BENGALI SCIENTISTS OF MODERN INDIA

HINDU BENGALI SCIENTISTS & THEIR CONTRIBUTION IN BUILDING MODERN INDIA:

This is what the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind had to say about Bengali scientists on Nov 28th, 2017:

Lauding scientists as "true nation builders", President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday said they have a major responsibility for the realization of New India - an India that will achieve certain developmental milestones by 2022. Appreciating the commitment of scientists to the nation, Kovind said it was important to harness the scientific talent pool in Bengal, for the good of the state as also the country.

New India cannot be achieved without New Bengal. And neither New India nor New Bengal can be achieved without the scientific community here contributing in strong measure," Kovind said at "Vigyan Chintan-Scientific Ecosystem in Kolkata", organized at the Raj Bhavan, where he interacted with scientists from various reputed science and technology institutes of the city.

He said Bengal has produced a galaxy of scientists and made a major contribution in promoting the scientific temper in the country.

This is what the ex- Prime Minister of India, Dr.Manmohan Singh had to say about Hindu Bengali scientists on 2nd June, 2012:

"In many senses, modern science in India was nurtured in this city. I congratulate the city of Kolkata for nourishing an environment of learning and producing some of the country’s outstanding scientists, mathematicians and economists, including many of our Nobel laureates," 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh praised the contribution to India's scientific pursuit by scientists from West Bengal while opening the centenary year of the Indian Science Congress Association in Kolkata.

Here are some of the latest Bengali scientists who reached the pinnacle of success in India in recent times. Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize is the most sought after Science Award in India. Here's how Hindu Bengalis performed last 5 years. 

2021 Prize Winners:

4 Bengalis out of 11. Still a whopping 36% from the state of West Bengal.Kanishka Biswas,Debdeep Mukhopadhyay,Anish Ghosh,Kanak Saha are the Bengali scientists from the list.

2020 Prize Winners:

7 Bengalis won the prize out of 12 candidates. A whopping 58.33%. A single state is producing around 60% of scientists of the entire country. 

Subhadeep Chatterjee, Jyotimayee Dash,Abhijit Mukherjee,Suryendu Dutta,Kinshuk Dasgupta,Rajat Subhra Hazra,Surajit Dhara are Bengali scientists among the list.

2019 Prize Winners:

5 Bengalis out of 12. Thats a whopping 41.6%.Soumen Basak, Tapas Kumar Maji,Subimal Ghosh,Aninda Sinha, Shankar Ghosh are Bengali scientists from the lsit. single state is producing around 41% of scientists of the entire country. 

2018 Prize Winners:

5 Bengalis out of 12. Thats a whopping 41.6%. Rahul Banerjee, Swadhin Kumar Mandal, Aditi Sen De, Ambarish Ghosh, Parthasarathi Chakraborty. are Bengali scientists from the list.

2017 Prize Winners:

3 out of 10 are Bengalis. That's a whopping 30%. Sanjeev Das, Aloke Paul, AMit Dutt are Bengali scientists from the list.

The Bengalis are over represented even in the Artificial Intelligence Researchers in India.

They make upto 40-60% in the Top 10 list on a year on year basis. Some of the names are listed below:

Sankar Kumar Pal:

About: Sankar Kumar Pal is a Distinguished Scientist and former Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His educational qualifications are as follows: • B. Tech. in Radio Physics and Electronics, Calcutta University, India, 1972. • M. Tech. in Radio Physics and Electronics, Calcutta University, India, 1974. • Ph.D. in Radio Physics and Electronics, Indian Statistical Institute/ Calcutta University, India, 1978-79. (Enrolled and studied at Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta as its Ph.D. student; the degree was awarded by Calcutta University) • Ph. D. and DIC in Electrical Engineering, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London University, London, 1982. His research interest lies within Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Image/Video Processing, Data Mining, Soft Computing, Granular Computing, Fuzzy-Rough Computing, Neural Nets, Web Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Social Networks, and Machine-Mind Development.  

Bidyut Baran Chaudhari:

About: He is a Professor & Ex-Head Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition Unit at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His educational background is as follows: • B.Tech. (Electronics) – Calcutta University. • M.Tech. (Communication) – Calcutta University. • Ph. D. – Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. • Post – Doctorate – Queen’s University, UK. His research interest includes: • Digital Document Processing, Optical Character Recognition • Natural Language Processing including Lexicon Generation, Ambiguity analysis, Syntactic and Semantic analysis in Bangla and other Indian Languages. • Statistical and Fuzzy Pattern Recognition including data clustering and density estimation. • Computer Vision and Image Processing. • Applications oriented research and externally funded project execution. • Cognitive Science.  

Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya:

About: Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is the current President of ACL and serves as the Director of IIT Patna (since 2015). He is the Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering IIT Bombay. He was educated in IIT Kharagpur (B.Tech, 1984), IIT Kanpur (M.Tech, 1986) and IIT Bombay (Ph.D., 1994). He has been visiting scholars and faculty at MIT, Stanford, UT Houston and University Joseph Fouriere (France). Prof. Bhattacharyya’s research areas are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and AI. He has guided more than 250 students (Ph.D., masters, and Bachelors), has published more than 250 research papers and led government and industry projects of international and national importance.  

Dr. Sriparna Saha:

About: Dr. Sriparna Saha received the M.Tech and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, Kolkata, India, in the years 2005 and 2011, respectively. She is currently a Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India. She is the author of a book published by Springer-Verlag. She has authored and co-authored more than 120 papers in reputed journals and conferences including IEEE/ACM transactions, core ranked conferences. Her current research interests include text mining pattern recognition, natural language processing, multi-objective optimization, and biomedical information extraction. She is also a senior member of IEEE.  

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay is currently a Professor in Machine Intelligence Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. She has worked in multiple reputed universities across the world such as Australia, Germany, France, Mexico, and many more. She has been recognized for her research papers and was awarded the Bhatnagar prize, Infosys award, JC Bose Fellowship, and many more prestigious awards and fellowships. She is a member of the Science, Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of India. She has authored and co-authored over three hundred research articles and published six books from prominent publishers. She is one of the top AI researchers in India with a focus on pattern recognition and data mining.

Arpita Patra

Arpita Patra is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at IISc, Bangalore. She has two thesis and 15 journals under the scientific publications with participation in 53 conferences as an AI researcher to influence the minds of people regarding artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms with specialization in MPC (Multi-Party Computation) in cryptography and the area of fault-tolerant distributed computing.  

Dr Partha Talukdar

Dr Partha Talukdar is a staff research scientist at Google Research, focusing on graph-based learning algorithms using automated knowledge, temporal information harvesting from large data, and neuro-semantics. He has pursued his Ph D and post-doctoral studies, after which he has worked with IISc and Microsoft. His interests lie in natural language processing, machine learning, and knowledge graphs. Dr Talukdar has co-written a book on Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning, published several research papers, and presented them across India, Italy, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, the USA, Belgium, Australia, and more.

Nikhil R Pal

Nikhil R Pal is a professor in the Electronics and Communication Science Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His research interest includes pattern recognition, medical and satellite image analysis, fuzzy sets theory, neural networks, evolutionary computation, bioinformatics, and brain science. According to Researchgate website, Pal produced 299 papers. His research paper received over 14,000 citations.

He has co-authored a book titled Fuzzy Models and Algorithms for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing and Advances in Soft Computing. He also co-edited Advances in Pattern Recognition and Digital Techniques, ICAPRDT99 and Advanced Techniques in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Pal obtained his BSc (Physics) and MBA (Operation Research) degrees from the University of Calcutta and his MTech and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute.

Soumen Chakrabarti:

Soumen Chakrabarti is a professor at IIT Bombay in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. According to his Google Scholar profile, Chakrabarti has produced 167 research papers. His current research interests include:

• Better embedding representation for passages, entities, types and relation
• Searching the annotated Web with entities, types and relations
• Graph conductance search, which is supported by IBM and Microsoft.

Chakrabarti holds eight US patents on web-related inventions. He has authored one of the earliest books on web search and mining. He also wrote a book on web search and mining called, Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data.

He has done his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur (1991) and a Master’s (1992) and PhD (1996) in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

List of Indian Bengali scientists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_Bengali_scientists

Joy Bangla Fact:

There are 5000 Bengali Brahmins in America. They have 1500 patents and 2 Nobel prizes. A stat that even Ashkenazi Jews cant match!

The spirit of science is kept alive by these Bengali young guns and India will be prepared when time pushes us to a New World. We wont be scared. We will be ready. 

Jai Hind!