Many of us who had spent decades working in AI and educational technology are extraordinarily fortunate to be alive and well at this time. We had committed to these technologies, although we knew they were unlikely to make progress in the short term. The Knowledge-Based Computer Systems team (KBCS) of the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST, now merged with the CDAC) had bet on AI and educational technology (ET). Sasi and I were both members of this team. Forty or fifty years ago, AI and ET sounded like science fiction to most people. Today, they are among the leading technologies of the day.
It has not been a question of making the right
choice and waiting for it to materialize. Sasi’s lifelong work is recorded in the
papers by him and his co-authors. You can find them on Google Scholar and
Researchgate.net. The number of co-authors, the number of topics, and the
sustained focus on technology are all there for you to see. I am glad that all
this is well-recorded, preserved, referred to, and continues to influence
people. His videos on his YouTube channel provide additional information about
his work.
This detailed recording of one's life's work through
the Internet had not been available in earlier times. For instance, it was not
available to Prof. Narasimhan, from whom all our team members learned a great
deal. He headed NCSDCT and gave us complete freedom and support to pursue our
interests.
The KBCS team at NCST achieved several
significant successes, and Sasi contributed to a number of them. We had written
a proposal for a Knowledge-Based Computer Systems project. The government responded by launching a major project involving a number of national institutions and securing the support of the United Nations Development Programme. Of course,
the NCST team had a very significant role in the project.
The NCST team launched the first in a series of
international conferences, which soon became an annual KBCS conference. Sasi
has a YouTube video describing the incredible experience this was. Of course,
he played an important role in these conferences.
These conferences allowed us to bring leading
researchers to India and to invite hundreds of Indian researchers. All of them
presented their research work, and the NCST team edited and had them published
internationally—that involved enormous amounts of editorial effort. There were
times when the team worked right through the night and rushed directly to the
airport at 5:30 in the morning to send the manuscript to the printers!
The effort required to solve certain types of
problems grows unavoidably exponentially as you try to use the solution to
bigger and bigger systems. Sashi’s MSc (Engg) thesis submitted to the IISc
begins by showing that this is the case for scheduling planes efficiently for
an airline. If he had worked abroad, Sasi’s work on airline scheduling would
have led him to launch a startup and build a large company across multiple
countries. It went off very well in India as well, as Air India picked up the
idea and sponsored the KBCS team to develop relevant software.
This led to the scheduling of oil tankers to
feed Indian refineries, sponsored by the Oil Coordination Committee, and later
the scheduling of oil pipelines. The paper describing pipeline-scheduling work
has Sasi as the first author, showing his key role in the effort. It is a
widely recognized piece of work.
The book on Expert Systems, produced by a few
members of the KBCS team, again has Sasikumar as the first author, recognizing
his key role. Sasi had the energy to collate the manuscript of this book and
put it in the public domain, decades after the hardcopy version was published. The
book received worldwide visibility. Every week now, I receive notifications
stating that someone has published an article in which this book is listed
among the references.
NCST’s work on a nationwide public testing
system using advanced techniques to create the questions, to grade and analyze
the answers, is very well known. The whole NCST worked together to run and
develop it over the years. Sasi had his heart in it and had contributed to it
from the beginning. Over the last two decades, this technology has played its
most significant role through projects at CDAC Mumbai. Through multiple
projects, it has served students at several levels and has served millions.
Only the other day, a principal told me that he has acquired the CDAC Mumbai
system for use by every student of his institution.
AI-based systems use the best algorithms and
heuristics they can find on the Internet to solve problems and to create
optimal plans for activities. As a result, researchers find that their
published work lives on.
The AI revolution owes a great deal to powerful
hardware that utilizes highly parallel computing involving many CPUs. Sasi had
worked on this in the last century, if I may say so, and has published his
results.
You may be interested in Sasi's YouTube Channel at
https://www.youtube.com/@SasikumarMthelittlesasi/videos
Srinivasan Ramani
