IISc Open Day 2025

Open Day at IISc is one of those blissful times when you can enter a haven of intelligence and creativity while the rest of the world is busy with corruption, childish politics, superstitious idiocy and mindless entertainment. I wish there was such an environment I could have visited every weekend as a child. Anyway, since this time IISc was very crowded and there was a lot of walking to do, I decided to visit only a few projects. Here are some I found interesting:

At the brain research center where they do research on Alzheimers and dementia:

 

Avoiding metabolic syndrome

Get your vitamin D

Neurogenisis is better in people who keep their brain active

This device can tell if you have peripheral neuropathy by what level of vibration you can detect

Presynaptic neurons

Brain degeneration in dementia

Interesting quiz for kids

This was at the main campus:

Play chess

Have icecream made with liquid nitrogen cooling

Sodium alginate is obtained from seaweed

Sodium alginate forms a gel which can help disperse medicines in the body precisely

Kids punching a non-Newtonian fluid

3D printing metal on metal. This allows printing a magnetic metal onto non magnetic metal too

Vortexes in water can make flow inefficient. This lab experiments with various types of pipe materials to make flow efficient.

A mini seismograph

Using transducers to measure shockwaves created which are reflected back to the surface

Various ways of minimising landslides

Demo of how a grid polymer can keep loose sand in place

Crowd tracking using optical flow and having an early warning detection of stampedes

The people who proposed a suburban railway for Bangalore

Re-generating what a person saw, using fMRI scans

Diffusion techniques are used for regeneration

The model is first trained on known fMRI data generated when a person watches images

Using a specialized model to detect emotions in speech

Methods of improving AI reliability

There were many games based on AI projects. You can win chocolates as prizes.

Using Google's Teachable Machine to train an AI

Use gestures to play space invaders

Take a photo and substitute it in an AI generated image

Building 3D models using depth cameras

Recreating a jar in 3D from few photos. It can't handle many photos due to the small context window of vision transformers

Robots avoiding obstacles live

The obstacle avoidance control panel

Levitating metals via magnets

Large crowd, coconut water at Rs.50, free Bisleri water, toilets and games

 

As with every year, there were two places where they showed demos of the non-Newtonian fluid and two places where they showed demos of instant ice cream. Interestingly, one of the projects demonstrated how slowly water seeps into the soil, and mentioned that it can take a thousand years for water to seep through and reach the water table below. Of course that's not the only way it reaches.

There was a challenge given to us by some computer science students, to find a flaw in their simple coffee ordering program. The program gives you an account balance of Rs.100. You can either buy a coffee for Rs.35 or buy the special coffee for Rs.10000. The challenge is to find a flaw which allows you to buy the special coffee. I solved it within a minute, because I figured it might be an integer overflow problem. So I typed something like -10000000 at the number of cups to buy, and was able to 'buy' the special coffee because an integer overflow increased my account balance. There were no prizes for solving it, sadly.  These guys had actually allocated two hours of time for solving it :) They were surprised I could solve it in one shot, because as per their method, it required multiple attempts at increasing the account balance.

It was nice to see students working on the latest tech in terms of LLM's, but there were other groups that were using LLM's for image processing, but they were not even aware of basic image pre-processing techniques, which could have solved their problems much more easily. They were oddly struggling, saying that they were getting different outputs in different Android versions. I gave various teams many practical solutions which they agreed with and were grateful for.

One researcher mentioned that she detected lead in milk samples in Bangalore. She didn't reveal the brand, but said she tested seven brands, so I guess one or more of those contained lead (which can be harmful to the brain and nervous system).

One of the teams actually asked me for funding, which I found very strange. It is sad that people doing such excellent research are made to struggle for funds, while people spreading superstition obtain funds relatively easily.

There were some interesting games too. One of them required me to hold a 20kg dumbell horizontally with my hands fully extended. I managed to hold it for one minute and eleven seconds. They said it was a good duration, and that the maximum someone had held it was for two minutes. The guy who tried before me could hold it only for 40 seconds.

Most of the food stalls in the main campus appeared to be doing brisk business despite the quality food not being too good. Some of them accepted payments only via UPI. The food stall at the brain research center however, did poor business due to a lack of people visiting. They could've offered food at a lower rate. Somehow, I couldn't trust the quality of  food, and even at the IISc canteen, the food was priced too high. For such an event the stalls and canteen really could have offered food at a lower rate. So if you go there, make sure you carry your own food. Also, the gymkhana grounds used for parking, leaves a lot of dust on the vehicle, so public transport would be better. Alternatively, they could have sprinkled water on the grounds periodically, but March is a time of water shortages, so perhaps Open Day could have been held in Jan or Feb. It'd be cooler then too.  

Visiting IISc was as usual a pleasure, and if it weren't for the yearly increase in crowds and poor public transport access, I'd love to go there again.