Conducting Research: A Personal Technical Experience
-Part VI: At the National Aerospace Laboratories
By JIRARA
© JIRARA, September 2022
Published by JIRARA
on matrubharti.com
All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, for any commercial purposes without the prior permission of the author and/or publisher.
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Disclaimer: This is exactly the same as in the previous parts of the story.
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Continued from the story/article part V.
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Some interesting/unhappy incidences (as a coordinator or the head of the division):
i) Delay in getting the results: A senior scientist and the intermediate project director and the coordinator from a sponsoring agency complained directly to my boos about some delay in the work of the project that was given to me, this made me upset, since I felt he should have told me, and I would have explained the reasons; so I went straight to his office and raised my objection to the way he handled the situation, and told all the reasons as to why there were delays: i) the work was difficult, ii) the data were not coming to me in certain time frame from his organisation, and so on; and I also had told that if he did not have the patience he could cancel the project, because I was not interested in pursuing the work. The project work was continued.
ii) Insufficient information: One scientist from a sponsoring agency was supposed to supply certain information on some constants that were important to be utilised for getting proper results; and he had not given to us; but he utilised the same information and generated correct results with his own software for the sake of checking, and presented the results to his group’s review meeting and had said that the results obtained by us were wrong; when I learnt this through somebody, I blasted that ignorant scientist and told that he had not given that missing important information to be plugged into our software and hence our results differed a lot; to which he tendered his apologies, and supplied the pending data with which we got the correct results; but by this he had already damaged our reputation and gained his own. After this incidence I stopped interacting with this half-trained and showing-off-kind of the scientist.
iii) Non-agreement on one important estimated parameter: After thorough analysis of several sets of real flight data of LCA, we found that a particular lateral-directional stability parameter was not being reconciled with the wind tunnel/analytical predictions; and we had held that our results were more plausible since they had been obtained with lot of data-consistency checking, and with good performance metrics; but the sponsors were not agreeing, and nearly it took one year of convincing; later on they did their own analysis again; which they did after several meetings, and conducting further several wind tunnels experiments (abroad) with more specific and stringent accuracy control; then the results were reconciled.
iv) Non-cooperation from one scientist: A junior scientist was not very efficient and always worked in his own dodging style; and this was not acceptable to me, because the project works had to be done in a specific style to maintain the work-time chart drawn out at the time of the project proposal; when the work was handed over he would say he had understood everything; and after a month’s time if the progress was asked he would have several doubts; and this will further delay the matters, this was his style of dodging; and one day I became furious and told him to change the group and even the division if he did not want to work according to my instructions and requirements; to which he got upset and then complained to the head of the division, who had first come to me and got the briefing from me, and then he called the disgruntled scientist and just told him: do what Dr. Raol says. And the boss left my chamber, and the guy also; gradually he adopted the new style and over a period of time without even a Ph. D, rose to the level of Sc. G, and then retired.
v) Another unhappy scientist: This guy was not called for the merit promotion, so became unhappy with me; I said his performance for last three/four years was not satisfactory and hence had not got sufficient marks in his CRs, and hence he was not qualified to be called for the interview; he even did not have patience to listen to me in which way his performance was poor; he banged my office door and left in a huff; after a week he had come to my office, and had reiterated that his performance could not be lesser than 90%; and kept arguing; and then I had told him that if he listened to me, I would recount point by point, to which he listened and yet did not agree and left the room. And for a year he never looked at me whenever he had met me in the corridor; and I also had stopped interacting with him; he resumed talking to me after he got the next promotion.
vi) Group change of another scientist: A fairly senior scientist was after me and was all the time urging me that he was unhappy with his group leader, and wanted me to shift him to another group, which I did after much thought and after his so many requests; and then when his group leader approached him and asked why did he go to another group, he told that I shifted him on my own to the other group; a liar guy.
vii) Unnecessary and unhealthy outburst: A group leader one day suddenly entered my office and blasted me that a Scientist B is resigning from his group since I had not involved him in the newly approved international project; ironically the same group leader had not supported the initial proposal of this project, and had also categorically told me that he or his group was too busy with their ongoing projects. Actually, the Sc-B was really unhappy with the treatment of his group leader and had even come to my residence and had expressed his woes and that he wanted to change the group, and also had told me that he had got an offer from a private company with nearly double the current salary, so he might leave, and hence left the division. Another liar senior level group leader scientist.
viii) Denial to finish the thesis work as was planned: A lady scientist denied to complete the thesis work as was planned and recorded in her thesis synopsis; to which I had become furious, and she argued that whatever she had done was sufficient, then I had said that she could submit the thesis on her own, and then justify it, and if anything adverse happened I would not be responsible; she cried and left my office; this immature scientist could have created some problem of harassment of which I was really scared; and then on Saturday she called me and expressed her sorry; and on Monday came to my office and agreed to complete the work, which she completed and published a paper on that piece of the work, and she even got very good remarks from a foreign thesis examiner on that piece of the work, and got NAL’s research award.
ix) Getting involved in the CLAW team: For unknown reasons, I was very tacitly and unjustifiably left out of the CLAW team officially; to which I had protested; and some unpalatable reasons devoid of any common sense were given to me to justify the action, much later I came to know that one lady group leader who was included in the new team had raised some objections of my being in the CLAW team; her reason that came out later on was, since I was staying in the official quarters, and being near to the work place, I would go even on holidays and weekends and do more work and might make more progress compared to her, and she being in the city far away from the NAL office would not be able to devote so much time.
Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for me, we all did almost equal amount of work and earned our assessment promotions and credits which were almost nearly the same.
x) A group leader (or any of his team members) did not know how to solve a particular problem of handling large flight data for obtaining a general (nonlinear) math model, and yet did not have any patience for getting the solutions from the others; he kept on making a big noise and blaming my group and me even though we were sincerely working on that problem. Eventually, he sought help from some foreign body, since he had some money left to be spent from his big project; I never came to know who actually resolved the issue and how was it done?; since by the time I had retired from the lab.
xi) Egoistic scientist: This group leader had a peculiar philosophy that nobody, even the head of the division, and the director of the lab could directly approach any of the scientists working in her team to resolve any scientific problem, for which some expertise had existed in her group. And despite this, some scientists were ready to render any help requested, especially they would not like to refuse to the director of the lab. I had generally spread the message that nobody should ever say no to ‘the science’, and spirit of investigation.
xii) Ill support to some scientists for the visit abroad: One high profile professor had been invited to the FMC group on TOKTEN (transfer of knowledge through expatriate nationals) program (of CSIR), and the visiting professor and I had handed over to two scientists some technical problem on analytical redundancy, which they had solved and even their paper was accepted for the presentation at a conference in India; and on the basis of which these two scientists were offered a visit to the professor’s department for three months with the full financial support except the return airfare to Canada. Unfortunately, for their air travel no support of the funding came from the lab; and exactly at the same time the full funding with DA and TA was released from the lab for other two scientists of the group to visit abroad to present their papers at some conference there (in my opinion. only one scientist could have been sent to present two papers, and the funding saved for the other two scientists for their visit to Canada. For the sake of the record, I would like to mention that I had presented three papers on my one visit to Austin, USA, in the AIAA conference in July-August 2003, and another set of three papers on my other visit to Ottawa, Canada, in the IEEE conference in 2006; both to save money to the lab).
This blatantly showed the partiality to certain scientists based on the liking or disliking by the intermediate managers; I strongly feel that this negativity to the deprived (and yet) successful scientists was intentionally articulated by one middle level manager by talking and taking the then director of the lab into confidence.
Ironically, the same professor for whom I had put lot of effort and done procedures for his coming on this TOKTEN program (that had fully funded his visit to NAL), later on had denied to me any financial budget to support my postdoctoral visit to work under him in his department; I could see that his reason was an excuse only, since he used to fund other such candidates from elsewhere.
xiii) Unnecessary fear of certain research: While we were pursuing offline flight data analysis, some sponsors used to suggest us that we should also concurrently pursue the approach of online data analysis and parameter estimation, and I had agreed to do this; but one of our bosses was upset with this and sort of blasted me for agreeing to do this, and even accused me that I was trying to be in lime light of the big wigs and hence had accepted their suggestions and so on; I also got upset with this blatant accusation on me and my freedom of doing research on any contemporary areas, and futuristic research, and I had to give rebuttal to him, though I did not want to argue with him because I respected him. This had a negative effect on my future prospects of going to USA on any NRC fellowship; since though I was promised that I would be helped to get that chance; later on I was not supported for the same, and the reasons given to me were totally absurd, and were devoid of any common sense. Interestingly, the research on the similar lines that I was talking about was conducted by one FMCD scientist when he went to Germany on deputation.
xiv) A nonperforming research assistant: I had hired him for one year, since he was very smart, had a first class EE degree, and also had worked for one year in one DRDO lab, and in the interview he had performed well; but then he did not do any work here, I was getting bored of keeping him with me, so I handed over him to another senior scientist, but there also he did not perform; so I wrote to the then acting director that he be terminated by giving some financial reasons; so he was relinquished; the guy came to my office and cried, but I told that I could not do anything for him. After sometimes his father had come and met me and had blasted me as to why his son was terminated, I in a plain truth explained his behaviour and complete non-performance and that he had a mental blockage; the father was surprised, and told me that he did not know that his son had this problem, and thanked me for alerting, and told me that I was the first person ever to tell him.
After the formal director came back from his visit abroad, he called me regarding the case of this research assistant, and I explained everything. After a few days, the guy came to me and told me that his position has been renewed and he was shifted to another division; I was surprised with this news; then I learnt that his father was a very influential engineer and was working in HAL. The guy enjoyed three years of salary and did not contribute anything; and then he had got some offer in a private company; I did not keep track of him afterwards.
Coordinator of ADA-projects to NAL:
I was in the beginning asked to help my boss (Dr. SSK) while he used to coordinate several projects on LCA that were sponsored by ADA, especially to fix the date of meeting, and sending notifications and making various arrangements at the meeting, and writing down the minutes of meeting; the latter part being very difficult for me since my background on the aerodynamics, propulsion, structures and wind tunnels was very limited; and after the first meeting that I helped, he had made me the full coordinator for the next few meetings; which again became very taxing for me, but I learnt lot of aspects of such coordination. Once, the NAL director had called and told me, only half a day in advance, to cancel the meeting; it was tough to do that but I had to; calling, informing and giving the reasons to everybody involved in the meeting, a very thankless job, even answering some irrelevant questions by these individuals; especially the scientists who were project leaders/investigators.
Chairman of 5 major committees:
For ease of management, a director would normally form several committees which would meet periodically and conduct the proceedings, and (the committee would) take some decisions that would be then communicated to the director. For reasons unknown to me I was made, at different periods, chairman of five committees:
a) NAL-UNI for interaction with some universities and to coordinate the courses to be specially conducted by NAL (at times jointly) on certain specialised fields in which NAL was supposed to be a leader, so that the others can get benefit of the knowledge, and also get familiar with the technologies being developed by NAL.
In fact, when this committee was initially formed, I was the first scientist to conduct the course on System Identification and Parameter Estimation, for which I had designed the brochure also, and I myself gave 8 lectures, and in that 3-day course, had given opportunities to some more colleagues of the group/division to give some lectures. For the course, I had prepared extensive notes which much later I converted into a book manuscript.
b) ISTAG: international science and technology affairs group. This was formed for interaction with the parent group of the CSIR, and the overseas R&D institutions with whom we had some collaboration. It also involved the initial checking of the files and approval of the applications of the scientists who were proposing to go abroad on either deputation or presentation of their papers to conferences. It also involved keeping track of the progress of the work done as a part of the respective cooperation, conducing review meeting for the major cooperation, and arranging a trip to the concerned county to conduct such a meeting in their laboratory; all these were very time consuming, and arduous tasks and involved lot of efforts on my part.
When the scientists wanted their files cleared for their visits abroad, they will be after me, and sometimes I had to call the headquarters to speed up the final approval process, and once they had got the approval, and having come back from abroad they would not say any thanks to me and even they would avoid me as if they did not know me!
One scientist wanted to go abroad for leaning a new course at the lab expenses, under the pretext that he would after coming back start some new research; but since his record of doing research in the lab for the then last five years was so poor, that his proposal was not approved in the initial stage itself; and he stopped talking to me afterwards.
This job was really a thankless job.
c) NAL-CR committee was formed to see that the evaluation of the performance of the scientists was done regularly and without any hindrances. This was a sensitive process; in one case a new head of the division felt that his scientist was not called for the merit promotion, despite his performance was good; he went to the director and fought for the scientist’s case. This came up to me for looking into it; we checked all his previous CRs (confidential reports), and found that the previous head had not given good marks and good remarks, so the scientist was not considered for the 3-year merit assessment-promotion; because his case did not meet the threshold at all; the new head was not very happy with this outcome. The work of this committee was very sensitive.
d) NAL grievance committee: a very sensitive and a dangerous proposition; mostly the unhappiness would be amongst the workshop and lower cadre staff. I only called the first meeting, and judged the tempo of the other committee members, and hence after wards I never called any meeting; handled the situation only with the help of the secretary of the committee. Many grievances were child-like issues, and of jealousy and the partiality kind; but I had insisted that any grievance should be communicated to me in writing in English only, and the petitioner could take any help from anybody to draft the application letter; not a single issue came up; all their grievances were like gossip stories so nobody wanted to give any complaint in writing.
In an overall sense, it was a headache being part of any such committee.
e) Hindi Technical committee: To promote and monitor technical writing in Hindi, because NAL being a central government research laboratory, it was mandatory to use Hindi not only in official meetings but also produce a few reports in this language. Our division was first to produce five such reports in one year, and the authors had got some cash prizes on the Hindi celebration day. We had also organized one technical seminar for 3/4 days wherein several scientists made their presentations in Hindi. Having promoted technical work in Hindi and being the chairman of the committee, I was awarded a certificate, and memento by some voluntary Hindi promotional body.
I was also a member of five other committees, but did not play any significant role except giving some suggestions: i) NAL-Academic: was formed to approve the applications of the scientists who would like to go for higher studies in Indian universities and especially wanted study leaves. If a scientist did not qualify for the study leave and hence the study, his wrath will be always on us. If after they get leave, and get registered for their chosen course and degree, rarely they will see or meet us; ii) NAL-Security committee; iii) SARAS aircraft software verification committee; and other two I do not remember.
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In an overall sense, I enjoyed working in NAL for nearly three decades, and was able to contribute to their ongoing R&D activities, and was also able to do some innovative research work in the areas of: i) estimation of unstable dynamic systems, ii) aircraft (and recursive) parameter estimation, iii) sensor data fusion, iv) decision fusion with fuzzy logic, v) image fusion, vi) theory and application of artificial neural networks for parameter estimation, vii) genetic algorithms for parameter estimation, viii) model order determination, and ix) deeper analysis of effect of motion cues on the human operator’s tracking activity; all these and many more works of mine are (jointly or singly) published in International/National Conferences, and Journals; and major part of such work was incorporated in my eight (8) books: a) one published by IET/IEE, London, UK (in 2004), and b) seven published by the CRC Press, Florida, USA (from 2007 to 2023).
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Interestingly, most of my colleagues who worked under me, and/or under my direct technical guidance received some awards from NAL (on research, technical application); but ironically, I never got any such award; and for any similar award from the other organizations or the professional bodies, I was never nominated by any of our seniors, including any director of the lab; despite the fact that I had made lot of innovative contributions in several difficult areas of flight mechanics and control, including other areas like: a) multisensory data fusion, b) artificial neural networks, c) fuzzy logic, d) genetic algorithms, and e) aircraft parameter estimation; whereas some others with similar or even lesser contributions were recommended for variety of opportunities: i) higher level of awards, and ii) high level positions elsewhere, etc.
As a head of the FMCD, I had noted in my remarks (in the CRs) of some of my contemporary colleagues that they deserved a position as a head or director of a research lab like NAL; and in one case it really became true, the scientist was later on appointed as the director of NAL (this I consider as a coincidence rather than due to my recommendation); and in the other case, the scientist has been very recently interviewed for the director’s position of NAL.
I consider that, on the average, I am a self-made man and a scientist (I had not got any position or the assessment-promotion with any influence and apparently I did not have any God-father), I had learnt lot of new subjects (nearly 5) on my own, and worked in a very difficult area without any aero-degree, and had guided several scientists for their doctoral studies, several scientists for their project works, I had proposed their names for variety of awards, and had written one book before my retirement, and 7 after the retirement; and most of these books jointly with some of the colleagues who supported me technically and morally.
My name featured in the Stanford University’s list as one of the top 2% researchers of the world for the year 2019. Except my two immediate bosses, and a few close colleagues (and relatives), none of the heads of the then current lab or the institutions, where I worked and studied (my alma maters), had taken note of this honour, despite the information being with them; this shows their egoist attitude, lack of humility, and lower sagacity; mainly because, I feel that they thought I did not belong to their coterie, kind or line; I felt bad, like a child whose mother does not take any note of her child’s achievements.
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