How IIT Professors created India's own 5G Tech | Prof. Radha Krishna Ganti, EE, IITM on BP2B S2 Ep.6

See, the math that you learn in electrical engineering is the basis of most of the AI ML that you do.

Okay.

Okay? So that way, electrical engineering people learning AI ML is actually very easy. We have, I mean, have seen this whole cycle of, uh, 5G. It's a big team effort, but this requires dedication of, like, the timescales are ten years. We felt that if we don't attempt to build this, it, it's always going to be, like, a distant dream.

We do a lot of work with students who come in to campus through this program called Ask IITM. I have heard a lot of parents say that IIT Madras is supposed to be a theoretical campus, uh, and they're quite worried about it, or they're like... But when I talk to professors, when I talk to alumni, they seem to have been doing a lot of building. Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Best Place to Build Podcast. Today, we are sitting with Professor Radhakrishna Ganti. He's a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras in the field of wireless communication. He's also the twenty twenty-four winner of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize. Young Scientist Prize, is that the right word?

Yes. [chuckles]

Congratulations, Professor, and welcome-

Thank you.

-to the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

Professor, we also had, uh, Professor Prabhu Raghu Gopal last year on the podcast, and I think the two of you got the prize together. Must have felt really good, right?

Yeah, it, it, it was a absolutely fabulous feeling, but an eerie feeling also. I never expected [chuckles] the prize to come to me, and there was a huge gap of, like, one year before the... Um, not one year, about eight months before they announced the prize, and it was a sudden surprise one day, I see an email saying that, "Yeah, you got the prize." Yeah.

You mean, eight months from the-

Actual-

-nomination?

-date of nom... No, no, uh, from the time the prize was supposed to get announced. It got delayed because of elections last year.

Okay.

So they couldn't announce the prize, and we- almost of us forgot that we have submitted this, [chuckles] and, uh, suddenly it was a boom, we got this, uh-

Nice. Congratulations, Professor.

Thank you.

There aren't too many prizes for professor... academic life, right?

Uh, I guess so, yeah.

Nice. Um, Professor, your work is in the field of wireless communication, a field that I understand really nothing of. [chuckles] Uh, I do remember, uh, in my first year, I was in mechanical, and, uh, my friends in electrical engineering had this project that they would carry one of these Nokia phones around campus with a notepad, and every twenty meter, they were supposed to stop and note down the signal strength.