 So, good morning once again to all the participants. I have been asked to kick off with the first session and I thought I will touch upon a very a few, but very important aspects of what I call the articulation abilities. Articulation is an English word to articulate means to express and the expression that we use in our human interaction is of two forms, could be verbal, could be written. There is also an articulation mechanism which is neither verbal nor written, but which comprises of body actions, what we call body language. So, it is a visible articulation. In fact, if you recall the growth of a human being as we grow from birth to childhood to adulthood and so on, you will notice that our visible abilities are which are intrinsic by the way start becoming very useful right from the early days. When a child cannot speak and certainly cannot read or write, the child can see and child can make others see what it wishes to express. So, visible articulation and understanding of visible articulation is the first thing that happens to all of us. Verbal articulation is the next. Indeed, I always point out that human children learn a foreign language to speak a foreign language between the age of three years and six years, which is later on called the mother tongue. It is important to appreciate that all children learn this language independent of the competencies that they develop in articulation and in other fields later on in their lives. And this they do without going through any workshop like this, any educational institution, any examination, any course, any book. What I wish to emphasize is that God has endured all of us with adequate capacity to solve very difficult logical problems such as mastering a foreign language, which we intrinsically do when we are very young. Sadly, this ability is limited to our verbal communication and that too for what we may call a run of the mill regular activities that we undertake when we are very young children. But we are indeed able to express ourselves reasonably well to convey exactly what we feel to our parents, to our brothers and sisters, to our friends, to neighbors and everyone. And equally well, we are able to understand what other people are conveying verbally to us very clearly. This ability is then to be further supplemented by ability to write and read that happens in our school days. You will notice that this ability requires us to use our vision faculty to a far greater effect because what is written is written in terms of symbols. Symbols which form the alphabet of a language for example, or the digits etcetera, you have to master these symbols. Then you have to go over to an abstract level where after mastering the symbols, you learn to write these symbols in a particular juxtaposed way such that they represent what we usually speak. So, writing the spoken language itself is the first task that we have taught while we learn writing. However, the matter does not end there because we take a lot of liberties when we speak that is the verbal articulation is often not as exact as it necessary to convey to someone what we wish to state particularly when that someone is not aware of the context in which what is being said is being said. That is because when we speak we are interacting with people and we always assume a lot of contextual knowledge on behalf of listeners, but when we write something the written word would be read by people who are not necessarily aware of the context and therefore, writing skills are more difficult. Similarly, when we read we need to understand in our mind by creating a context environment of what the author had in mind when the author wrote those sentences. So, this bringing out of the context implicitly in whatever you write is very important. Modern articulation has multiple facets and the most important to master the art of writing is an attribute which I call discipline is a state of mind and to achieve the state of mind is not very easy. Let me give an example where I believe that it is the lack of discipline which causes people not to have mastered their abilities for written articulation to the extent that they could have. I have been often told time and again that sir I cannot write well in English because English is not my native language. It is true with most of us we live in India our native languages are Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Odisha whatever but very few people would have English as their mother tongue. But what I say will apply even to those whose mother tongue is English which is the following. I did an experiment for several years during our M. Tech admissions to our school of information technology in IIT Bombay. For the shortlisted candidates I would give them a longer test paper it would of course have several technical questions, but one favorite question which I would ask them to write answer to was write about your family in 10 to 15 sentences. Most people would write and as you would expect they would perhaps write bad English. The next question would say rewrite your answer in your own mother tongue. I could personally check the correctness of the second answer written in Hindi or Marathi because these two languages I know I studied in them. But I got the answers checked even when written in Telugu and Tamil because we had senior M. Tech students and research scholars who would be competent to handle that language. And what we found consistently over 5 years with a fairly I would say acceptable set of sufficient to draw statistical inference is that people who wrote bad English also wrote bad Telugu or bad Tamil or bad Marathi. In fact I am now tempted to challenge anybody who claims that he or she makes mistakes in writing English language sentences because English is not the native tongue. I would ask that person to write 10 or 15 sentences in his or her mother tongue and I will say that the number of errors and the kind of errors made would be exactly similar to the errors made while writing. What does that to do with the word discipline? What does that to do with word discipline is that people who write correctly have disciplined their mind to look for errors after they write, to avoid errors while they write and to correct errors after they read what they have written. This is the minimum discipline in written articulation that every grown up human being is expected to follow. Sadly most people particularly people whose life is spent in professional careers and therefore they are expected to imbibe this discipline as a part of their life sadly they do not do these things. Whenever you write something you would be writing emails for example or you would be writing even simple things as questions in your question papers that you set or you would be writing explanatory notes, tutorial problem descriptions. Do you carefully read what you have written? Do you think while you are writing? Do you automatically correct a small spelling mistake while you are writing? Do you at least correct all the spelling mistakes after you have written? Do you carefully check the grammar that you have deployed in constructing sentences after you have written it? Do you go through an iterative process to finalize whatever you are writing before you actually use that written thing either for sending as email or for submitting it to someone or for giving it to someone. Consequently this kind of discipline has to be coupled with both rigor. Rigor is expected to be imbibed in our written articulation through our school education. Sadly the school education appears not to be able to achieve this task to an adequate level and that is one of the reasons why when we get students in our colleges they are not able to articulate themselves well in the written language. As one of the honorable guest speakers mentioned that communication skills is not a testing requirement for our most of our competitive exam and therefore that ability is never tested and since that ability is never tested is well known to participants the participants never prepare themselves for imbibing that ability and this is a vicious circle which goes on and on and on. However when you come to the professional education professional work of any kind and particularly professional research there is no shortcut but to develop your written articulation abilities to perfect it is in this context that rigor is required. I will give a simple example of rigor in a mathematical term but because it is a written articulation it is interesting to observe what exactly rigor would imply. My favorite example is that of a situation where you are mathematically modeling something there are three variables call them a b and c and we wish to state that these three variables are different in value. We typically write a not equal to b not equal to c and we believe that this is an adequate rigorous representation of what we have in mind. Several decades ago I noticed in one of the books the expression used was a not equal to b not equal to c not equal to a. Please note that the first version does not necessarily imply that c and a are distinct. I suddenly learned that what we take for granted is not necessarily conveyed by what we write unless we look at whatever we have written more rigorous. In fact I recall I shared it with Professor Gaithonde then who said he has always been using this kind of expression is right and there are many many of my colleagues who were familiar with this rigor. I was not but I learnt it and when I learnt it I have been using it since then and that is the point about rigor. The rigor has to be obtained through observation through imbibing those observations in your mind and through using whatever you have imbibed very very seriously in every writing that you do. I will tell you one method which I learnt at about 2 o'clock in the night in 1995-96 when I was the general co-chair for the international conference on very large databases and my colleague conference organizer Dr. Anand Deshpande from Pune was visiting me and we are having a late night discussion and it is only in the night time that I would get to look at the emails sent by my students and I was looking at one email which had rather horrible English constructs trying to describe something technically which I could sort of figure out what that person is intending to say in spite of these errors and then I was trying to correct those errors in a response and Dr. Anand Deshpande looked at what I was doing he says what are you doing he said I am correcting the errors and he observed a very important thing he said but sir if you do that he will never learn to correct his own mistakes so please do not do that please resend that mail back again to him replying first correct all English errors in your submission and reset because then he will be looking at it once again seriously he will be making the corrections aware of the fact that you have seen that mail and you are angry with the incorrect usage he will probably spend more time and in the process will discipline his own mind better perhaps a time has come where we should all resort to this both for our students as well as amongst ourselves. If we receive a badly written letter or a draft we should send it back to our students saying that it will not be checked unless you correct all the basic errors this is one way of introducing both discipline and rigor amongst our students. I will mention a few things about hard work as you know anything that you want to do professionally perfectly requires hard work as human beings our constant endeavor is to minimize our work to maximize our gains in mathematical terms it is called optimization so we are all great optimizers particularly when it comes to getting marks by doing minimum work we excel by mastering the current set pattern for the examination and working towards it rather than working to maximize the knowledge but nevertheless I like this what do I mean by what kind of hard work do I imply when it comes to written articulation the key word or key words rather are iterative improvement I implicitly followed this what it means is by the way you write the first draft of anything then you read then you correct things then you read it again then you make corrections and so on but the iteration that I imply here go beyond just the correction of basic mistakes I had sort of understood it and used to attempt it but I learnt it best when in 1995-96 I was given the responsibility as dean of resources to build the alumni association other things and I was required and my director Prasar Sukhatmeh was required to interact very frequently with several of our alumni constantly writing letters and expecting replies from them and responding to them and so on and I learnt one fantastic thing about Prasar Sukhatmeh whose English articulation both verbal and written by the way is absolutely excellent yet when he would draft a letter he would never send it he would circulate it to me and to Prasar Narayan Murti and couple of other colleagues saying would you like to add something so please note this is not at all an issue of correcting mistakes in English language because they did not exist but whether the choice of words whether the formation of sentences was adequate or should they be improved whether some idea is missing which should have been articulated whether something should be emphasized whether something should be deemphasized these issues become important even in small letters that you write because when you write a letter you are not personally standing in front of that person the person is not privy to your body language which can convey so many other things everything has to be said in the words the second aspect about a written articulation is a verbal articulation is heard and later on only from memory somebody can try to decipher what you said but a written articulation on the other hand can be read again and again and again commas and full stops and clauses could be deciphered differently every time you read them and therefore it is far more important to be very careful on what you write so this iterative improvement or I would call iterative perfection is a technique which I have learned from Professor Sukhatme and I would like to suggest that you will find this technique extremely important particularly when you are writing technical conference papers without adequate number of iterations you will not be able to produce the best that you can ever write it is therefore important that you do this iterative. Another technique which I learned from another friend of mine again in I think that was late 80s or early 90s Professor Ramini who was the director of national center for software technology NCST as we used to call it both of us were required to write a report on certain things and he had asked me to prepare a draft and two days three days later he called me says Fadak is it ready I said no I am still I have written only five pages this five pages so I have yet to write three more pages anyway another week later when we met he looked at those eight page report which I had written and he says this is too big and I asked him why do you think it is too big he says Fadak please understand that when you and I write this report this will not be this was in the context of some what you call a financial institution a financial regulator and he says only very senior people from that regulator body will be reading this report and they do not have patience to read an eight page report so whatever you want to state must be stated in two pages if you cannot do that then nobody will spend time in reading all your eight page report so he taught me how to reduce words how to reduce sentences without losing the meaning and it was amazing I found out that the eight page report that I had written in two readings he reduced it to four pages and when I read the remaining four pages that were left out after his editing it still made enough sense then he pointed out Fadak your style is verbal you write the way you speak and that is not the way it should be written so you have to be precise you remember one of our guests from one of the universities who interacted briefly with us the retired IS officer he mentioned the same thing you have to be precise and that precision means additional iteration there are so many things that are involved in writing good conference papers good technical conference papers I am sure that over the next day and over the next two days today and tomorrow a professor Sanna Murthy and our colleagues will be taking you through a whole lot of important issues I thought I will use this opportunity to emphasize what I call the basic points in any good written articulation to recapitulate I mentioned that the articulation can be verbal or written I am currently ignoring visible articulation although essays can be written on it suffice it to say that when you go and see a stage play apart from the way the drama has been written the dialogues have been written apart from the way the various actors and actresses speak those dialogues you will appreciate that without enormous amount of body language that you see among those actors the drama would not be as effective to some extent we teachers are also actors and we have to use our body language to convey things visibly in addition to whatever we articulate verbally in a class but most importantly what we write in our board on the board what we write in our slides what we write by hand is as important as writing a technical paper and that will require all the dimension that I mentioned subsequently namely an enormous amount of self discipline extraordinary rigor in whatever we write and of course hard work specifically in the context of written articulation hard work comprising iterative improvement I would like to end by saying that not only I have not found any substitute for hard work and I would like to assure you that I am a reasonably clever person I am a good optimizer like most of you I would also like to optimize my time do minimum efforts and get maximum gains but not only in the matter of written articulation but in the matter of conducting any professional activities sadly I have failed to find any alternative to hard work I have then studied so many other successful people and then I have noticed something this is for all of you who are still attempting to do optimization reducing the hard work or reducing the amount of work please note that a very large number of people all of them much more cleverer than all of us have attempted over last 4000 years to find a substitute for hard work none of them have succeeded yet there is no reason to believe that we are so smart that we will succeed so please rather than avoiding hard work actually imbibe hard work philosophy and in the context of written articulation please go by the two great learnings that I had one from Professor Sukhatme about iterative improvement in the meaning of what you are articulating and one from Professor Ramani on being precise and reducing the flap in your writing I will end my talk with this thank you very much