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The Hindu newspaper carries a regular column called “A Hundred years Ago” in which an article published in the newspaper exactly one hundred years ago, say on October 15th 1920, is re-published. Well a recent choice was an extract from an editorial which talks about the Indian Institute of Science in 1920 and begins with a commentary on the intentions of the administration in the appointment of Alexander Cardew over the option of Professor Thorpe. The extract ends with a cryptic and somewhat cynical note about the impact of the Institute in the closing sentence that says “And considering the enormous amounts annually spent over the Institute one really wonders what adequate return is made by it to advance scientific and industrial progress in the country.”
It is odd how some of these questions of impact keep coming back into public discourse. And for the Institute, it is probably useful to maintain a steady level of communication with society at large about scientific research and technological innovations taking root at the Institute that do in fact have impact. At one level, the communication happens through publications by the faculty and students, national and international seminar talks and the Institute’s website and youtube channel. In partnership with the Office of Communications of the Institute, we are now exploring the idea of using podcasts as a new communication medium that can reach a wide audience.
This idea of podcasts was born in a special session of the annual research students symposium of the Division of Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Sciences (EECS) (https://eecs.iisc.ac.in/EECS2020/). During this symposium that was held on July 12, 2020, there was a special session that was held on the Covid-19 research and innovation projects carried out in IISc in general and the Division of EECS in particular. The session was chaired by Prof. Vijay Chandru and received excellent response. This first set of podcasts are recordings of conversations that these teams had with Arjun Swaminathan and Vivek Madan of Native Voices. Please enjoy them, post the links and pass them on to family and friends. In these stressful times it is good to have a viral effect that spreads cheer instead of gloom. Here is the list of Podcasts.
