Tenured, with an early promotion at @iiscbangalore . Thankful to everyone who helped me along this journey. When I heard the news, there was a sense of emptiness. My philosophical mind started pondering, “Oh ya, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” Then came a Zen saying, “It’s neither the destination nor the journey; it’s the company.” The Mahabharata is not about five princes ruling a kingdom. It is a tale of self-doubt, denial, struggles, war, and Dharma. What makes it an epic is also the company it keeps, from Vedavyasa, Vidura, Bhishma and Drona to the sages and, of course, Yogeshwara Krishna himself. The conversations, dilemmas, and struggle to uphold Dharma are the crux, not the plot. शिक्षा ग्राह्या, न कथा कथञ्चन। So I thought I would write a little self-note to look back and thank some of the wonderful souls who built me, brick by brick. My parents gave me the freedom to be myself and never doubted me when I chose unconventional paths. There was an old man, Sheshagiri Rao, who sculpted me inch by inch. From differential equations to Nyaya and Vedanta, he taught me for 25 long years. More importantly, he taught me life. He was my friend, philosopher, and guide. Sadly, he left his body last year and is not here to witness the sapling he planted and nurtured bearing fruit. He is the reason I am what I am today. Prof. @YoganandaC85447 not only taught me mathematics during my undergraduate days, but also inspired me to take up this profession. Prof. Ramarishnanan AG and Dr. TV Ananthapadmanabha introduced me to academic research, while my teachers, Profs. PS Sastry, Chandra Murthy, and Chandrasekar Seelamantula instilled mathematical rigour into my thinking. During my industry stints, I was fortunate to learn from some exceptional engineering minds, including @ManishGuptaMG1 , @geethamhp , Lalith Meshta Sanjay Bharadwaj. They taught me to bridge the gap between academic ideas and real-world practice. At @iitdelhi, my faculty colleagues treated me as family and helped me navigate academia. I continue to cherish the mentorship, collaboration, and friendships I found there. @ramgopal_rao When I moved back to South India, the leadership at IISc welcomed me as a faculty member. And the last five years at @iiscbangalore have been nothing short of a fabulous adventure. From starting new courses to taking leave to start a company, I have been given extraordinary freedom and support. I cannot imagine a better academic environment. I owe much of my research to my PhD students, Arnab, Ayush, Amit, Oshin, @backpropogator , Subhodip, Pavan, Shubham, and Karn. I have had the joy of watching them transition from young enthusiasts to collaborators and peers. I am equally grateful to the thousands of students I have taught, both in-class and online. They have given me a unique opportunity to learn every time I walk into a classroom. Special thanks to @chandanjayaram , my right-hand henchman in all my MOOC efforts. I have also been fortunate to have fantastic collaborators from industry who taught me how to translate mathematics into meaningful applications. And fortune favoured me in entrepreneurship too. Two of my best students, @Maxaravind and Vinay, are now my cofounders at @LatentForceHQ . Our investors @IdeaspringCap and Yali Capital, led by Nagananda and Ganapathy Subramanian, took a chance on a professor trying to build a deep-tech company. There are many more mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and well-wishers whose love and blessings have shaped my journey. The list is by no means exhaustive, and my apologies to those I have missed. After writing all this, I feel more and more like I have been a निमित्तमात्रं. From being a small-town kid who didn’t even know that this world existed, to being where I am today, it all feels quite miraculous. One thing I tell my young friends is: If I can be here, anyone can too. Tenure, they say, is freedom. With increased freedom comes increased responsibility. I wish and pray that God gives me enough courage, strength, and will to use that freedom responsibly and tread the path of Dharma. With that note, I shall stop typing. Yes, I typed every word of this without an LLM. And seek your blessings. Prathosh. ईशावास्यमिदं सर्वं यत्किञ्च जगत्यां जगत्। तेन त्यक्तेन भुञ्जीथा मा गृधः कस्यस्विद्धनम्॥ कुर्वन्नेवेह कर्माणि जिजीविषेच्छतं समाः। एवं त्वयि नान्यथेतोऽस्ति न कर्म लिप्यते नरे॥

Sharing our NeurIPS 26 paper, Graph Mamba Operator (GraMO), a latent-space simulator that integrates state-space models with graph-based interaction learning. This captures spatial interactions alongside long-range temporal dependencies to model interacting dynamical systems. I also attach my lecture on State-Space Models (SSMs), which form an alternative class compared to transformer-based autoregressive models

Another great use of my open-source TTS. My good friend @karthikraman has collated the rendering of entire BhagavadGita chapter-wise with scripts. May be of interest to a few. Link for the playlist in the first reply.

A fun conversation in Hindi, ranging from Lec. 16 to the latest advances in AI. My Hindi is still a work in progress; the gender of verbs continues to defeat me 😂 Have a look:

I spoke about the purpose/restructuring education in the time of AI. This was a year ago, to a room full of teachers. This was in Kannada (my mother tongue). Maybe of interest to my Kannada friends here.

Saturday afternoon experiment: I asked Opus 5.5 to teach Jensen’s inequality in my style. These models are getting ridiculously powerful. "Lecture 16" would have been very different had I known about the model. Single prompt with a small snippet of my actual video.

I completed the discussions on Flow Matching models. This is a state-of-the-art technique for image/video generation (like the recent 80s trend). I have explained each equation and derivation. Have a look. It's part of my ongoing NPTEL course on the Math of GenAI.