Precog: A Family Affair

Before joining IIIT-Delhi, my father and I sat together to go through the list of faculty members who would teach me. We were awed by them all but some names stood out, one being PK’s. I read about his achievements and was eager to enroll in one of his courses when I joined IIIT-Delhi. After completing my first year, I was presented with several domains within computer science which I did not know existed; I wanted to explore them all. During the same time, Backpack was a hot product which students and professors were gushing about. I was told that a few of PK’s students had created Backpack and my interest in working with PK increased. However, it wasn’t until my third year that I actually met him.

I enrolled for DHCS, a CSE course on Human-Computer Interaction — the first of its kind in India. I liked the work we did in the course and wanted to dig deeper into this domain. This led me to become a Precog intern in the Summer of 2016. I worked with Dr. Niharika Sachdeva (recently received her Ph.D. from the group) to analyse the satisfaction of citizens after police response to their complaints. I also evaluated the Android applications that the police had released for use by the people.

Pic: Precog Interns: Summer of 2016

My association with Precog and PK continued as my last year at IIITD rolled in. I took up a BTP, collaborating with another faculty member on campus — Professor Shriram Venkatraman — to study the social impacts of Killfie. I enjoyed the research immensely and learned more than I could ever hope to. I was given the freedom to work on a project I liked, making it more fun.

The culture at Precog is imbibed with working smart and partying hard. Regular socials (where everyone interacts with each other informally) ensure we know people from different projects, making Precog a research family rather than just a research group. The openness with which we greet each other (we can’t call anyone Sir/Ma’am, not the PhD scholars, not even PK himself) brings with it the comfort of familiarity I haven’t witnessed anywhere else. We have regular group meetings too, where everyone is encouraged to participate in the discourse, leading to a fresh set of eyes noticing something unique in the project.

At Precog, I met a group of people who were not defined by just what they did. Like the stars in a constellation, everyone had a different story to tell.