India's Innovation Divas
The MIT Technology
Review announced its annual list of top 35 innovators under the age of 35.
Called TR35, it had inventors, entrepreneurs, visionaries, humanitarians and
pioneers. For over a decade, MIT Technology Review has recognised exceptionally
talented technologists whose work has the potential to transform the world.
Past honorees include Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of
Facebook, and Jonathan Ive, chief designer of Apple. This year's list has three
Indians, all women. In interviews with Vanita Srivastava, the women innovators
talks about their research and more.
Edited excerpts:
“Go Against the Flow“
Neha Narkhede, 32, is
cofounder and CTO of Confluent, a company backing the Apache Kafka messaging
system that she has co-created. Before founding Confluent, she led streams
infrastructure at LinkedIn. After completing her bachelor's in computer science
from Pune University, she went to the Georgia Institute of Technology for her
master's.
On the work for which she
was selected
I helped co-create Apache
Kafka, an open source technology that acts as a central nervous system to
connect all of a company's data and make it available for use within a few
milliseconds. At Confluent, the company behind the Apache Kafka project, I oversee
the technology direction, product strategy and engineering, ensuring we build
the right product for our customers. Kafka has seen widespread adoption across
thousands of companies like LinkedIn, Netflix, Pinterest, AirBnb, Verizon,
Salesforce. We are solving a key problem that companies face, which is
collecting data about everything happening inside the company and allowing
applications and systems to react to events in real-time.
On the broader objective
behind this research
Our mission is to build a
central nervous system for every company in the world. There is a tectonic
shift happening in data processing needs as companies become more digital. The
old world of batch processing needs to be replaced by a modern world of
real-time data and stream processing. Building the technology that helps
companies make the shift from batch to real-time is the objective of Confluent
and Apache Kafka. Data used to locked up in silos. Traditional solutions could
not keep up with the newer high throughput data sources. Kafka provides an
elegant solution to this problem.
On India's research
ecosystem
India is at the forefront
of technology and the startup ecosystem ripe for disruption. It is exciting to
see the change in business ecosystem with the rise of venture capital. The
availability of capital is the key to enable India's bright minds and budding
entrepreneurs.
On message to India's young
researchers
Go against the flow, find
opportunities that solve a real problem and develop persistence to turn your
vision into reality.
“Focus on Quality of
Research, Not Quantity“
Radha Boya, 32, is a
Leverhulme early career fellow at the University of Manchester where she is
exploring the fundamentals and applications of atomic scale nanocapillaries.She
completed her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research
(JNCASR), Bengaluru, in 2012.
On the work for which she
was selected
I make atomically thin and
ultra-smooth pipes -capillaries. Individual atomic planes, which are removed
from a bulk crystal, leave behind flat voids of a chosen height. When
one-atom-thick layer of graphite -graphene --was isolated in 2001, it led to a
scientific revolution, bringing in new types of 2-D materials. What I have made
is an antipode of graphene by focusing on what is left behind after extracting
one-atomic layer out of a crystal -an ultrathin cavity. This is a completely
new type of nanoscale system, which can be made as a cavity (to confine various
substances) or an open-ended tunnel (for transporting matter).
Tiny pipes which can allow
flow of fluids through them have interesting mass transport properties when the
size of the pipe itself approaches the molecular size. The art of making such
tiny pipes till now relied on removing material in a structured way from
conventional materials such as silicon, glass, quartz, etc. This is the first
time that an unprecedented control in making such ultra-fine capillaries has
been achieved, thanks to the atomically flat 2-D material, graphene.
On the research ecosystem
of India
The place from where I did
my PhD, JNCASR, is at par with the research institutes that I have worked in
the US and UK. Awareness needs to be spread about the quality of research that
needs to be done rather than the quantity. Importantly, fundamental research
that has implications for societal benefits in the long term needs to be
encouraged, apart from science for immediate commercial applications. We need
to think ahead, for the long term.
“Try Figuring Out Big, Open
Problems“
Suchi Saria, 32, assistant
professor at Johns Hopkins University, has built algorithms from medical data
for early identification of sepsis. Hailing from Darjeeling in West Bengal, she
did her PhD at Stanford.
On the work for which she
was selected
My research is in the field
of statistical machine learning and computational healthcare. I develop
computer algorithms that make use of large-scale data routinely collected
during doctor visits to figure out new ways to improve treatment. TR35 points
to my work on early identification of sepsis.Sepsis kills more patients than
breast and prostate cancer combined. It also evolves very quickly so timely
treatment is important. Now, sepsis often goes undetected until patients are
suffering from organ dysfunction because of sepsis. My work shows that we can
devise new computer algorithms that can recognise sepsis early and precisely.
On the broader objective of
this research
Our health data is now
stored electronically. I want to leverage this data to find new algorithmic
protocols for personalising the delivery of medicine.
On her message for
researchers in India
Middle school education in
India is very rigor ous. This means we are taught the necessary fundamentals
for tackling interesting techni cal problems. But, at some point, the system
relies too heavily on tests to incentivise stu dents to learn. Here is what I
say to my little siblings: focus on identifying the big, inter esting, open
problems that deserve your time and attention and then figure out what you can
do to fix them.
The writer is a Delhi-based
journalist
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