bedabrata pain the iitkgp old boy who was part of the team that invented the active pixel sensor that is now ubiquitous in digital cameras has one foot in the arts and another in the cutting edge of science is the distinguished alumnus award from iit an addition to the numbers for you i guess it was a bigger deal for me because of my father he had wanted me to go to iit it was a 3 idiots kind of a scenario where i didnt want to go to iit while he did where did you want to study i had wanted to pursue basic sciences i had the rank to go to any of the iits but he had insisted that i go to kharagpur maybe that was because of some bengaliness of not letting me go too far from home he would have been very proud if he had seen this when he was alive i was invited to give a talk at my department in iit and he was very proud that was one of the reasons why i decided to come down in person and take this award there was a bunch of screenings of chittagong organized by secondgeneration indians in the us during the same weekend it was an interesting social phenomenon where this generation was telling what their parents didnt know yet i chose to come down personally to accept the award instead how was the response overwhelming though i found that the students were a little diffident in our times we were more brazen and would have also wondered who is this fuddyduddy coming to get an award i am sure we would have felt that and shown it too here the students were looking at us with a fair bit of respect didnt you expect that no i didnt are you saying that iitians are a tamer bunch now laughs there was a big turnout i began my talk by saying i dont know if i was really at iit because the students were in pindrop silence i was not hearing any catcalls all i heard were the occasional cellphone rings so i started off with the slogan kgpka tempo and that did the trick it eased the tension high hai the students roared back in unison did you find future filmmakers at iit they definitely have an interest they wanted to know about the technology of digital filmmaking and whether they can participate as technologists and artists to take the work forward this is an important matter because human vision is not just eye but brain as well actual sight of image formation is about 10 of the vision the rest is the brain interpreting what we have seen our cameras today are 90 image formation and 10 image processing i foresee a huge amount of work to be done in imageprocessing since one is entering a zone of intersubjectivity i foresee a lot of invention happening from the arts