Editorial

To bridge the gaps between the various limbs of the community is the prime objective of The Spark, to let it grow into a vehicle of creative expression, its ideal.

-The Spark, Vol. 1 No. 1, Feb 15, 1965

While the rekindled Spark has been conceived and sponsored by the alumni, we would love to see it grow as a true community magazine with increasing content from current students and faculty.

Students and faculty are the lifeblood of IITK. While we, the alumni, can continue to talk ad-infinitum, our content, by definition, is history. History is good, but then you are always looking at the rear-view mirror. We therefore invite, with great enthusiasm, the current residents of the institute to take finger to keyboard and opinionate. You are the ‘today’ of IITK!

This issue is the third in a planned four-part series on CSE education in India, which started with the 1963 arrival of the IBM-1620. That story completed a full circle when IITK alumnus Arvind Krishna took over as CEO of IBM in 2020. In this issue, Arvind shares a message with current students and alumni on his many learnings on the campus.

The arrival of the DEC-1090 in 1979 established a new level of interactive computing on campus, with the Computer-Card-driven batch processes finally replaced by Time-Sharing terminals. It also marked the start of the BTech CSE program which immediately became the destination of first choice for JEE entrants. They in turn, would follow up with global contributions, and the results continue to impact advances in computing, including how we surf the internet, even today. This issue of the Spark pays a special tribute to Rajeev Motwani and includes excerpts from an interview featuring his years at IITK, and his contributions to the creation of Google.

As always, we would love to have your feedback. Drop us a line, and share a memory or a reflection! We love to hear from you and will try to publish as many responses as possible. Write to us at: spark@iitk.ac.in, or post directly in our FaceBook group This Bit of That IITK. If you are on FaceBook, check us out! We welcome new group members: students, alumni, faculty and staff, and all others with IITK connections, but ask that you respond to the three screening questions so that we can validate your membership.

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Letters to the Editors

What’s In a Name (or a Description)?

Thank you for sharing this. This is really good. My only comment is with calling it an IITK Alumni Magazine.

The Spark was started in 1965 as a student newspaper. The new Avatar should be called an IITK Student/Alumni Magazine that is open to current students’ contributions.

Ram Misra
BT, ME, 1963-68
IITK Distinguished Services Award, 2019

Thank you, Ram! Point noted. Editorial and Cover Letter have been modified accordingly! On a separate note, we now know that the Spark appeared through 1989, not 1986 as we had assumed earlier, making this at least the fourth reincarnation. Like the cat with many lives, more remain in the kitty.

We Didn’t Start the Fire!

Thank you, Prof. Sahasrabuddhe, or as your friend Mr. Murthy, said complimentarily about you in the previous issue, ‘Buddhe’.
Yes, the original Spark was indeed “cyclostyled, hand-illustrated, hand-delivered to unspecified recipients, in general very rough-hewn“.
That style is now fashionably known as the ‘French Country style’. Much like the Aalu Parathas, where finding the Aalu part of the Paratha was the ‘Sunday Morning Treasure Hunt’, consumed together with the warm fluid in those battered jugs, uncertain whether it was coffee or tea, or an eclectic blend of both. Now, with automation, everything is homogenous and standardized, but we are trying very hard to keep the ‘country-style’ alive, with a diverse blend of writers, photos, and irreverent comments like this one.

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In the Spotlight

Picture Credit: Keshaw Singh (BS, Math, 2013-17)

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The Times They Are A-Changing

The metro service from IITK to Kanpur City was inaugurated by the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, on Dec 28, 2021. The inauguration team included IITK alumnus DS Mishra (BT, EE, 1978-83), who during his tenure as the Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary, Govt of India, has contributed to the launch of the Kanpur Metro, as well as other Metros around the country.

The service is currently up to Moti Jheel, after which the underground portion of the track (to Kanpur Central Station and beyond) is under construction. The IITK station is a five minute walk from the Main Gate. The ride to Rawatpur takes 15 minutes, and costs 20 bucks, as of now.

Clockwise from Top Left: Metro and Driver at IITK; the IITK Platform; view from Moti Jheel, towards IITK. Credits: The 1977 photo of the Tempo was clicked by Shirish Joshi. Other pictures have been shared by Shakti Chaturvedi. Text contributed by Amit Shukla (BT, ChE, 1983-87) and Shakti Chaturvedi (MBA, IME, 2014-16, Research Scholar IME)

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Establishment of the CSE Academic Programmes at IIT/Kanpur

V. Rajaraman (Professor EE/CSE, 1963-82)

Prologue

I joined IIT/Kanpur as an Assistant Professor in the Department of EE on March 23, 1963. I was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison before I came to Kanpur. My Ph.D. was in EE (Adaptive Control Systems). When I joined IITK there was no campus. We were in a wing of HBTI in Agricultural Gardens (called Company Bagh by locals). We officially moved to the Kalyanpur campus at the end of March 1963. The only building which was ready was the workshop. First, the library moved to the workshop. About a month later, the departments moved to the workshop. I remember the May - June heat in the workshop where all faculty of EE sat together in one enclosure. The next buildings that were ready were the Southern and Western Labs. The IBM 1620 moved to the far end of the Western Laboratory in August 1963.

The (Late) Professor H.K. Kesavan joined as Professor and Head of the EE Department in early 1964. Before joining IITK he was the Head of the EE Department at the University of Waterloo in Canada. It was fortunate that he joined IITK as he was far-sighted and an excellent academic administrator. He was my mentor in my early days at IITK and I learnt a lot from him about academic administration. There was only a BTech programme when Kesavan joined. He was convinced that with a young research-oriented faculty joining the EE department it was necessary to start a post-graduate programme as soon as possible. IITK was a new institute and it was necessary to publicise its special facilities and the young talented faculty. On his suggestion, I went to IIT/Madras and IISc, Bangalore in March 1964 to talk to graduating students in EE and tried to convince them to join the MTech programme being started in IITK in August 1964. The first batch of ten students joined in August 1964. Among them was H.V. Sahasrabuddhe who had earlier joined IITK as a research assistant after graduating from IIT/Bombay, S.C. Seth, C.V.S. Rao, and R.K. Ragade from IISc, Bangalore. (All three went on to get Phds.)

In early 1965 H.N. Mahabala joined the EE Department from the University of Waterloo. He had worked with a Bendix computer at the University Of Saskatchewan in Canada where he obtained a Ph.D. In August 1964, Professor Kesavan was made the Head of the Computer Centre in addition to his responsibilities as Head of EE. He requested me to join him in the Computer Centre as his deputy and I gladly accepted. I had taken courses in digital computation and programmed the IBM 704 in the USA during my student days and had extensively worked with analog computers during my doctoral research. In 1965 Mahabala and I started teaching some courses in computers and requested Kesavan to allow us to introduce an option in MTech EE with specialisation in Computer Science. He was far-sighted and saw the future growth of computing and the unique position of IITK that had a computer. It was an informal arrangement as the MTech degree was awarded in EE.

Starting an M.Tech. (Computer Science) Option in the EE Department

The Computer Science option in EE became very popular and a majority of students admitted to MTech EE opted to take courses in Computer Science and do a project in that area creating some friction among the EE Department faculty. The courses in Computer Science were limited. They were on Digital Logic Design, Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Artificial Intelligence, and Design of Information Systems.

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Approximately a dozen students were graduating with MTech with the Computer Science option in EE. Ph.D. students also joined EE in 1965/66. If I remember right H.V. Sahasrabuddhe started working with Professor H.K. Kesavan as a Ph.D. student in 1966 in the area of power systems that involved considerable programming using the 1620. In 1966, P.C.P. Bhatt who was a lecturer and C.R. Muthukrishnan started working on their Ph.D. thesis with my guidance. Muthukrishnan submitted his thesis in 1969 working in the area of Decision Tables and joined the faculty of EE along with Sahasrabuddhe. Another Ph.D. student was (Late) T. Radhakrishnan who worked with me in the area of parallel information retrieval. He also joined the EE faculty. P.C.P. Bhatt also obtained a Ph.D. degree in 1969. We now had six faculty members in the Computer Science area. In 1968, Professor Kesavan left IITK and returned to the University of Waterloo where he started a new Systems Engineering Department. I took over as the head of the Computer Centre.

Starting an Interdisciplinary Post-Graduate Programme in Computer Science

In 1971 the Senate of IITK approved starting separate MTech programmes in Computer Science, Materials Science, and Nuclear Engineering. The first admissions to a new MTech Computer Science Programme were started with an admission of around a dozen students. As an interdisciplinary programme the minimum qualification for admission was BTech in any discipline or an MSc degree in Mathematics or Physics.
The parting of ways from the EE Department was cordial. The EE faculty was happy that Computer Science got separated as the MTech students in EE, after the split, were taking EE courses and working on their MTech and Ph.D. theses in the traditional EE subjects such as Power Engineering, Electronics, Control Systems, Electromagnetics, and Circuit Theory.

I continued to be a faculty in EE in addition to being the Convenor of the Computer Science Programme. The first MTech (Computer Science) batch graduated in 1973 and most of the graduating students were employed by TCS. The course was in great demand and we continued to get good students. Admission was by a written test and an interview. GATE had not started.

The Computer Science faculty size increased slowly and steadily with Shyam Kumar, S.V. Rangaswami, S.K. Basu , Narsingh Deo, R.M.K. Sinha, V.K. Vaishnavi, S.N. Maheshwari, Arvind (Visiting), S.C. Seth (Visiting), R. Kodandapani, K.V. Nori, and R. Sankar joining over the years. IIT/Madras installed an IBM 370/155 system in 1973 and did not have any experienced faculty to manage the computer centre. Mahabala accepted an invitation from IIT/Madras to join its faculty, manage the Computer Centre, and also start an academic programme in Computer Science. He persuaded Muthukrishnan and Radhakrishnan to join him. P.C.P. Bhatt was invited by IIT/Delhi to start its Computer Science programme.

The MTech and Ph.D. programmes thrived. IITK was graduating around a dozen MTechs every year. The Ph.D. programme was also thriving. In my memory several students including A.S. Sethi, V.K. Vaishnavi, M.S. Krishnamoorthy, R.M.K. Sinha, V.Gupta, M. Ibramsha, Om Vikas, B.K. Gairola, Asha Goel, V.M. Malhotra, R. Govindarajulu, S. Krishna, and S. Biswas obtained Ph.D. during the period 1970 – 1982. (This list is not exhaustive).

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Introducing the B.Tech. Programme in Computer Science

By the mid-1970s, the faculty of the Computer Science programme felt that CS was maturing as a discipline and the time was ripe to start an undergraduate programme. As the convenor of the CS programme, I prepared a proposal, after consulting the faculty, to start a BTech programme in Computer Science. I discussed this proposal with the Acting Director Dr. Jagdish Lal in 1975. He was convinced and as Chairman of the IITK senate introduced the proposal in a senate meeting. There was extensive discussion in the senate with many members opposing the resolution.

The arguments against its introduction included thoughts that: it was not a major discipline; had little content besides programming; was already being offered as programming diplomas by private companies; would not offer employment for BTech graduates; and was not an Engineering course. Finally, other departments would have had to give up some seats as the total BTech intake was fixed by the Government of India.

I and my Computer Science colleagues in the Senate pointed out that it was indeed a mature discipline; it was not just programming; there were professional societies on computers in India, the UK, the USA, Japan, and several countries in Europe; there was an International Federation of Information Processing Societies (IFIPS); it was growing rapidly, and would become essential knowledge for all engineers. Many countries in the world including the UK, the USA, and several countries in Europe already had Computer Science departments in their universities.

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Despite our attempts to convince the senate members, no decision was taken. Dr. Jagdish Lal left IITK in 1976 and returned as the Principal of Motilal Nehru Regional Engineering College (MNREC), Allahabad, from where he had come to IITK. While the IITK senate was continuing the debate on the BTech programme in Computer Science, Dr. Lal convinced the Board of Governors of MNREC and started a BTech programme in Computer Science in 1976 two years before IITK did, thus becoming the first institute in the country to offer this.

In 1976, Dr. A. Bhattacharya took over as the new Director of IITK. I had a long discussion with him and he was convinced of the importance of starting a BTech programme in CSE. He re-introduced the proposal in the senate. The arguments for and against were repeated. Finally, Dr. Bhattacharya steered the discussion successfully and the senate approved a BTech programme in Computer Science with a student strength of 20 in 1977. He also steered the proposal through the Board of Governors. The programme was slated to begin in 1978. A few seats were taken from other departments and allocated to the BTech programme in Computer Science.

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BTech Programme Begins

BTech in Computer Science was announced as a discipline in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) of 1978. Many parents came to me to discuss Computer Science and its prospects before choosing the department for their children. I distinctly remember Rajeev Motwani’s father and Jaideep Srivastava’s father who were anxious about the future of Computer Science and had long discussions with me. Both Rajeev and Jaideep joined the first batch of the BTech Computer Science programme.

To the surprise of the entire faculty of IITK and the other IITs, BTech Computer Science became the first choice of a large number of students who qualified in the JEE. By 1980, the last student admitted to the program had an All India Rank of 40! The students from the first (1978) batch were uniformly good and many of them distinguished themselves as world leaders in Computer Science.

Epilogue

A professor of IIT/Kharagpur collared me after a meeting in Delhi and asked how IITK could give a BTech degree in Computer Science when there was no department. I retorted that IITK was a pioneer that broke many existing norms. IITK was the first IIT to have a core curriculum, letter grades, grading “on a curve”, a semester system, sizeable humanities courses in the BTech, etc.

When the other IITs saw the success of IITK’s BTech programme in Computer Science, they unitedly requested the Ministry of Human Resources Development to allow them to start a Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The ministry agreed in 1983 and all IITs started a CSE Department. The Computer Science Programme at IITK became the CSE Department in 1984. I was not at IITK when the new department started as I had left IITK to join IISc in 1982.

Prof. H. V. Sahasrabuddhe came to IITK as an Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student in 1964, after getting his B.Tech. degree in EE from IIT Bombay. At that time, Computing was taught as a specialization in the EE department, with the Computer Center under its care. A 10-day intensive course on computing was in progress, and Prof. HVS remembers it was so much fun that the Computer Center became his second home right away. He completed his Ph.D. in 1968, and joined IITK as a faculty member.

Since computing was then a specialization in the EE department, he got to teach many courses in this area. Simultaneously he was assigned a core EE lab (ESc341/ESc342 in alternate semesters) as the EE "pound of flesh!” This continued till 1976 when he was formally moved full time to the newly formed "Computer Science Program" in anticipation of the IITK Senate approving a full Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Professor Sahasrabuddhe was an avid Bridge player during his IITK days. He recalls an interesting incident - once, in a lab, his students could not get an experimental circuit assembled on a breadboard to work properly; the oscilloscope connected to the breadboard was not impressed. He recalls doing what people used to do with radio and TV sets of those days - he gave the scope a hard slap, and voila, the circuit started working! Prof. Sahasrabuddhe left IITK in 1984 to join the University of Pune. He is now retired and lives in Pune.

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Prof. R. Sankar joined IITK in 1975, on the initiative of Prof. Rajaraman, after previously being the head of the Computer Center at the National Aeronautical Laboratory in Bangalore. His education was in Mathematics, and he had received his Ph.D. from Oxford University. Interestingly, his older son, Sriram, was a student in the inaugural CS B Tech batch of 1978-83. Prof. Sankar co-taught the introductory core course in Computer Science to B Tech students, as well as Numerical Analysis and Discrete Mathematics. He also introduced the area of Computer Graphics and Computer Aided Design at IITK, teaching courses and conducting research in those areas.

He recalls a funny incident having to do with acronyms - there were several acronyms being used at IITK, and he could not keep up with them. He remembers his embarrassment, when, as the head of the Computer Center, he asked a student what CC stood for! Prof. Sankar left IITK in 1985 to join the University of Pune, which Prof. Sahasrabuddhe had joined a year earlier. Together, they built a strong CS program at Pune university as well. He is now retired, and lives in Bangalore with his wife, Mrs. Padmavathy Sankar.

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In August 2019, Professor HV Sahasrabuddhe visited Bangalore. He visited both Professors Rajaraman and Sankar, and took the pictures that we have shared here. Later in that same month, we achieved all C(3,2) combinations of the three professors when the Sankars visited the Rajaramans. We also learned that Prof. Sankar and Prof. Rajaraman had met for the first time in 1949, at the age of 16, in a bus on the way to Delhi University to collect their DU entrance scholarship examination form. Both got the Rs. 25 scholarship. Prof. Sankar completed a BA in Math, and Prof. Rajaraman a BSc in Physics, both from St. Stephens College. Prof Sankar graduated as the topper of Delhi University in 1952, receiving the President’s Gold Medal from Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India. What a long connection between old friends!

About the contributors

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Music lovers on the campus will recall…

The Legendary Hindustani Classical Vocalist, Composer and Guru Vidushi Veena Sahasrabuddhe.

Vidushi Veena Sahasrabuddhe (14 September 1948 - 29 June 2016) was a prominent Indian Classical and Semi-Classical Vocalist and composer of Hindustani Classical Music. Though her singing style reflects Jaipur and Kirana Gharanas, it finds its roots in the Gwalior Gharana. Veena was known as an accomplished singer of Khyal and also of Bhajans.

Veena Sahasrabuddhe was born in a musical family to father Shankar Shripad Bodas, who was a disciple of famous vocalist and musicologist Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. She began her early musical education under her father, and then under her brother Kashinath Shankar Bodas. She also learned Kathak Classical dance form in her childhood. Veena's musical mentors include Padmashri Balwantrai Bhatt, Pandit Vasant Thakar, and Pandit Gajananrao Joshi.
She obtained a Bachelor's degree in Vocal Performance, Sanskrit Literature, and English Literature from Kanpur University (1968), a Master's degree (Sangeet Alankar) in Vocal Performance from Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal (1969), as well as a Master's degree in Sanskrit from Kanpur University (1979). A.B.G.M.V. Mandal conferred on her a doctorate in Vocal Music (Sangeet Praveen) in 1988. She was the Head of the Department of Music at the SNDT Pune campus.

Veena had given musical performances in and across India and toured foreign countries including Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Her many awards included prizes in Vocal Classical category in a national competition for artists under age 25, conducted by All India Radio (1972), the Uttar Pradesh Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1993) and the National Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (2013). Veena Sahasrabuddhe passed away on 29 June 2016 at her home in Aundh, Pune, after a prolonged illness. She is survived by her husband Dr. Hari Sahasrabuddhe, a son and a daughter.

From the Facebook group, Hindustani Classical Music and Everything, shared by Alok Kumar (BT, ChE, 1976-81)

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CSE at IITK: The Arrival of the DEC-1090

V. Rajaraman (Professor EE/CSE, 1963-82)

Earlier, I had written the story of the purchase of IBM 7044/1401. These systems became fully operational in 1966 in the new Computer Centre building. From day one they were used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Besides this system, there was an IBM 1620 that continued to be used for undergraduate teaching and laboratories until it was sold to SAIL R&D. We also bought an IBM 1800, a small process control computer, for experiments in real-time control.

The (Late) Professor John McCarthy, head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University visited IITK in 1971. He saw that students were using a computer that had a batch processing operating system (OS) which did not allow interactive computing. He was a great believer in interactive time-sharing systems. He had written a famous memo to the Director of the MIT computer centre in 1959 pointing out the advantages of interactive time-shared use of computers for better human-computer symbiosis that would improve the productivity of computer users. That memo led to the development of the first time-sharing operating system in the world, called Compatible Time-Sharing Operating System (CTSS) in 1961, for the IBM 709 at MIT.

Professor McCarthy told me that his laboratory at Stanford had a DEC PDP 1 computer with a time-sharing OS which was in good working condition but was being replaced with a larger computer. He wanted to donate the PDP 1 to IITK. I was at first reluctant as it is normally difficult to maintain a used computer. On second thought, after consulting my colleagues in the computer centre, I decided that such a machine in the laboratory would allow students to have hands-on experience with both hardware and software of a computer that was not possible with IBM machines used by all departments and maintained by IBM engineers.

With the time-sharing operating system, the terminals of the DEC-1090 (right) replaced the punch card machines of the IBM-7044 (left). Visible on the right, in front of the camera, is Rajeev Motwani of the first UG CSE batch. Picture Credits: (L) Echoes In Memory, photo yearbook, 1982; (R) Growing Up, photo yearbook, 1983

The PDP 1 computer was shipped courtesy of KIAP and arrived at Kanpur in 1972. It was installed in the Computer Centre by our students who were assisted by Professor H.N. Mahabala and it started working. The computer came with only two terminals. One was a graphics terminal and the other a teletype. Several users could not use it simultaneously. Its greatest attraction for students was a large display terminal that came with it. It was used to play one of the early computer games called Star Wars. I gave both hardware and software projects on PDP 1 to many undergraduate students of the EE department. I remember R.S. Nikhil and Bhasker, among others, who worked with it.

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A 20 MB disk (one of the largest IBM disks in the 1960s) was added to IBM 7044/1401, but by 1976, it was saturated and IITK wanted to replace it. However, during the 1970s there was a serious balance of payments deficit in India and the import of computers was highly restricted. IITK’s budget also was not adequate to buy a new machine that would have cost around Rs. 1 Crore.
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I was a member of the Electronics Commission of the Government of India, chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Electronics (DoE), now called the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY), from 1978 to 1982. I was also a member of several committees of the DoE that approved buying computers for the Regional Computer Centres being set up by the DoE and computers requested by other organizations during the late 1970s. I was able to convince the Secretary of the DoE of the need to replace the aging IBM 7044/1401 system at IITK. The Secretary agreed to fund IITK up to Rs.50 Lakhs in 1978 provided IITK was able to contribute matching funds from its budget.

IITK was short of funds and it was difficult to allocate Rs. 50 Lakhs from its budget for a new computer. I felt that we could raise some money by selling the IBM 7044/1401 computers. As I pointed out earlier, there was a foreign exchange crunch during the latter part of the 1970s. When the Janata Government was in power after the defeat of the Congress party in 1977, George Fernandes was the Industries minister. A new government policy required foreign companies to dilute equity and take an Indian partner. IBM and Coca-Cola refused to comply and were asked to leave India in 1977.

The IBM 1401 was a highly popular computer in India with over 100 companies having 1401 installations. Many of these companies had saturated their 1401s and wanted to expand by renting/buying additional 1401s for their software packages. Their investment in 1401 software was enormous. The IBM plant in India was the only one in the world refurbishing used 1401s and renting/selling them for reuse. IBM had discontinued the sale of 1401 for the rest of the world in 1971. Many Indian companies were thus in a bind with IBM’s exit and I knew that there would be a market for IITK’s 1401. Besides this, IITK had a stockpile of critical spare parts for both 1401 and 7044.
I told the then Director of IITK, Dr. A. Bhattacharya, that we could raise some funds by selling the 1401 and 7044. He felt that it might be pittance but agreed. Consequently, a committee was appointed that included Srivastava, the then chief accounts officer, and some other professors besides myself. The committee discussed the procedure to conduct the sale. It was decided to advertise it in the papers and separate tenders were invited for the two computers with an earnest money deposit of Rs. 5 Lakhs each. Many prospective buyers visited IITK to inspect the machines to see whether they were in working condition and also to assess the availability of spare parts. On the day assigned to open the tenders, all the tenderers were present, and the committee met them and explained that their tenders were final and that there would be no negotiation. It was also pointed out that in case a tenderer reneged, the earnest money they had deposited would be forfeited.

The tenders were opened one by one. There were around 10 bids for 1401 and only one for 7044. The committee was flabbergasted when one of the bids was Rs.30 Lakhs for 1401! The next highest bid was 15 Lakhs. There was only one bid of Rs. 15 Lakhs for 7044 – a much more powerful computer. The highest bid for 1401 and the lone bid for 7044 were from the same company. This company was owned by two entrepreneurs, Sadasivan and Raghunathan, and was based in Bangalore. Sadasivan was an ex-IBM customer service engineer with many years of experience in maintaining 1401s and Raghunathan was a financier. Sadasivan was confident of maintaining the computers and had assessed that the spare parts IITK was offering were adequate. I learnt that they had already lined up a customer who had contracted to buy two shifts of IBM 1401 time to run their existing programs. They had second thoughts on 7044 and withdrew their offer. The committee explained that they would forfeit Rs. 5 Lakhs, the earnest money deposit.

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After the formal tendering process was over, I invited Sadasivan and Raghunathan for a discussion. I asked them why they were withdrawing their bid for the 7044 which was at least 10 times faster than the 1401. Their trepidation was a lack of customers as most companies in India were not familiar with the 7044 and all their software was for the 1401. I then offered to depute programmers from IITK to write software for the 7044 to enable 1401 programs to be run on it much faster. I also assured them that if the software did not work, they could return the 7044. They agreed to take the 7044 and paid Rs. 15 Lakhs. The software was developed in Fortran by our programmers, Nirmal Roberts and K.S. Singh with the guidance of Professor H.V. Sahasrabuddhe. It was good software and ran 1401 programs faster in 7044 than in 1401.

Dr. Bhattacharya was pleasantly surprised to learn of the sale of the computers for Rs. 45 Lakhs after they had been used for 13 years. We had bought the two machines for around Rs. 95 Lakhs in 1966. The circumstances during 1978-79 were fortuitous for the sale of used mainframe computers in India. Later mainframe computers were sold as junk. With Rs. 45 Lakhs from the sale, IITK allocated Rs. 5 Lakhs from its own budget and we were able to match the grant of Rs. 50 Lakhs by the Department of Electronics (DoE). With Rs. 100 Lakhs in the kitty we started exploring the market for a new machine. An evaluation committee was appointed by DoE that invited quotations for a high-end time-sharing computer. Digital Equipment Corporation won the tender. DoE negotiated for two DEC 1090 computers, one for IITK and the other for IISc, Bangalore. IITK had a larger budget and got a bigger DEC 1090 computer. The DEC 1090 was installed in 1979 at the location vacated by IBM 7044/1401.

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Remembering Rajeev Motwani

Chilukuri K. Mohan (BT, CSE, 1978-83)

Among all of our numerous brilliant classmates, one name stands out, like a comet that traversed the adolescent sky of computer science research, accomplishing an incredible amount of work that continues to influence leading researchers in many areas of computing. His name now honours the IITK Computer Science building, made possible by a generous donation from his family.

Rajeev Motwani (“Mots” to friends) was born in Jammu (1962), and grew up loving mathematics in New Delhi, where he studied at St. Columba’s school. He joined the first batch of 18 students* admitted to B.Tech. in Computer Science in 1978. During 1983-1988, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation research at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was supervised by Richard Karp, a 1985 winner of the Turing Award (something like a Nobel Prize for computer scientists). Rajeev then started teaching at Stanford University, where he mentored many graduate students (including the founders of Google) and conducted pioneering research in collaboration with colleagues and students who went on to become leaders of their research areas.
He served on many corporate boards, advising the founders of Google and numerous Silicon Valley startups; he was a soft-spoken deep thinker whose reasoned words were revered by many successful entrepreneurs. He passed away in June 2009, in a tragic accident that robbed his wife (Asha Jadeja) and children (Naitri and Anya) of his love and affection, and robbed the world of all the great potential contributions that would surely have sprung forth from his exceptionally creative brain.

* Of the 20 students accepted in the first batch, two chose to follow other interests and did not join the program.

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I first met Rajeev during our early days at IITK, as a fellow member of the cherished "first batch" of CS undergraduates, and in ragging sessions; later, we were both in the same classes and in nearby rooms in Hall V. Rajeev had always been a lofty thinker, and in the last two years at IITK he became intellectually excited and began exploring research ideas. A few of us were deeply interested in theoretical Computer Science, and three of us (Rajeev, Amitabh Shah, and I) wrote up a rather unusual B.Tech. project report under Prof. Somenath Biswas's guidance. That report, addressing communication protocol verification, using “Mailbox Automata” (an invention of Rajeev) and Petri Nets, still has a hallowed place in my shelves.

We had many mind-bending discussions in those days, focusing on mathematics and theoretical CS. We used to take graduate-level courses from the Math. Department, and Rajeev had most fun with the courses on Number Theory and Graph Theory. He was always very helpful and generous, sharing knowledge and explaining ideas to his classmates on the nights before mid/end-semester tests. It didn’t seem to matter whether he had actually attended the lecture itself: a quick look at someone’s class notes would suffice for him to rapidly grasp difficult concepts with which others vainly struggled.

Athleticism was not his forte, though we spent many hours patiently tossing the volleyball around on Hall V's court. Of the two old photographs of Rajeev that I have, one is of his posterior on the volleyball court, and the other is on the Hall V lawn, holding up his own photograph, an allusion to ideas of "self-reference" that we played with in those days. After coming to the USA, we communicated occasionally by email, but our paths rarely crossed. I met him only twice: once in 1985, on the Berkeley campus, where we were in a group of IITK alumni who fondly shared a fondue dinner, and once in 1994 at Stanford. Every time two friends separate, there's a possibility that they never meet again. That happened with us, though I've often celebrated his accomplishments with pride at having known him, though briefly.

Rajeev’s room-mate in Hall 3 (Room 256) was Rakesh Kumar (“Teddy”), who reminisces that Rajeev was doing very well at academics without putting in too much effort. Rajeev would be out partying when Teddy fell asleep at 11PM, but could be seen studying for an hour or two in his bed at 2AM if Teddy happened to wake up. When Teddy was quarantined with chicken pox at the IITK Health Center, carefree Rajeev wanted to hug him despite warnings from Teddy to the contrary. Teddy remembers that Rajeev was not abstemious (to put it mildly), but could totally stop smoking and imbibing alcohol at will when he returned to his parents’ home in Delhi during the summer, when he used to volunteer teaching kids at a neighborhood school.

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Rajeev was very successful at solving the brain-teasers with which Teddy used to challenge him. Puzzle-solver he was, breaking crossword puzzles with ease. He had told me, in 1982, of the easiest way to crack passwords on the IITK's DEC10 system. I promptly changed my password. Three years later, in the US, when someone else briefly shared his password with me while he was traveling, I found that even that password was predictable by the Rajeev heuristic.
I will try to discuss his research contributions, and why we consider Rajeev to be a great computer scientist, at the risk of being too simplistic (for computer scientists) as well as abstruse (for the rest of us).

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Rajeev is most famous for being the co-author of a 1998 technical report (published in 1999) describing the “PageRank” algorithm for citation ranking. Two of his co-authors, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate students at that time, whom he mentored and encouraged in their successful efforts to start a new company which swiftly became a household word. The brilliance of that algorithm was in showing how objects in a connected network could be evaluated and compared, effectively using the evaluations associated with other objects with which they are connected.

The basic idea of the algorithm, updating a web-page’s importance using the importance attributed to connected web-pages, appears straightforward (as is the case with many brilliant ideas); the importance of the work is in showing that the iterative process converges to a meaningful quantity, i.e., the probability of arriving at a web-page (when you start from almost anywhere in the web) after a large number of clicks. This provides the basis for making recommendations: if thousands of pages could be retrieved after a query, in what order should they be presented to an impatient user, assuming that a human user would prefer to reach their most likely destination very quickly? Such a question is answered by identifying the most important ones, using PageRank and its successor algorithms that have emerged over the years, and are used extensively every time we pose a query to a search engine. Many of our batchmates remember Rajeev, in the early 2000s, excitedly telling us “look at this; it will change how people surf the web”. Needless to say, it did!

Rajeev is also famous for being a pioneering researcher and the co-author (with Prabhakar Raghavan) of the first book on “Randomized Algorithms” which has been used as a textbook in many universities. A large class of problems is known to be practically impossible to solve in a reasonable amount of time—this is not just an abstract mathematical concern, a huge number of challenging problems encountered by real-world companies falls into this category, e.g., scheduling or route-planning. Randomized algorithms address such problems, obtaining very good solutions with high probability by carefully exploiting randomness, often using numbers generated randomly using a known probability distribution.

Rajeev’s most cited work is the classic textbook he co-authored (with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman), the second and third editions of “Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, Computation”. We had touched its first edition (called the “Cinderella Book” due to its original book cover) as B.Tech. students, and Rajeev’s work as co-author appears to have been focused on Automata Theory and its applications, making the book more accessible to undergraduate students than its predecessor. The mark of a great teacher is his ability to explain a difficult subject at a level understandable to a student, and Rajeev personified this attribute.

Rajeev’s next most cited work is a 1998 paper co-authored with a graduate student (Piotr Indyk), on algorithms for finding “Approximate Nearest Neighbors”; they followed this in 1999 by writing another highly cited paper on approximate similarity search, which focused on addressing problems of high dimensionality. Finding exact nearest neighbors for a point involves excessively high computational effort. Rajeev’s work shows that we can efficiently find solutions that are acceptable for most practical problems, i.e., points that are almost as near as the nearest neighbors (within a specifiable tolerance level), for an important class of problems. A key idea developed in this work is that of “locality-sensitive hashing”; these results have applications in many areas, including information retrieval, clustering, and pattern recognition. Rajeev’s work has practical applications and is also mathematically well-developed—unlike many other publications in related fields, his work is not restricted to proposing algorithms which have been demonstrated to work well only empirically.

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Rajeev co-authored numerous other highly cited publications; the impact of researchers’ work is often evaluated in terms of citations, and his record in this respect is amazing: as per the Google Scholar citation index on Feb. 11, 2022, his “h-index” was 95 and the number of citations was almost 100,000; last year alone, he had 3,935 citations. His impact as a professor can also be assessed in terms of the remarkable success of his former students, some of whom continue to conduct excellent work at top-ranked academic institutions in the USA. IITK recognized Rajeev as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2006.

I conclude with a few verses that I had written when Rajeev had passed away in 2009.

MOTS

The gods struggled, the gods gave up;
A theorem found, no proof in sight;
They thought of Mots, they needed Mots!
Alas, he's gone, mid-day is night.

When reckoning day comes
And sins are weighed,
Accuse, indict, arrest these Lords
For desolate hope, betrayed.

Not yet his prime,
It was too soon.
Just forty seven,
Oh randomized June.

Sometimes a lotus,
from water grows;
Sometimes a pool
drowns hope's rose.

Fermat, Turing,
Brightest flames gone,
And now, young Mots,
Too early, we're alone.

But he smiles
from the other side,
Einstein's proved wrong
A roll of dice, is life denied.

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A Bit of IITK, Twelve Thousand Kilometers Away

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Rajeev Motwani: In His Own Words

From an Interview with Shivanand Kanavi

Shivanand Kanavi interviewed Rajeev Motwani in July 2002, while researching for his book “Sand to Silicon: The amazing story of digital technology”. Below are some excerpts that focus on IITK and on how Google got started, in Rajeev’s own words (as transcribed by Shivanand, and compressed by the editors of this issue). The full interview can be accessed here: http://reflections-shivanand.blogspot.com/2009/08/rajeev-motwani-interview-2002.html

On Childhood Interests and Shaping Influences

About Shivanand Kanavi:

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From IITK to IBM

Arvind Krishna (BT, EE, 1980-85)

About Dr. Arvind Krishna

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Our Bits of That IITK

Three Bumps (And Many Children) Ahead!

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And the tradition continues…

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Of Campus Residents (And Other Living Things)

Kaustav Das Gupta (M Design, 2007-2009)

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