How do you use AI tools in your work? (Edited by Ashmita Gupta)
Tag: research
Better Brews
Researchers are using science to improve our coffee It’s a crisp, windy morning in Bengaluru. I open my jar of fresh coffee powder and pack some tightly into my coffee filter. I then gently pour some boiling water over the bed of coffee grounds, filling it to the brim. Watching the water burble over […]
Choosing Academia
Faculty members in academia want more than what a lucrative corporate package following a conventional career path has to offer. The modest income compared to industry jobs is just a known feature of their decision to join academia and not a problem that they’re trying to solve. It’s the call to heed something bigger than […]
‘With Gen AI, there are now a lot of opportunities, but also challenges’
Nihar B Shah is Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, where he leads a research group exploring how human-AI collaboration can lead to more trustworthy research publications and fairer evaluation systems. He completed his ME from the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE) at IISc in 2010, and also received the Young Alumnus Medal […]
Origin Story
How did life emerge on Earth? (Spoiler alert: We still don’t know) On a cold winter evening in 1952, in a dimly lit lab at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, a 22-year-old graduate student, stared at the murky brown sludge in the shake flask in front of him, his stomach sinking. Days of […]
‘I don’t want to be “Durga”. I want to be Anindita’
Anindita Bhadra, Professor at the Behaviour and Ecology Lab, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata, does not believe in glorifying women as multitaskers. A former PhD student at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc, Anindita studied hierarchy in social wasps and later shifted to researching the behaviour of stray dogs in India. […]
The Feeling of Being
Can scientists solve the conundrum of consciousness? Sometime in the late 1980s, two Oxford scientists examined PS, a patient who had suffered damage to the right side of her brain. The damage left her unable to notice things to her left. Even when she drew objects, she would draw their right sides perfectly […]
Modelling Life
Maths is providing new ways to make sense of biology In the early 2000s, a fierce debate was raging among health practitioners about when to start HIV patients on antiretroviral therapy. The standard approach at the time was to delay treatment until the disease had progressed to a critical stage. However, emerging mathematical models […]
‘People think talking about mental health will make it worse. That’s not true’
Deanna Barch is a well-known figure in the field of psychiatry. She has spent over three decades studying the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the development of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia and depression. While her research primarily focuses on adults, she also studies the risks of mental illness in children due to early adversity, such […]
Crossed Cultures
The lives and experiences of IISc’s international students Fourteen years ago, before Fekadu Mihret Geremew came to India for the first time to pursue his Master’s, he had heard a lot about how it was not the ideal place to live. The image he had in mind was a country of traffic congestion, overcrowded […]
