Dr. Arvind Yadav
Ph.D (IIT Roorkee)
Professor, PIET, Vadodara, Gujarat
Q1. Please share your educational and professional journey?
I did my schooling at government school in small town of Gujarat. Did my graduation in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Government Engineering College, Modasa, Gujarat, in 1999. Secured admission for Master of Engineering course in Electrical Engineering (specialization in Industrial Electronics) from one of the renowned institute of Gujarat, M. S. University, Baroda and completed it in 2001. After post graduation worked with Microsystems Ankleshwar, for around a half year duration as a Service engineer, where I have explored ABB’s PLC and SCADA system.
I got my first opportunity of working as a lecturer in the year 2003 at SVMIT, Bharuch, where I worked for around 2 years. In 2005, I got another opportunity as a lecturer at BIT, Varnama, Vadodara. After working for about 3 years at BIT, got the much needed opportunity to work as Assistant professor in Electronics & Communication Engineering Department at Parul Institute of Engineering and Technology in 2008. Within 6 months of joining I got promoted as Head of the Department. It was a learning opportunity, because of the day today challenges, which brought the needy transformation in me from pure academician to administrator.
But still the passion of technical growth has kept me starving for further education and then got the golden opportunity of my life, pursuing PhD program at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee in 2012. Getting admission into IIT was a dream came true, but within few days I realized the challenges associated with the PhD program. After, lots of struggle and ups & downs, submitted thesis in August 2015 and the degree got awarded in 2016. In August 2015, I rejoined my parent institute who sponsored me for Ph.D. program and got promoted as Associate Professor, then Associate Dean and finally Professor in Department of ECE, Parul Institute of Engineering & Technology, FET, Parul University.
Q2. What kind of hurdles did you face in your journey?
Hurdles are the opportunities to explore the potential of a human being. When I joined as a fresher in industry and academics, the initial hurdle was getting the disserving opportunity and following the orders of superiors even if they were wrong. Later on, as I got promoted to administration a position, the hurdle was getting work done with the juniors, especially fresher’s within stipulated duration of time. Sometimes I felt that the work that could have completed in simple manner was made more complex. Then comes misunderstanding, mistrust and blame game. But it has made me explore my potential and allowed me to develop potential to handle such people and situation.
Q3. You have been evolved from Lecturer to Professor in past years. What have you learned in this evolution period?
In any job winning the trust of a person is most deserving thing. The learning was improving the technical skills, imparting the up-to-date knowledge to the students. Helping them in needy situations, not limiting oneself for imparting technical knowledge, but also inculcating ethical, social behavior and discipline among students (but for this one has to follow it before preaching it to others). As the position changes form lecturer to professor, the need arise for devoting more time in administration activity compared to academics. Along with that I have been fortunate enough to be assigned the task of handling the R & D team in our institute. Which makes me still connected young researchers and helps me to improve my technical knowledge.
Q4. How do you handle stress in this fast and competitive life?
Stress is important part of today’s life, be it social, professional or personnel. I am of the opinion that most of the stress is artificial; it is fear of your own thought process. The stress is result of facing unknown challenges, meeting time deadline, and priorities. In most of the cases I used to handle the stress by doing the task which is having high priority, thus some of the tasks do remain unattended or partially completed. And they can be completed within short time.
Another important aspect of handling stress is maintaining balance between professional, personal and social life. After performing my professional duties at office I prefer to devote sufficient amount of time to my family, friends and near & dear ones. Being a social animal it is my duty to be useful to the society and nation at large.
Friends are stress busters. Yes I know having good friends these days are uncommon, but luckily I have friends who are residing at far away from me but they are always helpful in the needy time. Under stress condition discussion with friends most of the times results into solution, or else how to minimize the effect of stress on health wealth and family. Last but not least, playing with my kids, and doing things that makes me happy is also another way of handling stress.
Days are gone when having knowledge was more than sufficient to survive 30-35 years of service. In this fast changing era, getting updated with recent technological development has kept me surviving here.
Q5. How do you motivate students to excel in their academics and career?
Most of the students admitted to specific branch of engineering must had chosen it because of the recommendations/suggestions of their parents, friends, relatives etc. As they are not passionate about it, therefore it becomes very difficult for them to excel in that field. During my interaction with such students, I always advise them to apply their 100% efforts to explore the challenges thrown to them.
Another issue that is very common among most of the students of India is that they do their schooling in local Language, whereas the engineering courses are taught in English medium. Here, it becomes significant to support and encourage them so that they don’t feel uncomfortable in the classroom/campus, at the same time I used to encourage them to speak in English with their colleagues with whatever knowledge of English they have. And those students, who put the advice into practice, have been found excelling in their study as well as other segments of their life.
Discipline and meeting deadlines are one of the important aspects that I used to inculcate into my students, so that they are prepared for the challenges and opportunities available in the real life.
Q6. What was your Thesis topic in Ph.D. Please share brief about it?
I had worked on “Classification of Hardwood Species using Multi-resolution Techniques”. As we all know that lots of illegal activities are happing in the field of woods and wood species. In order to import/export a wood or items made of wood need certification from specific government agencies. Most of the precious wood species are imported/exported by showing them as low quality wood species / or they do not fall in category of endangered wooed species. All this becomes possible because of involvement of few corrupt officers/they are forced to carry out these activities under local/political pressure.
Thus we have developed a machine vision based system which extracts features of microscopic images of the hardwood species, normalizes it, and feeds it to input section of classifiers for classification.
In my work I had proposed discrete wavelet transform based LBP variants feature extraction techniques to extract significant amount of features. These extracted features are of high dimensions, thus feature selection techniques namely MRMR and PCA were used to reduce the feature dimensionality. These features were fed to SVM, RF and LDA classifiers to classify the hardwood species of wood into 75 different categories. The highest accuracy reported by our work has been 99.20 ± 0.42% using DWT based FOS-LBP histogram Fourier features (DWTFOSLBP-HF) technique at the 5th and 6th levels of image decomposition RGB images, using linear SVM classifier.
Q7. Which one thing do you want to change in yourself and why?
I wish I could change so many things in myself, Hahaha… We all fight if anything goes wrong with us. But nobody dares to fight for others. I wish someday I could dare myself to say wrong to wrong even if it is not happening with me and support those who stand by truth. This seems to be more idealistic statement but wish someday I could instill this behavior in myself.
Q8. Who is your source of motivation?
My first source of motivation is my mother and father because of whom I exist. My mother was not well-read but she has done all the efforts to make us educated. Then all my teachers who provided me helping hand to walk on this path of knowledge and reach this place where I am today. Especially all my PhD supervisors (Dr. R S Anand, Dr. M L Dewal, Dr. Sangeeta Gupta) Dr. S P Yadav, Dr. Vinod Kumar and my fellow colleagues from IIT Roorkee have also motivated me a lot.
Q9. Who is your Role Model in your domain?
Though there are several people who inspired me, but Dr. Vinay Pant, Electrical Engineering department, IIT Roorkee, is my role model in my domain.
