Pawan. Diverse career path

Posted On May 8, 2019

Where did you study?

I went to school in Mangalore, then I studied in a university in Bangalore before moving to Germany for my Master Studies.

How many years do you study in school in India?

You start from a kindergarten. It’s two years and it is mandatory. Then you have 10 hears of schooling, which is a must. At the end you have a board examination for the state (region).

At what age would that be?

At the age of 15. Depends on when you join the school, for me it was at the age of 14. This is the time when you write the first state exam. Then it depends on which state you are in. In some states you have class 11 and 12. In my state we have pre-university-college 1 and pre-university-college 2 (PUC1 and PUC2). At the end you have the second public exam where you compete with students from other schools and other PUs. Then you have a competitive examination, which makes you eligible for applying to state level universities (CET) or you can write an exam for the national universities (AIEEE), which I would call premier 2 universities, or an advanced version (JEE) of the exam for the top universities in India.

Do you need to choose which exam you write?

You can write all three of them, but JEE is very difficult. I wrote the exam for the state level colleges and for the premier 2 universities, CET and AIEEE. I got a rank of about 650 for CET at the state level. My rank on AIEEE at the national level was about 4000, but there are probably 30 times more students at the national level. I got an admission from an NIT, which is a premium 2 institute and I also got an admission from a state institute. I chose to go to the state institute, because I felt that I’m not ready to put myself completely into study. I wanted to enjoy my undergraduate.

Which institute did you go?

It’s called MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology. It’s famous in India for engineering, it’s good for studies and education. It’s known as one of the most modern institutes in India, the culture, the architecture, everything is westernized.

What did you study?

In my bachelor studies in Ramaiah, I did electronics and communication engineering. In India, when you start the study in engineering, you must study many different courses: civil engineering, informatics, mechanical engineering, biology, medical engineering.

So you get basic courses in all branches of engineering?

Exactly. We got introduction in many branches of engineering. There are two purposes. First, you can do interdisciplinary work later and you already have basic knowledge. Second, you can change your speciality during the first year. For example, if you start in electrical engineering, but you find out that you like mechanical engineering more.

Do you speak some local languages from that area?

I do speak the local state language, which is Kannada. Just like Canada)) Then I speak my hometown’s local language, which is Tulu. Then I speak the India’s most spoken language Hindi. I can also speak a couple of other states languages: a little bit of Tamil, a little bit of Telugu, Konkani etc

How did you learn them?

Since Bangalore is a metropolitan city, you get to hear many different languages. Also my hometown and state languages were spoken around when I was growing up.

You learned them as a child?

Yes, especially in the south of India the languages are more diverse. Every state has its own language and script. On TV you also have many channels from other states. For example, my mother was watching soap operas from other states because they were interesting. You listen to the TV and you start learning the language. As a child you get hold of it quickly.

So you have some local broadcasters, which make programs in the local languages, but you can receive them in other parts of India, so you get exposed to the other languages as well, even though people around you don’t speak that language?

Yes, especially in the south of India, you have many different languages.

Did you work somewhere when you studied?

It is not quite common in India to work while you study because usually your parents fund your study. It is even looked down upon if you work. Major industries usually do not hire students unless it is some kind of internship. You may get a job in something like Domino’s or McDonald’s, but it is looked down upon: if you work then people may think that your parents cannot support you, so your parents won’t let you work. I did work without my parents knowing. I wanted to start working as early as possible, since I wanted to have my own money, although my parents helped me enough. I started with Domino’s in Bangalore. I didn’t have a driver’s license then, so I couldn’t be a delivery boy. I started in the kitchen, but then I was promoted in three months. Since I spoke the local languages, also my English was very good, they put me in the front. After another three months I got a “client’s favorite” award and they put my photo on the wall. Was was my first experience working and it was all very good. Until one of my cousins happened to come to the same store and she saw the photo and she told me that I should stop doing this otherwise she will tell my mother 😀 I quit that job because I didn’t want to have the drama, you know the Indian family drama, they show it in Bollywood. I didn’t want to have that.

After that I wanted to find a safer job, where my cousin wouldn’t find me. I was going to a gym. It was called something like “Golden gym”. For the first three months I had a personal trainer and he was a good friend of mine. He told me that he did some certification courses to become a trainer. I was good at studying, I took his books and prepared for the certification exams. I passed the theory exam, I didn’t do well in the physical part of the exam, but I still passed it and I got a certification as a trainer. So I was eligible for training people.

They put me in the same gym as my friend. I don’t know if it’s a nice thing or a funny thing, but they put me in charge of ladies and girls who came to the gym. I don’t know if they considered me not fit to train men.

I guess you have very good communication skills.

Probably. I worked with them for another 5 or 6 months. It was not a lot of money but it was a very interesting experience because you get to know a lot of people. You talk to them, you get to know they perspective, why do they come to the gym. Everyone had a story.

Then I was finishing my studies and during my final days at school, i didn’t pay much attention to my fitness and  I was no longer fit to be a trainer.

In fact between these two jobs I had another job. After the Domino’s I worked for three months in a restaurant in the kitchen. I really love cooking. It was a very local restaurant. The restaurant owner is a good friend of mine. We were chatting and I said that I’m really bored in the evenings and he joked: why don’t I come and cook at his restaurant. I took it seriously. So the next three months I was cooking at the restaurant. I could do the full course meal. But it was a lot of work, it is also a lot of responsibility because your food should taste good all the time. Then I switched to become a trainer.

The bachelor program was four years?

Yes, it is four years. During the last year you have to do a project, make something that works. Usually these kind of projects get recognition. I made a robot that could track people. It could find and identify a person, then it could follow the person. If you come close to it, it stops and points a laser to your heart. It identifies your heart and points a laser pointer. If you move, the laser pointer will move as well and it will continue pointing at your heart. I called it a border patrol robot. Considering the rise of patriotism in India, this was a hit. So it was recommended for the state competition, where students from different universities come. I got the award for the best project in the state.

State is like a region?

Yes, like a Bundesland in Germany. A state in India is like Germany (population of Karnataka is about 64 millions).

So this was your final project. Then you get a degree and you looked for a job?

Actually I got a job even before I finished. When I was in the seventh semester. We had campus interviews where companies come to the universities. There are posters that say that, for example, Bosch is coming or Google is coming. The salary is fixed, it could be something like 8 Lacs per year (800 thousand rupees per year). That is fixed. You cannot negotiate it. Then the students line up for the interviews. You have group discussions, they look how the person performs in a group. Then you have a technical interview and finally an interview with the HR department. Bosch was my first company that I went for an interview with. I got a job and I decided not to continue with other companies, so I just singed the contract. After my studies I had one week of time and then I started to work with Bosch.

How was it?

It was very interesting. I was a hardware engineer. I was designing PCBs (printed circuit boards). You have to take many things into account. For example, when you have two tracks with current, they can affect each other by the magnetic interaction, which can interfere with the signal in the PCB. Once the boards are ready (the ones that I design), they come back to me and I do some basic testing, functional testing, integration of the complete system, and system testing. I was in the hardware aspect of the products. I worked for them for two years. I worked on multimedia circuit boards, such as a touchscreen on the coffee machine that has a touch sensor, which activates a pump for the milk or the pump for the coffee etc. So that kind of PC boards with wifi and internet enabled on it. I also had a bigger project, which was designing audio conference controller. In parliaments or in hotel conference rooms you see many mikes and there is a controller that controls the amplifier, the speakers etc. It took about one year for me. It was a big project, it had to control 40 or 50 microphones. After that I was thinking of what to do next. I was bored with being a hardware engineer. Maybe the hardware engineering didn’t give me what I had when I was a personal trainer. There was very little interaction with people. The learning aspect was very interesting and I’ve learned a lot about hardware engineering, but I didn’t learn much about life, there was little human touch. There was a touch screen, but no human touch.

At that time I thought that either I need to have a constant change or maybe I haven’t found the right profession yet. I tried different kinds of jobs: I worked as a chef, as a trainer, as a waiter, now as a hardware engineer, but I hadn’t found yet the job that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That was when I thought that it would be nice to try to move to another country also to learn a different culture. Since I worked in Bosch I had a lot of contacts with my bosses and they highly recommended that I move to Germany to continue my studies. Firstly, because the education is much cheaper in Germany than, e.g., in the US, and, since I wanted to do communication engineering, it is also very strong in Germany. I also wanted to learn more languages. Although I new maybe five different local languages in India, they are not international. If I were to go to the US, I would continue to speak English and wouldn’t learn a new language. In the end Germany was one of the best options for the informatics, for the studies I wanted. Thus, from hardware engineering I switched to software programming. Now I had to switch back to research from the industry job, I had to write papers, to publish them, to work on new discoveries. Maybe the discoveries were not great to get noticed in newspapers, it’s more like: somebody has designed a system, you design a better system. So I started here in Erlangen at FAU.

In which programm?

It’s called Communications and Multimedia Engineering (CME). There was a reason for this. I had experience with hardware design for the conference controller. Now I wanted to learn the software side of multimedia. That would make me a complete person: now if I were to design a controller I could do both the hardware and the software aspects.

What kind of classes did you take?

There are several general topics. One is communication: digital communication, mobile communication. Multimedia side is about audio processing, speech processing, video processing, image enhancement, computer vision, music processing. The third aspect is information theory: audio data and video data compression. It’s a complete chain of multimedia communication: first you get the data, then you process it (e.g,. compress) and send it.

What were your scientific projects?

In the first semester I worked on a music project. I’m really into music, I play violin. In my first semester I took a course called “Music signal processing and analysis” (MPA) with professor Mueller. The way he taught the course was so beautiful, so amazing, it was like watching a movie. He was not just speaking and showing the slides, he really acted. He was not going from one place to another, he was flying. I really enjoyed the way he taught and I fell in love with the subject. I decided that music is my life, I will be a music engineer and I will go to the Queen Mary college in London, I’ll do my PhD in music. I took up a project with the professor. This was my first research project. It was about music mixing using chromograms. A chromogram is like a spectrogram. In a spectrogram you have an intensity as a function of frequency at each point in time. In chromogram you determine which “chromo” is played at each point in time. A chromo is similar to a cord or a tune, e.g., C, D, A sharp. If you play piano, you can play several keys at the same time, so you can have several chromos simultaneously.

Is chromo just a frequency?

There is a difference between frequency and pitch. People usually consider frequency and pitch to be the same. But the pitch is not a single frequency, it’s a packet. At lower frequencies the packets are wider, at higher ones the packets are narrower. For example, when somebody is playing a C tune, it does not mean that he plays at 100 Herz or 200 Herz, it means that he is playing from frequency A to frequency B. In this project, I plotted the pitch versus time, this makes more sense for music, than plotting the frequency. What matters is the pitch, not the frequency. What I did is I designed an algorithm in Matlab to plot the chromograms. I plotted a chromogram of Yanni. He is a musician, a composer. I really love his music, it is beautiful. I especially love “Nightingale”. It’s an amazing piece of music. He played it in China, the main tune was played flute. Then he played it with a voice instead of the flute. The woman singer took pitches at such extreme, I could never think that was possible. I listened to this music maybe a million times. I took this chromogram and some chromograms of rock and pop music. Now I had two visual maps with intensities of each pitch. I could see some patters in it. So what I did was I tried to design a pattern combining these two in a new chromogram in Matlab. Thus, it was the “Nightingale” mixed with pop. To my surprise, it did sound good. It was a new way of creating music. You don’t need to listen to create, you could see a pattern visually and play it. This was my first small research. My professor was very impressed. I asked him if I could do a PhD with him. He was like: “done, you can do the PhD thesis with me”. I thought that my life was set now.

And then I took some other courses to continue my studies. I took a class on channel coding. You have your data, you compress it a lot and then you need to send it over some communication channel. There is some noise added to it during the transmission. So you add extra code for error correction. There was one chapter about NASA communication with satellites, what kind of codes they use. That took my mind away. Sending a signal from here to India or from here to next room is nothing great, but sending data, images from Saturn, or from Voyager 1, which took a photo of the entire Solar system. In order to send data from millions of miles to Earth and reconstruct it – you need to have the best error correction codes. Then I decided that music is not my life, space is my life. Space always made me curious. I read every article about what NASA is doing, what ESA is doing, about what Russia is doing, and China also. I also read about black holes, I try to understand them, to understand the mathematics behind. Music was my interest, but now I found another interest, which is also my passion. I wanted to work for a space agency and to do the channel coding. I dropped my idea of music and I wanted to find a student job about channel coding. There was a career fair. There was SAAB.

It’s a Swedish company. Right?

Yes. Their airplane division and communications. I went to them and I asked them. I said that I’m doing a channel coding course and I’m really interested, especially in deep space communications. The problem was that I don’t come from EU, but the channel coding is very important, it’s critical. They wouldn’t let the sensitive parts to be touched by anyone, who is not an EU citizen. I also applied to ESA, but they rejected me outright, saying that they don’t hire non-EU citizens. I also tried DLR, the German Aerospace agency. They offered me something with machine learning, but nothing with the channel coding. This is a very sensitive area. They cannot hire a non-EU person. With that my hope of a channel coding job dropped.

Then I had to find a real job, I was looking around and I applied to Dolby. My initial goal, when I moved to Germany, was to do audio software. So going back from my fantasies of space and music I went to what I originally wanted to do. And they had for me something! I was hired by them. With Dolby I did two projects. One project was to develop a software that tests how good your audio is. Basically if you have a speaker and you don’t know if the speaker is of good quality. You can pass the test streams and use the software that I’ve designed. It will tell you if the speaker is performing good, if will give a report about the speaker (or about a codec). It will say something like “at high frequencies there is a cutoff”, “the spectrum is not good”, or “there is too much noise”. It will give a complete report about the speaker or a codec. This kind of software is also used by Netflix to check the quality of videos they broadcast. Then I had a project about HDMI latency. Usually HDMI cables are fast, but if the resolution is high, then it also takes time to process. So I was measuring the processing and transmission time, the latency. My contract with Dolby is coming to an end at the end of March. Also my studies at FAU end then. I will soon have the thesis presentation.

What is your thesis about?

It is about video compression. I like compression but I couldn’t work on channel coding. I like video as well. I tried to combine the two. For example, if you watch a video on Youtube, there are different resolution levels. The different resolutions are the same image, but at higher resolution you send extra data. This extra data takes more time to load. I’m designing an algorithm how to compress the extra data in the most efficient way so that the loading time still remains small.

But now I felt that I need to move on from the software engineering as well. I thought: what next? I have a masters degree, what should I do now. I wanted to do something that was close to my degree but not exactly engineering. I thought about designing products or selling them. I started to look for jobs like product manager or sales representative. You don’t work on the design directly, but you develop the business plan and you talk to the customers. This was a job that I was looking for: it involves a human touch, actual human touch, not a machine touch, but it also has engineering and it would value my degree. I thought that it would be hard to get, because I don’t have any experience with this. I didn’t do any course on it. I had taken one class about “Business intelligence and relations” at the FAU school of business, because I already had a thought at my first year of masters that I could do something like that. I was very glad when a Japanese company called Murata hired me as a project manager in the Internet of Things (OIT) division. I will develop business plans for the products, coordinate with other teams, do customer and client interactions. I think I love to do that.

Sounds like a lot of fun!