CHENNAI: Campus of the Institute of Mathematical Science or IMSc in Taramani is serene amid the bustling OMR. Untroubled by the outer world, the national institution, its faculty and students focus on high-quality research in basic sciences such as computational biology, computer sciences, mathematics and theoretical physics.
Founded by the physicist Alladi Ramakrishnan in 1962, IMSc is celebrating its 60 year journey. TNIE visited the campus and spoke to some of the best minds there. “We ask fundamental questions about basic sciences,” IMSc director Prof V Ravindran told TNIE. “It is important to focus on practical applications and outcome-based research, but without basic science, modern technological innovations and development are not possible.”
The research at the institute is wide-ranging, including study on black holes, cosmic microwave background, astrophysics and cosmology, super conductivity, complex systems, statistical mechanics, differential geometry, algebra, complex analysis, number theory and conjectures.
Rahul Siddharthan, professor of computational biology department, who is working on gene regulation and yeast biology among other areas, said one of the emerging trends is creating models from patient data. Internationally machine learning (ML) and healthcare is an emerging field.
“Currently we are collaborating with two private hospitals in Tamil Nadu on adverse outcomes in ICU patients with heart and lung complications and predicting risks and modelling growing fetuses using ultrasound data, predicting its birth rate and need for early intervention,” he said. The team is also talking with government hospitals on using AI and ML in assisting doctors. Diagnostics using AI and ML models is a rapidly developing area, Rahul said.
Funded by the department of atomic energy, IMSc has 50 faculty and 270 post-doctoral students. Apart from academic research, the institute reaches out to school and college children and the general public to create scientific curiosity, conduct public science outreach programmes, train teachers and hold academic workshops/lectures. More than 250 research papers are published in a year, with around 20,000 scientific publications since 1985, the year in which it was expanded.
However, the ratio of women faculty at the institute stands at 20% and only 25% of the students are women. Dr Meena Mahajan, professor at the Computer science department working on designing better algorithms, said even though the ratio is low it has improved from abysmal numbers and is progressing over the years. “We are definitely more than 15%, but it is nowhere near 50% it should be in an ideal utopian world,” she said. Tackling societal problems are much harder than tackling ‘well-framed mathematical problems’, she added.
We try a mechanical method that a computer can implement, Prof Saket Saurabh explains about their work in layman terms. “We’re working on providing quantitative definition to societal concepts to compare and improve algorithms.”