Oral-History:Tariq Durrani
About Tariq Durrani
Tariq S. Durrani (Life Fellow, IEEE) is currently a Research Professor with the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K. He has authored 350 publications and supervised 45 Ph.D. scholars. His research interests include AI, signal processing, and technology management. Dr. Durrani is a fellow of the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and the Third World Academy of Sciences. He was an elected Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2021 and 2018, respectively.
In this interview, Durrani discusses issues related to signal processing, healthcare applications of technology, IEEE activities, including the establishment of multiple IEEE medals, and the importance of history on future and current work.
About the Interview
TARIQ DURRANI: An Interview Conducted by Robert Colburn, IEEE History Center, 4 August 2021
Interview #859 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Tariq Durrani, an oral history conducted in 2021 by Robert Colburn, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Tariq Durrani
INTERVIEWER: Robert Colburn
DATE: 4 August 2021
PLACE: WebEx
Early life, D.J. Science College, East Pakistan University in Dacca
Colburn:
All right, the recording is beginning. For the transcriber, this is Robert Colburn interviewing Tariq Durrani for the Life Members and Signal Processing Oral History Project. Today is the 4th of August, and the interview is taking place over WebEx. To start off, I’d like to ask about early life and schooling, and what were some of the things that interested you in electrical engineering and determined your path of studies?
Durrani:
Hi, well thank you Robert first of all for inviting me to talk to you and record things for the History Center. Early life: I was born at the time of turbulence in India and Pakistan. My earliest memories are my family leaving Delhi to go to Pakistan at the at the time of what's called Partition, when India was subdivided into India and Pakistan. My parents went into Pakistan, so those were turbulent times. My family lost everything they had; they had to restart all over again when they came to the main city in Pakistan called Karachi. I went to school there. My early impressions of school are vague; it's a long time ago. One of the things that tipped my early life and, to a certain extent, most of it, was my father because my father was a professional electrical engineer. When he moved into Pakistan there was nothing in terms of communications.
He went about setting up the wireless communications systems in Pakistan, and he had a very important role to play in terms of developing the whole communications architecture there. Being an engineer, that I think was something that was part and parcel of my growing up, but part, out of it I would say was the inspiration for me to become an engineer.
Colburn:
What sort of, what school course were you able to take that that prepared you for your college?
Durrani:
Okay, well school, I was very good at math, and physics and chemistry. I remember very well those are the subjects that I was very pleased about, and I did very well at school in these subjects, so that automatically led me to go to college. In college, (D.J. Science College, Karachi, Pakistan), I took science and physics. The college degree was a four-year degree for a bachelor of science. I was very young because I think I finished my first degree in 1961, which would mean I was eighteen years old. I got my first degree, and I felt I really needed to do something more, so I took up engineering and got a second degree in electrical engineering from East Pakistan University in Dacca, in what was then East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh.
This was in electrical engineering and it was a tough course. It was a very good course, and it was based upon the American system of semesters. We had eight semesters, and at the end of the fourth year we had a project and final exams, and I think I came first in the class. It was very good, very pleasing.
Colburn:
Yes indeed.
Durrani:
Lots of recognition, and it was a very well-balanced course, also good analytical skills were given, a lot of maths and theory and practical. Having done that, I had the good fortune of getting a job at Siemens. Siemens at that time had an electrical engine plant, where they used to design power transformers for the emerging power industry in Pakistan, as well as squirrel cage induction motors.
I don’t know Robert, have I gone off the beaten track or is this something?
Colburn:
Oh, no not at all. This is exactly what I’m interested in. In the article you talked about the experience of designing the transformer, and then the months of testing, then the thrill of seeing it working.
Durrani:
That was the best part of it, seeing it from paper to actually being designed in the shop, and seeing it working and testing. That was good fun, and it taught me quite a lot of interesting things. One was clearly that your undergraduate degree was fine, you knew about the theory behind transformers, et cetera, but actually seeing them being designed and being implemented and tested was a very rich experience in terms of what real engineering is all about. After I’d been there for—I can’t remember now, about a year or more—I got a scholarship to come to the U.K. This was to study electronics at University of South Hampton, and that’s when really where my interests sort of moved on. That gave me the opportunity to get an M.Sc. in electronics, and then I had the good fortune of being chosen to carry on for my Ph.D.
My Ph.D. was under a very distinguished professor called Jim Nightingale. It was a time when things like the Fast Fourier Transform were getting known and again, you've read in the article the inspiration I had, which really drove me into signal processing. I’d say really at the end of the day I’m a signal processor, and for the past forty years, that’s the area I’ve worked in, where I've thought in, and where I've supervised projects. It also a lifelong experience from a technical perspective, and also from a professional perspective because from very early on I got involved with the IEEE.
IEEE Activities
Colburn:
Oh, excellent, that that was one of the other things I wanted to ask about: your IEEE activities and how you feel that the IEEE serves the profession in that role.
Durrani:
Okay, well, as I said, I got enrolled with the IEEE. My recollection is somewhat hazy, but I contributed to publications in the IEEE Electroacoustics Journal, and they were well received. I remember being invited to become an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions at that time so that got me embedded into the IEEE Signal Processing Society and so that led me to essentially become a lifelong IEEE member and contributor. Now you asked me the question about how did working for the IEEE impact professionally. That’s an interesting question and from my perspective two things happened. One was earlier on—it's in the article, I can’t remember the dates now—but I took a trip to the U.S. I started from east coast. I visited New York, where I met Athanasios Papoulis, and I went to Yale where I met Peter Schultheiss, and I went to MIT and met Al Oppenheim.
From the east coast I went to the west coast on the same trip, where I met Tom Kailath at Stanford and on to southern California where I met people such as Will Pratt and Peter Andrews there. I think I stopped in Colorado, and I met a number of people in Colorado that were part of optics group and electronics. They were Lou Schaff and others. And they're quite impressive. We were all sort of starting up in our career, and we were all enthusiastically committed to signal processing. They were all engineers and young academics, and they’ve been lifelong friends since. One of the things I would always encourage people to have done that with my students is make sure that they do travel and visit other institutions.
Get to know people because the people you get to know that early stage in your career become your lifelong friends, so all of these people that I mentioned have been friends of mine for forty years or more, and —as is life—we all gradually improved our own careers and risen up the value chain, so to speak. All these colleagues have contributed significantly to the development of the IEEEE Signal Processing Society.
Signal processing
Colburn:
Those must have been very interesting and formative years for signal processing. You mentioned reading the two-piece article on the fast Fourier transfer and how that that inspired you. How would you describe the state of the of the signal processing field at that time, as well as as you moved through your career?
Durrani:
Sure. At that time, and this is going really earlier on because the Fast Fourier Transform paper came out in ’65. There was a major workshop—called a NATO workshop in Britain, ’67—and all the people who were involved with fast Fourier transform were there. I can’t remember all the people who came, but it was totally dedicated to what the Fast Fourier Transform could do, as early as that. It really formed the basis of the transition from electroacoustics, which is really what the IEEE Society was then called, the Audio Speech and Signal Processing Society, to the Signal Processing Society. Digital filters came into their own right then, and we moved away from electroacoustics or electromechanical systems to digital systems and electronic systems. But that was really the key transition from one side of the discipline to the other and, as you say, it is the formative years of signal processing and all of these people were pioneers, Tom Kailath and Al Oppenheim and others.
Forgive me, I’m trying to search my memory over here. One of the things that happened is that the Signal Processing Society transitioned from being the ASSP Society to the Signal Processing Society. There were also some opportunities. I got involved by being an associate editor. I used to attend ICASSP; this was a major annual event which brought everybody who’s in the area of signal processing together. ICASSP was the International Conference of Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing. The early years of signal processing covered acoustics. This came from the history of the society being electroacoustics, speech, important components, and then signal processing through the design of digital filters and spectrum analyzers. At that time there was only one Transactions and everybody really loved to publish in there. I think it was still called the IEEE Transactions Electroacoustics. I can’t quite remember but you'll probably be able to find out when did it transition from electroacoustics to signal processing.
Colburn:
Yes. (Subsequent note: It became the Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society on 1 January 1974, and the Signal Processing Society on 6 October 1989.
Durrani:
But the main thing was the people involved in society were very prescient, they realized that this is an emerging field. More importantly, there is a need to provide a platform for people who are working in this area, a coherent platform. That was really what the Signal Processing Society became, and the annual IEEE ICASSP. The Signal Processing Society also had, at that time, technical groups. Their groups on acoustics and speeds, and spectrum analysis and digital filters and microprocessors or digital processors. Because again, these things the fast Fourier Transform gave an impetus to software development for signal processing. At the same time, there were devices being produced, first of all the general microprocessor. But more importantly, Texas Instrument would use chips that were the early TMS 320 chips, and they allowed you to do simple hardware development. Eventually, one of the key things that Texas Instrument was successful about was a device called Speak and Spell.
Colburn:
Oh yes. It has been designated as an IEEE Milestone.
Durrani:
It has really quite an important impact because A) it was a learning device for kids to learn about speaking and spelling, but was the first manifestation of what electronics can do and B) how signal processing can impact on things. In parallel with Fast Fourier Transform and digital filter design was this hardware development. It was the marriage of the two that took place under the signal processing field. So, in terms of my career, the impact was multifold. Going to these events where I got to know the best of the best in terms of signal processing, and therefore, I was able to publish well, and one started getting name recognition. People back home within the university realized that this is an emerging field, and there is good work going on. I, by that time, had a research group of my own with Ph.D. students and in the nineteen—I think it was 1980— I was given a professor’s Chair - the first Chair in Signal Processing in Europe, which was a great honor but also, I think it was recognition of the importance of that field because in the past there were chairs in power engineering, and chairs in optic systems, and so on. But this emerging field was recognized by a chair in signal processing and as I said, I was fortunate enough to get that chair.
Colburn:
Yes, and that must have been a very, very proud moment for you.
Durrani:
Yes, it was it was indeed and then also being recognized the first time. The subject was new in Europe. In the U.S. there were already professors like Al Oppenheim and Peter Schultheiss who had been recognized for signal processing.
Colburn:
And did that chair then allow you to train graduate students in—
Durrani:
Yes, what happened at that time was the fact that signal processing was growing and there were a lot of interest in that area, so we had lots of people wanting to come and do research. At one time I think I had the largest signal processing group in Europe—about thirty people or so. At that time, thirty was a big number. It isn't now. I've had scores of Ph.D. students coming out from my research group over a period of time. But, as I say, it was good to be recognized. One of those things in life is that recognition brings its own rewards and its own benefits. They also attract a lot of people to come and work in signal processing at Strathclyde, that’s my university. The other thing that happened I’d say, career wise also terms of professional development, was that I realized that IEEE Signal Processing Society had this keynote conference called ICASSP, and ICASSP was being held either on the east coast or the west coast of the U.S.A.
So, I made a bid to bring it to Europe and the first ICASSP in Europe was held in Glasgow in 1989. I was the general chair for that conference. We had about 1,600 people from all over the world coming to that. Again, there's a whole gang of people involved in organizing an event like this. It was very successful. You had all the best in signal processing coming to that event. But it did two things. What it did was in the minds of people working in signal processing was to recognize Strathclyde, my university, as a center for signal processing. But importantly enough—and I’m going to continue with this line of discussion in a minute—it recognized Glasgow as a location for big conferences.
Durrani:
That was a spinoff that we hadn't thought about at that time. It became very important. Since then, there have been hundreds of conferences that have taken place in Glasgow, so much so that thirty years on, again, in 2019 we celebrated the 30th anniversary of ICASSP. In the meantime, Glasgow had become what is called an IEEE conference city, and different societies, the IEEE Ultrasonics Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society and the IEEE Photonics have had their conferences here. But to celebrate the 30th anniversary of ICASSP, the City of Glasgow devised a special IEEE tartan. Do you know what I mean by that? Tartan is a pattern.
Colburn:
Oh yes. I remember. I was at the History Committee meeting in September of 2019—in Glasgow in conjunction with the anniversary.
Durrani:
Yes, that’s when they unveiled the tartan. So, I was very pleased. The city remembered ICASSP and then produced this tartan, and tartans are not readily available. I got sidetracked into something which I hadn't thought I’d be talking about, but there you are.
Colburn:
Yes, it was a very enjoyable experience to be there.
Durrani:
Yes, of course, yes. You were there also when they had the unveiling of the Milestone plaque for the Standardization of the Ohm, Weren’t you?
Colburn:
Yes. Yes indeed. That’s a magnificent museum. [the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University]
Durrani:
Yes, it is.
Colburn:
I really enjoyed spending time in there afterwards.
Durrani:
Oh, you did. That was good. They had some very nice things in that museum. They had the first steam engine ever devised, which brought about the industrial revolution. Then there were people like Lord Kelvin who was a professor at Glasgow University. The Kelvin scale is named after him. A lot of his papers are there, and it was interesting. Kelvin was one of the entrepreneurial engineer/academics, so he set up a company. He was one of the people involved in the laying of the transatlantic cable from the U.S. to Britain for transatlantic communications. His company set that up. That was a long, long time ago. Well, anything else Robert, I can tell you about?
Personal philosophies, establishing IEEE medals
Colburn:
One of the things I wanted to ask you about is that you’ve been a pioneer in many areas during your professional career. You're a pathfinder. As you mentioned, you were the first professor of signal processing in the U.K. You helped establish the IEEE Jack Kilby Medal, and the Wolfson Maxwell medals, and you established the China-Scotland Signal and Image Processing Research Academy, and other things. I was wondering if you would talk a little bit about the philosophy needed to be that kind of a trendsetter or a pathfinder.
Durrani:
That’s a tough question, Robert. Thank you for having done your homework. I think it's about opportunities. I think it’s also being able to spot a trend, to recognize opportunities. For example, the Jack Kilby Medal, a little interesting thing came about because I mentioned ICASSP. One of the key organizations that supported ICASSP and had a huge display platform at ICASSP was Texas Instruments. It was obviously of benefit to them because they could see all the people who use their Texas Instrument devices coming to a single event they needed to set up. Texas Instruments were very keen to support signal processing in the larger world, and they give also some interesting opportunities like helping people set up research labs or teaching labs. They were interested in producing as many people as possible who were familiar with the devices.
In the meantime, I attended various IEEE events and awards ceremonies and things, and thought, let’s see if they’ll have an interest in recognizing Jack Kilby and in supporting a signal processing medal. At that time, the Medals Committee oversaw the IEEE medals. They were in all sorts of subject areas, powering, living, and devices and communications, but there was nothing in signal processing. I spoke to one of my colleagues in Texas Instruments- Gene Frantz.
Durrani:
I said Gene, it’d be quite a good idea if there was something more tangible and more memorable in the long-term, and which would give Texas Instrument an opportunity to be more closely involved with the IEEE. It would also recognize people who have done pioneering work in the subject. We started kicking this idea around, and eventually we came to the conclusion that the best thing would be to see if we could form a Texas Instruments Medal recognizing people who’ve done pioneering work in signal processing. He took the idea to the Texas Instruments Board and the Board agreed to it. At that time, Robert you may need to just check that, I’m not sure that Kilby was alive or not, but a few years earlier he got the Nobel Prize, but they wanted to commemorate him now.
By then the plant at Houston had been named for him, also all sorts of roads. One of the roads was called Kilby Road, and another was called something else. But to give a medal the name Jack Kilby Medal was a major recognition and major accolade. They agreed to that, and in 1995 they funded that medal, and they’ve been funding and providing support for that medal ‘till last year, I think. It was one of the longest sponsorships that I know of in the IEEE. That was the Kilby Medal, it was an opportune moment. Things came together and there were people who realized it would be good to do that.
But that medal has been quite effective in its own right because it has ensured that within the hierarchy of IEEE, signal processing is well recognized, and within the signal processing community the award of the medal is a supreme accolade in signal processing. The other thing you mentioned was the Wolfson Maxwell medal.
While I was working in signal processing I was also quite heavily involved with the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Royal Society of Edinburgh is an ancient society, it's like the Royal Society of London, and it's been going since 1783. I think I was on the Council, which is really the Board of the Royal Society, and I thought that it’d be quite good if something happened between the IEEE and the Royal Society, but couldn’t quite work out what would happen.
In the interim, there were people who were interested in history of communications going back to Maxwell’s time. You know Maxwell’s equations. There's no communications without Maxwell’s equations. Edinburgh has a lot of history because Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, in a large house outside Edinburgh.
In June 2006 there was an IEEE Board of Directors meeting and I was going there so I invited the president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, if he’d like to come along. I think the ceremony was in New York, and the president of the Royal Society was Sir John Arbuthnott- who had been the president of my university earlier on.
He said okay, he’ll come along. He has lots of friends here; he spent his early career in New York, so he came along and he came to our Board Meeting. He was very impressed by what the IEEE was doing. Came back and he said we should really do something, realized that main connection we had there from historical perspective was James Clark Maxwell. We mooted the idea of a joint medal between the IEEE and the Royal Society of Edinburgh named after Maxwell. The IEEE Awards Committee was delighted to hear about this thing. Then we set about finding a benefactor. There was at that time a company, Wolfson Microelectronics, that makes microelectronic chips for telephones, the early mobile phones.
We persuaded them to fund this medal. This was in 2005 or 2006, when the earliest recipients of that medal [received it]. It had to go through the usual protocols of the IEEE board agreeing to that medal, the Royal Society of Edinburgh board had to agree to the medal, and they accepted that. I remember the first recipients were Andrew Viterbi and Irwin M. Jacobs, who set up Qualcomm. It’s been going strong since then; all sorts of important people have received that medal. Last year it was given to two people who set up the ARM Company. But again, it's just been funded by various organizations. But that was very successful. It worked out. Again, you were asking me how did it all happen. It's just serendipity and opportunity, and it's a question of being able to recognize those opportunities when they happen.
Colburn:
I suspect your acting as a catalyst for these things probably also was very important.
Durrani:
It did help because I eventually became vice president of the Royal Society sometime around that period. But you're right, it's knowing the people and doing the connections is an important thing. A couple of other things I thought I would mention to you. The China connection has been going strong. It was the early days when people were very interested in China, and China was emerging. Interestingly enough, when I first went to China for a conference or something, one of the first people I met there was the then International Director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
His name is Tieniu TAN, and he invited me to come along to the Chinese Academy of Sciences meeting. He says, “you may not remember this Tariq, but when I was a Ph.D. student in London, I came to Glasgow to attend ICASSP, 1989.” He was a signal processing guy. Again, it's serendipity as I said, an opportunity. We thought about things that could be done and clearly, he has an interest in signal processing; I have an interest in signal processing. In addition to him being on the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he was the director of a very large research lab on speech analysis or speech synthesis.
We thought, let’s try to do something commonly of interest of China and ourselves. We set up this research academy of five Scottish universities and seven Chinese universities, key universities in signal processing. That’s been going on for ten years. Every year we have a workshop, either in Britain or in China, to get people together, where we identify topics. There are exchanges between the staff from the two universities. There are students who come from various directions most of them from China. There are joint publications, joint research projects and so on. That’s going strong, that’s been very successful. Because of this hiatus [COVID] we’ve not been able to do anything the past eighteen months, (Regrettably the Academy closed down in 2021 due to lack of action).
Durrani:
A couple of other things - - bring you up to date on and this really has to do with opportunities that arise whether it's serendipity or contacts or what have you, but I was for several years a Director of UNESCOs National Commission for the United Kingdom.
Durrani:
Being there I was involved in developing different initiatives and one of the key things that happened, this was published earlier this year, it's the UNESCO Engineering report. This is a very important report that UNESCOs produced which talks about the state of engineering worldwide and also shows how countries are progressing towards meeting what are called the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs. These are important things that UNESCO has decided that do really improve the quality of life worldwide in a whole series of areas, and countries who worked toward meeting these goals by 2030. I was the cochair of the Advisory Board that produced this report. It's quite an important report because it really tells you the stage of the journey to 2030, where different countries are, where different organizations are, and where different industrial levels are. I’m really proud of that because it's a landmark publication by an international organization for the benefit of humanity in the large. It's called the UNESCO Engineering Report 2.
Healthcare applications
Colburn:
Yes, indeed, it is extremely important, and I’m very glad you, you mentioned that because I didn’t know about it to ask that. This connects very much with one of the other things I wanted to ask you about, and that is about your more recent work in signal processing, particularly through applications to healthcare and also in sentiment analysis, which I thought was a very interesting topic that I hadn't run across before, and which I wanted to ask more about.
Durrani:
Yes. Healthcare. I’ll talk about healthcare and sentiment analysis. Really very much of the work is with my students rather than myself, but again, the whole issue of a sentiment analysis is that engineers look at signals and tend to look at frequency and timing. But, when you think in terms of speech, we, as humans, are really much more concerned with not just the content, but the sentiment behind the content. Very easily, a little kid of five recognizes when his or her mother is angry. It's the tonal changes in the voice, how the sentiments are expressed in speech, and what kind of algorithms that need to be developed to essentially analyze that. That’s really the background behind sentiment analysis. Again, it's a growing area because lots of people are looking at not just sentiment analysis, they're looking at how you can, in facial recognition, be able to interpret sentiment, interpret emotion, sentiment analysis in imaging, also sentiment analysis of speech, and motion analysis in vision.
These two things are growing. That’s a health growth area. In terms of healthcare, I’ve been involved really in terms of signal processing and imaging processing and looking at aspects of healthcare. In image processing, I was one of the earliest people who looked at this whole idea of how you can improve images which came out of CAT scans. Very early work. We did it with more efficient algorithms—construction, cleaning up of images and all that. More recently we’ve tried to look at different kinds of signal processing tools that could be applied to healthcare. This was an idea that recently came out of looking at impendence and signals, and correlation. It tells you what is the relationship between one part of the signal to the other. Behind that is the study of the probabilistic structure of those signals.
How do you relate one part of signal to the other or one signal to the other? That has led to what's called copula, C-O-P-U-L-A, copula theory. This is something that we’ve extended and expanded quite a lot. Just to look at the underlying probabilistic structure behind signals and how do you relate them so that you relate them like coupling together information. That’s become an interesting topic of current research. Again, it's applications and looking at images, looking at x-rays and looking at different parts of an x-ray and related images that’s the healthcare part of it. But I was going to talk to you about a couple of other things which I’ve been doing recently which have become interesting topics.
Durrani:
COP26 is the UN’s major conference on climate change. Climate change is a huge, huge important subject worldwide. There's concern in terms of how things are changing, and four years ago in Paris a major agreement was made by nations that they wanted to maintain or try to ensure that there is a reduction in carbon footprint. To moving away from carbon to zero carbon by 2050. Now, COP represents that Committee of Parties, but these are the people who signed the declaration in Paris to maintain temperature at a certain level and everything else. Now, it just so happened—this is where serendipity comes in or opportunity—the major COP26 event will take place in Glasgow in November and we are expecting something like 30,000 people coming to it.
Colburn:
Wow.
Durrani:
But at least a hundred heads of state, presidents and prime ministers and so on, so it's going to be a huge event happening in November. We are involved in some of this front-line activity related to COP26, both in terms of developing strategies, and organizations. A lot of companies are involved in this. The IEEE will be holding a workshop on what is the role of engineering in mitigating against climate change. I’m hoping that Steve Welby will be coming, and a number of other people including the incoming vice president for TAB. Do you know Karen McCabe? she’s executive in the association. Anyway, so this is going to be a big event for IEEE also in the sense that we want to show them what engineers can do and how they're doing and what they're doing.
This this is a joint workshop between the IEEE, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the World Federation of Engineers. These are all big organizations in engineering, people who are going to tell the world how engineers are contributing to support this whole idea of zero carbon growth and mitigating against climate change. That’s happening in November. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that COVID doesn’t affect it because there's concern that that may get into the third phase or something. But that will be a very important event. 30,000 people expected. Every hotel from here to a hundred-mile radius has been already sold out.
Colburn:
Wow, yes.
Durrani:
Yes, and it's a Big event coming.
Colburn:
That’s a wonderful story. That is a really impressive contribution.
Durrani:
Well, I hope it’ll be a good thing to do because we really wanted to ensure that engineers are recognized as much as scientists are because in terms of climate change there is something called the IFC, International Federation of Climate Change, and that’s mostly scientists. But engineers are doing as much. Large major corporations have policies to reduce carbon, to introduce sustainability in the product design and in the product development. They have lots of strategies of how they are themselves minimizing their carbon footprint. We want to showcase that this particular event in November 2021. Interestingly enough, I got involved with one of our local organizations.
What we’ve done, so we see that this whole idea of the recognition of climate change and the impact on the environment could be reflected at all levels. We have initiated—this is more to do with Rotary’s, I don’t know if you are familiar with the Rotary organization. We’re doing a countrywide campaign, a competition for kids in primary school, which is between the ages of ten and twelve, to design posters which reflect their views of what climate change means, and what they think are solutions to the climate emergency. These posters will be then selected, and twenty of the best will be presented to COP26 to all these dignitaries that are coming. That’s the other end of the scale.
We want to make sure that schools recognize the whole issue of environment. Kids get an opportunity to at least express their view which means that they and their parents will have to think through what does climate change mean for you. But that’s another exercise that’s going on.
Colburn:
Oh absolutely. That’s a brilliant idea.
Durrani:
Very kind of you Robert.
The importance of history on the work of the future
Colburn:
Another question I wanted to ask about, since I work for the History Center, is whether knowledge of technical history is helpful to the practicing engineer and helpful in terms of designing solutions for the future.
Durrani:
Well, I think history is very important. It's a little bit like knowing the pedigree. You don’t know where you come from; you don’t know where you're going, so history is very important. Having said all that, the history of engineering—and I’m talking as an academic—goes through a phase. At one time almost all universities, at least in Britain, used to offer a course of history of engineering, but that’s all gone. I think the difficulty is there is so much of engineering that needs to be taught. With the pressure being there, some of these things go by the way. They’re offered as options, but no question that’s why I said, if you don’t know where you come from you won’t know where you're going. History of engineering is very important.
People need to know it. And we learn from our peers. We learn how people designed and worked through all these things, so I’m a firm believer. As a matter of fact, you have given me an idea that I will pursue through other means to see how education establishments I’m involved with, both the Royal Academy of Engineering and also the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, discuss the role of the history of engineering in education . Yes, I was quite pleased that I think it was two years ago I got elected as an international member of the National Academy of Engineering. Unlike the IEEE it's a totally different kettle of fish.
Colburn:
Yes. Of course, we agree with that sentiment very much ourselves. I also wanted to ask you, since you’ve talked about some of the highlights and accomplishments of your career, about your OBE and what it felt like to be announced in the honors list to receive that.
Durrani:
Yes, that happened in 2003. These are different levels of honors. The top level is knighthood. There are companion honors, and there are Officers of the British Empire. I’m an OBE. Not many academics get this kind of recommendation, so it came as a pleasant surprise. People thought I had done something worthwhile in my subject, and I think the citation for the OBE was for ‘services to electronics and higher education.’ At that time, I was one of the vice presidents of my university. I was responsible for setting up facilities and for staff development, so I was concerned with lifelong learning. I think my peers thought it was worthwhile getting recognition, and I was nominated. You get a beautiful embossed letter from the palace. When I received it, I said, that looks rather an impressive document. I wasn’t quite expecting a document from the palace.
I opened it up, and it was amazing, that the queen wants to bestow that honor on you, and asking you to write back by saying yes. Either one accepts or one doesn’t. But you asked, I think, the question of how do you feel. It was elation, surprise, humbling, all mixed into one. Mixed with all that, you get invited to all sorts of events, but [chuckles] it doesn’t get you a good table in a restaurant. That’s different, which is good. I mean the thing I’m probably most proud of since my getting it is that there have been a number of my generation to have received it in terms of engineering. But it was good. Then what happens is you're then invited to the palace, very formal ceremony and given, it's really more like a medal and a pin that you can put on your lapel, ribbon and all that. There was a select group of people, it's very formal, and my OBE was presented by Prince Charles, I think the queen wasn’t well.
I had a brief two minutes with him. I forgot what the conversation was because you're so tied up with the whole pomp and circumstance and ceremony that you totally forget what you talked about to anybody. A good day at the palace. That’s Buckingham Palace.
Closing remarks
Colburn:
Thank you very, very much for your time, I realize I’ve taken quite a lot of it and this has been a fascinating.
Durrani:
Robert, if there's anything else you want, I’ll be happy to send—I was just looking at my notes. I've written a paper on what the IEEE education activities board did when I was president. I don’t know if that’s of an interest to you.
Colburn:
Yes, yes indeed that would be great to talk about.
Durrani:
Yes, this was a year in the life of the IEEE. I’ll pass it on to you. If you need anything else, if you go through your notes and find any references I missed or anything, feel free to send me an email. I’ll try to answer as much as I can.
Colburn:
Absolutely. The other thing is after we get the transcript back and we do a preliminary edit, we send it to you and that gives you a chance to both edit it and also if there are things that you wanted to add to it, you're perfectly welcome to do that. Anything that we didn’t cover or extra details that you wanted to put in you have that opportunity.
Durrani:
Happy to do that. By the way you mentioned in one of your early emails that the Signal Processing Society putting together a volume for its 75th anniversary or something.
Colburn:
Let’s see.
Durrani:
You remember long ago, when I was president, I think we had the 50th anniversary.
Colburn:
Right, I remember the book that Rik Nebeker wrote.
Durrani:
Yes, I think that was in 1995, so it must be twenty-two years, twenty-five years since. They're not doing a 75th anniversary book.
Colburn:
That I don’t know. I know that they're planning to do a number of celebrations and the collection of these oral histories is part of the 75th anniversary initiative. I do not know whether they are actually working on a publication or not. But I can find out.
Durrani:
Send me whatever you're putting together, I’d be happy to respond.
Colburn:
Excellent, wonderful.
Durrani:
It's nice talking to you Robert.
Colburn:
Great talking to you. Thank you again so much.
Durrani:
No, not at all. I’m only too sorry that when you were here, I didn’t have enough time to come and sit and chat to you.
Colburn:
I know, I was hoping, but those were busy days for both of us.
Durrani:
Yes, so did you attend the event in the City Chambers when Glasgow was recognized as an IEEE meeting city?
Colburn:
No, I didn’t. …I think that was limited to the chair and the vice chair and a few other people.
Durrani:
Because Bob Dent was there.
Colburn:
Yes.
Durrani:
Did he come with you?
Colburn:
He was definitely in Glasgow. I assumed that he did, but I don’t know for sure.
Durrani:
Well, it's the Lord Provost who is the Mayor of Glasgow. We were given a very small dinner. The IEEE president was there. It was Jose Moura at that time. I know Bob was there. I know some of the people who had spoken at the unveiling of the plaque from the History Center, they were there, and there were people who were on the original organizing committee for ICASSP thirty years earlier, they were there. The key thing was unveiling the IEEE tartan. Anyway, Robert, good to talk to you.
Colburn:
Good to talk to you. Thank you again, so much.
Durrani:
No, no not at all. All the best. Take care.
Colburn:
You too.
Durrani:
Bye.
