Prof. Yashwant Gupta

Distinguished Professor & Centre Director, National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune

Professor Yashwant Gupta obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. in Radio Astronomy from the University of California, San Diego in 1990, after completing his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1985. Since 1991, he has been at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA, Pune) of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research where he currently holds the position of Centre Director. His research interestsrange over the study of pulsars (exotic neutron stars), the interstellar medium of our Galaxy, as well as signal processing and instrumentaionfor radio astronomy. Over the years, he has contributed greatly to the building and running of the GMRT Observatory — a world class instrument operated by the NCRA and located about 80 km from Pune. He also leads India’s participation in the SKA project — an international collaborative project to design and build the next generation global radio astronomy facility. He is a Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awardee, and has been elected a member of all the three Science Academies of India as well as of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and also a Senior Member of IEEE.

Abstract: Contrary to what one might imagine, signal processing — both algorithms and hardware — play a crucial role in our quest to unravel the mysteries of the Universe. We will look at this interesting and challenging interplay between signal processing and astrophysics, primarily in the context of radio astronomy — where we study the faint radio signals received from a host of natural phenomena (and maybe from extra-terrestial intelligence?). We will probe the complexity of processing of the weak signals from a multitude of receptor antennas to extract the signal of interest, the algorithms that allow for combining of the signals to obtain useful images or high time resolution temporal data from astrophysical sources, the challenges of real-time processing of the wide bandwidth signals, and the sophisticated off-line processing techniques that today span the realms of big data and machine learning. We will explore these various aspects in the context of some of the existing modern radio observatories such as the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India, as well as upcoming large international facilities such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project.