performance. We tightened up the assessment processes. We made the processes more flexible. We permitted a whole range of ways of performing well other than only one, publish, publish, publish. You give people a chance to do various kinds of things as long as they excel in them. Performance was an important aspect of the forward-looking things that we, I would say of course, we because I have a very nice bunch of deans who used to work with me. Visibility, I think IISc has been very modest in its achievements since I began. I said that that doesn’t work. One has to publicize, so we have an office of communication now and you probably are seeing a bit more about IISc than you used to.

If you did a technical magazine of IISc research achievements which is now an online publication. We wanted to project IISc around the world so we would be internationalized. IISc - - we took delegations out; we attracted potential grad students from around the world to come and think of IISc as a place to come and to apply for a position and then come and join us if they’re good enough. Then I wanted to strengthen IIScs infrastructure in various ways. And all the very processes that IISc was - - particularly the digitalization and all the processes, financial processes, purchasing processes and all that should be digitalized other than be on paper.

Some of these four or five different aspects of the institution are the ones that I focused on. I’m sure there are many more things to be done and my successor was our dean at that time, is I’m sure going to take the institution much more forward.

De:

I’m sure as you talked about fundraising, national and international visibility, teaching and research freedom, the infrastructure process, digitalizations, but what are you most proud of in your career, as your life? Did you achieve your dreams, what you contemplated?

Kumar:

I was thinking about this question. I think it’s impossible for a young person to have a long-term dream. Then at the end or towards the end of one’s career say I have achieved my dream. Because dreams have to be dynamic, at least for scientists or a technologist or engineer. The dream has to keep on changing otherwise you’re not growing with the times. Probably it’s not at all even a proper question to ask. I would say that at every stage of life we have choices to make and each one of us makes a particular choice. It’s not possible to have a grand dream in the beginning because you do not know what path one will take.

The dreams are in some sense local. Then I made a choice and I wanted to do well in this. My dream is to finish my Ph.D., having done very well in my coursework and I will come out with a big impact in the area that I’m working in. I would say at every stage that I chose a particular path, I would think, I of course have an opinion on what I did or did not do. I would think that I was able to do well in the path I have chosen locally.

De:

Local maxima.

Kumar:

Yes. Local but - - end to end our average cost or something has added up to anything and something for others to judge. I think I have been satisfied, and I’m really satisfied. I think I have done well and if I accumulate all the successes along the local paths that I have chosen so it’s not something I can say that I had a dream, a long-term dream which I have achieved. But the collection of achievements I’ve had over the different choices I have made, I think I am happy with them, I think I’ve done well.

De:

Now if I come to the next generation and the student communities now that they are coming and you seeing this whole life, have you seen a bit notable trend in education in general or in STEM fields that’s shifting in a big then when we started.

Kumar:

I think that’s certainly happened. The exposure to doing things with your hands, actually building things right from school, somehow the connection of the environment in the family and in the school as well, and even the encouragement to and get involved in sports, have some activity outside, out of doors. Somehow, I think that has become less in the generations I think our children my own children probably, it was still there to some extent, but I think it’s becoming less so recently. I find students who come from engineering colleges have a very poor understanding of physical reality, including the area that they are supposed to have been trained in. Laboratories are expensive.

Teachers often do not have the understanding of reality, they teach from textbooks, so it’s a combination of the university not spending enough money on laboratories and the teachers not being prepared for instruction which is hands on. They teach from textbooks. I think it’ll accumulate over time because how will these—so somehow the whole emphasis on the digital and the computer aspect of learning and experiencing is of course very important. I work in that area. But I think it’s taking something away from education. I find that even in some students who have had an education in in networking, I remember when I was a, a Ph.D. guide in my early years, about thirty years back, a student could take apart a computer and fix it.

I don’t think it’s possible nowadays, the students we get now, and a student got involved in computer administration and be getting into Linux and Linux administration and a whole range of activities. Somehow the mind was more open. I think somehow, it’s changed now. If we bring that back that openness of the mind, a breadth of activities.

De:

How could we utilize your experience and some of these parts with the help of other organizations like IEEE, into those who are entering or contemplating to go into the STEM fields, some people have chosen their field, but some are still thinking in that early stage how could you utilize.

Kumar:

Well, I just want to add one thing, that something which people like me are realizing, there’s also realization of this at national level, the national education policy which is now on the website, 2020 was announced, is contemplating a much more hands-on approach to teaching, to expose children to various activities, living labs and I think some have already begun it. There’s a national awareness of this problem and uh I hope if the awareness is there it’ll convert to reality. If NEP is implemented the way I’ve seen it being written up I think it’s going to change. More children are going to be encouraged to choose careers, but they will end up in a vocation rather than all end up getting useless degrees.

I think that will change the entire environment. People will at a very early age begin to see alternatives to just doing exams and passing entrance tests.

De:

As we come closer to our interview process, I’d like to see what is one great obstacle that you overcame in your career or growth and simultaneously I have to ask if you could go back and if you wanted to change something, what would that be?

Kumar:

Okay, so let me answer the questions in order. Obstacles, I would say we all have obstacles. For example, since the age of ten, I’ve been asthmatic, so in some sense I was always constrained a bit. I also had a speech problem. I have had a stammer for a long time. Both of these could have been impediments, if you do not know how to handle them, okay. I have lived in places where my health problem would get exacerbated. I’ve been in situations where my speech problem would cause an issue. But over time, as you gain confidence, as you understand yourself better, how to handle that, how to come out of it and I have been now in many public speaking situations and I’ve been fine, I think.

Now in terms of what are the other question that?

De:

If it’s more likely that you got to go back—

Kumar:

Change, yes go back and change.

De:

Yes.

Kumar:

As I was saying earlier, during life you meet so many forks where you have to make a choice. The choice of a profession, choice of which university to go to, choice of research problem and advisor, and so many choices you make at every stage. Now the question could be like in a chess game, what would different paths have led to. I don’t think it’s a very wise or relative question to ask. I think I would have been a very different person had I chosen a different path. I can imagine I can go back and see that if I made this choice, if I had gone to this university rather than that university, I would have been a very different person. I would have been a very, very different person intellectually as my personality, what I was doing and so on, so forth, in practically every possible way.

The two parts are very divergent. Okay, they are not running parallel and close to each other. Very divergent paths and I think the path that I have taken has had goals in every part and I have fulfilled to some extent or at least to my satisfaction, the goals along the path. The path I have taken has done well for me. Why should I change it because the other path would have taken me somewhere else? Maybe I would have been happy having that part as well, but this is the part I don’t want to change. Even if I had the opportunity to go back and relive my life.

De:

Because this is the chosen part. You have taken at every point of this—

Kumar:

Maybe not an optimal part but a chosen part and the part that I chose, it’s done well for me and probably I have done well for it, whatever I was supposed to do for.

De:

As we come close to a specific age, all of us have to superannuate and post-superannuation. You are still working in the department as [an] honorary professor, [and] as you said and as we hear, a professor never retires. Those who are sincere, they always love the students so [they] continue to contribute. We would also love to have more of Professor Anurag Kumar. As you move forward, what are your goals? What are your thoughts for the coming year that you have as you see it.

Kumar:

Well, the state of life that I am in, perhaps the uppermost goal in my mind is keeping good health and financial and physical stability in life. That’s very important. I’m sure everybody thinks like that. But as you said, I have been a faculty and academic for a very long time and over these years I have certain things I have begun to enjoy doing. One of them is research, thinking about certain problems, thinking about them in a particular way. As I’ve already mentioned several times earlier, I want to keep doing that as long as I can, as long as my mind works, and as long as I have an opportunity to do that. I have many involvements right now. I have involvements of course, back in my department where I’m now coming at least a few times a week to guide a project and guide some students.

I still have two Ph.Ds. and I got a couple of master’s students, so I’m active on that front. I will publish a few more papers. I’m consulting for a company in Bangalore, a startup. Startups are not new. Startups, every company was [a] startup at one time, so this startup is about sixteen years old, eighteen years old. I’m involved in them quite substantially, intellectually, and as a consultant. I am involved in various national level committees and councils, and boards of one company, so I think I have plenty to stay active as long as I can continue to do what I enjoy particularly in research, and in some teaching and lecturing as well. Another thing which I have not done for a long time is that I’ve accumulated many books which are nontechnical.

It’s always happened to me; I have two books in front of me technical and nontechnical and - - technical book - - learn more on my own subject. But now I think I have an opportunity to make a different choice sometimes.

De:

Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. It has been wonderful interacting with you and I’m sure this will be a big piece of IEEE Life Fellows’ oral history. Thank you again.

Kumar:

Thank you very much Alok for patiently questioning me and listening to me and I hope that somebody can benefit from this and what I had to say.

De:

Thank you. Thank you very much. I had a great morning interacting with Professor Anurag Kumar who has been Life Fellow just two years back and forty years with IEEE. Today we just conducted his oral history interview in which he talked about his early life, the early childhood to education, to undergraduate, to postgraduate, and he always talked about how he learned and applied from IIT Kanpur to Cornell to AT&T as his third university, and IISc where he has taught and has become director. He always has loved technology, has looked for how to make an impact in the society at the same time all of his contributions backed up by science, theories, and deep foundations. Thank you, Professor Anurag Kumar.