Dr.

Harrick Vins Speech

At PSG College of Technology Graduation

Compiled by Shyam Sayee K

Campus Lead, Chennai

How to be successful by Dr. Harrick Vin

Dr. Harrick Vins Speech at PSG College of Technology Graduation Ceremony

The prologue for the speech dates back to 1987. Dr. Harrick Vin recalled his graduation ceremony at IIT, Mumbai. What began that day was an incredible journey a journey in which he had to start applying what he had learned in college to develop innovative solutions for realworld problems. He said that: Many of these problems are not very well defined, and none of them have a single right answer; one has to apply ones creativity to develop new and different solutions. And this is what makes the journey exciting. He congratulated students on successfully completing an important phase of their career and entering a new exciting phase. According to Dr. Harrick, there are four key principles that one has to follow to be successful in this new phase.

Continual Learning
College education is just the beginning. To be successful, you have to do two key things. First, you can never stop learning. In todays day and age, technologies are changing so rapidly that you have to update yourself continuously to remain relevant. Second, while in college you have learned how to do a variety of things; successfully solving real-world challenges requires you to master the art of determining which learning you should apply, under what circumstances, and why. Drawing an analogy with Tennis, he said, Most professional tennis players have similar repertoire of shots. What differentiates the top players of the world from others is their ability to select the right shots at the right moments in a game!.

Identify and go to a place of most potential

You have to identify work environments and opportunities that provide you with the greatest potential for success. This is, often, hard to do; further, the process of identifying opportunities with most potential is iterative. You can acquire this skill through experience and from mentors. Two characteristics are essential for being successful in mastering the art of finding a place of most potential. First, you should be adaptive, willing to embrace change, and take chances. Dont get caught in a comfort zone; keep looking for opportunities with greater potential. Second, be different; dont simply follow others do things differently!

He recollected an incident from his own career. Like many Computer Engineers, he had penchant for hardware, architecture and design, and spent first three years of his PhD research career in this area. In 1989-90, an exciting new area involving digital audio and video technology was emerging. At that time, he had two options: Continue with his research in computer architecture and complete PhD in a year or two, or switch the research area completely and start from scratch (and hence take longer to complete PhD). He preferred the latter option while more expensive in the short-term, it definitely was an option with greater potential. This switch became a turning point in his career; he completed PhD with almost 25 research papers in top-tier conferences and journals in this new area, and became a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin (a top Computer Science department in the US).

Dont stop at the first answer that you find for the problem
For most real-world problems, there is no single right answer. Each problem can be viewed from many different perspectives, each one leading to a potentially different solution. Most ground-breaking innovations happen because a problem is approached from a different perspective. The key is not to stop at the first solution you obtain to a problem; keep looking for other perspectives and solutions; and dont be afraid of (or deterred by) failures. Convert win-lose situations into win-learn experiences. To illustrate this point, Dr. Harrick used the example of the National Geographic Magazine. He said that, on an average, each article published in the National Geographic carries around 50 photos. What most people dont realize is that these 50 photos are carefully selected from a collection of over 10,000 photos! It is not that the remaining 9,950 photos are not good; it is simply that the 50 selected ones provide a unique and a different perspective, and hence are better. So, a photographer cant stop after he takes one good photograph; he has to keep finding different perspectives, use different lenses, be patient and persevere to achieve outstanding results.

Be passionate and proud about what do you do

You go places only when you are passionate & proud of what you do.

Excerpts of Dr.Harrick Vins Speech at PSG College of Technology Graduation Ceremony was compiled by Shyam Sayee K Campus Lead, Chennai

Profile of Dr. Harrick M. Vin

Dr. Harrick Vin is a Vice President and the Chief Scientist of the Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC) at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India. He is also the Global Head for Innovation and Transformation for IT Infrastructure Services at TCS. He is a member of the TCS Corporate Technology Council that oversees all R&D and innovation activities at TCS. Prior to joining TCS, he was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas atat the University of Texas at Austin, he was the founder of the Austin for 15 years. At UT Distributed Multimedia Computing Laboratory and the co-founder of the laboratory for Advanced Systems Research. Over the past 20 years, Harrick has been involved in developing novel solutions in variety of areas in computing, including: one of the first video-over-IP desktop conferencing and collaboration system (1989); one of the earliest system design and implementation of a large-scale video-on-demand server and multimedia file system (1991); one of the first Quality-of-Service-aware Linux kernel (1996); Internet-scale distributed caching solution (1998); web-based content syndication and personalization solution (1999); a digital media entertainment gateway for homes (2002); and a programming environment for multi-core multi-threaded processor architectures (2005). These innovations led to three venturebacked startups in the US during 1999-2004. Harrick has authored more than 125 papers in leading international journals and conferences. Harrick is a recipient of several awards including the Faculty Fellow in Computer Sciences, Dean's Fellowship, National Science Foundation CAREER award, IBM Faculty Development Award, Fellow of the IBM Austin Center for Advanced Studies, AT&T Foundation Award, National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award, IBM Doctoral Fellowship, NCR Innovation Award, and San Diego Supercomputer Center Creative Computing Award. He has served on the Editorial Board of ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Multimedia. He has been a guest editor for IEEE Network. He has served as the conference and program chairperson for the premier ACM and IEEE international conferences in the area of multimedia systems and networks; and served as a technical program committee member for many international conferences. Harrick received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 1993 and Bachelors in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay in 1987.

area of multimedia systems and networks; and served as a technical program committee member for many international conferences. Harrick received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 1993 and Bachelors in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay in 1987.