From July 2010 to June 2011, I will be mentoring 8 undergrad students from my alma mater, Fr. Conçeicao Rodrigues College of Engineering for their Senior Projects (a.k.a. Final-Year projects). We plan to work together on two projects in the area of Personal Information Management. This is an experiment of sorts, because as far as I know, final-year projects in Bombay University have never been mentored remotely, and only a small proportion are research-oriented.

Why it’s the right time for this.

There are several reasons why I’m doing this: several years ago, a few of my friends from undergrad — Salil Wadhavkar, Ninad Pradhan, Vikram Iyengar, Noel Tide, Rahul Saxena, Raghu Cowlagi — had discussed mentoring our juniors to participate in tech contests. At the time, we all had just finished our Masters degrees, and felt that we could nudge a few students to take up research and grad school by such encouragement. That conversation died down for several reasons about 4-5 years ago, but the spark remained.

I enjoy building things. That’s why I had decided I wanted to be in industry (instead of academia) even before I started my Ph.D. program. But it’s also fun to conduct studies and find answers to interesting questions, and it’s incredibly hard to do the latter while my job at Google enables me to build Awesome Stuff™ full-time. Collaborating with students seems like a win-win situation for all of us: the undergrad students gain exposure to research, and we all are able to build, study, and publish what we find.

Proposing the collaboration

With these ideas in mind, I visited my undergrad college (under Bombay University) when I was in Bombay this February. I met the Principal, Dr. Srija Unnikrishnan, and the Head of the Department of Information Technology, Prof. Mahesh Sharma. Both found the idea promising, and Prof Sharma asked me to address the 3rd year classes (junior-level in the US system) that were in progress at the time. Although I felt a little bad interrupting classes to deliver my 15-min spiel, the students, professors, head of the department and the principal were not only supportive but also enthusiastic about this. My concerns about the distance & my lack of physical availability in Bombay were brushed aside by Prof. Sharma (“when there’s chat and Skype, why do you have to be here personally?”)

Soon, two groups of four students contacted me, and we worked on defining the projects between February and now (June 2010). I was impressed by their initial emails, which clearly showed they were not only interested, but had also done their homework before proposing a project. I will be collaborating with one team on an email-related project, and on a task-management related project with another; both within Personal Information Management. (We will publish the details of these projects and the entire source code developed as part of this project as and when we have something to report.)

Other voices

Luis von Ahn from CMU recently published a blog post about outsourcing his research group. While he proposes doing this mainly for monetary reasons, I figured this could be more of an academically-enriching mutually-beneficial experience. There are a few neat opinions expressed in his blog post, as well as in the comments.

Next steps

I expect to learn many valuable lessons about cross-continental collaboration from this process as much as I expect to learn from my new colleagues — who are no doubt better versed in technologies of the day than I am. I will continue to blog about our experiences as we proceed.

If you have any tips for us as we embark on this year-long experiment, please leave us a comment.