Hi! I'm Amitabh

My page is Amitabh's Notes.

Hosted on GitHub Pages
© 2018- Amitabh Yadav.

personal bio

I am a y/o Doctoral Researcher in Microelectronics and Neuroscience. I grew up in India, mostly in the northern plains in Lucknow and later, in the lower Himalayas in Dehradun. After college, I moved to Geneva, Switzerland where I first worked in the ATLAS experimental physics department at CERN. Soon after that, I moved to Delft, Netherlands to continue my Masters where I worked on experimental aspects of enabling a scalable implementation of Quantum Processors. After graduating, I continued on an orthogonal track of exploring theoretical quantum information science devising quantum algorithms for High-Energy Physics experiments at LBNL/UC Berkeley and later as an Electronics Engineer in the Ionizing Radiation Instrumentation Department at CERN. Over the years, I developed a deep interest in high-reliability and high-performance electronics systems design which got me curious to explore the ultimate frontier in Bio-micro-electronic Circuits and Systems. Currently, I work on integrated circuit design for reliable computing and biomedical electronics systems (specifically, on closed-loop neural integrated circuits design) at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

In my spare time, I work on white hat hacking on networks and systems. I excessively love movies (literally, all genres), puzzles, travelling, city escapes, partying and of course, blabbering :P... A wannabe music composer, I keep experimenting on the DAW and practice playing the piano, whenever I find time. The progress on that front, however, has not been so impressive. I like cycling off-road, bike-packing, photography, swimming and hiking - this comes alongside my hobbies as ranging from a nature lover to exploring ancient cities with intriguing historical backgrounds. I am a native Hindi speaker, fluent in English and a moderate-level French speaker.

One of my personal ambitions is to live at least till the age of 106 - this way I would be among the handful few who would have lived and experienced three centuries! Yayy!


just some thoughts

I curate thoughts and ideas. Every now and then when I stumble upon something mind-boggling, I update this list. Gentle disclaimer, you might find some of them ridiculous and in some ways, it is intended. I'll be psyched to discuss any and all of these and it'll be superb if you could change my mind. ;)

  1. Money can buy happiness.

  2. Chicken came before egg.
    (unicellular organisms ⟶ multi-cell organisms ⟶ [ evolution & development of reproductive organs ] ⟶ chicken ⟶ eggs)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_life also see: Goldilock's Conditions for life.

  3. The secret of happiness is 'free food'. [WFP podcast]

  4. Climate change and world food crisis are the catastrophe we, the human race, are not prepared for.

  5. The primary purpose of life is: Reproduction; everything else is secondary. The reason is purely 'survival'. Philosophically, you can find your own purpose.

  6. Coffee must have no sugar. If God intended coffee to be sweet, he wouldn't have made cocoa beans bitter.

  7. Quantum Mechanics is easier than classical mechanics. (It is! QM is a linear theory whereas, CM is non-linear.) But the needle's not going to move unless we prove the "correct" interpretation of QM.

  8. Twitter is better. Why? [Michael Nielsen's thread]

  9. The best application of artificial intelligence is tackling online harassment and security.

  10. The concept of jugaad (ad-hoc fix) is really harmful in any situation. It should be avoided, if possible.

  11. Tabs over spaces. Vim over Emacs. Windows/Linux over MacOS.

  12. It is possible to 'cure' growing old.

  13. Life can be Quantized (just needs to be figured out how; protein sequencing is a good first step). [See also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2023/07/16/the-next-frontier-for-large-language-models-is-biology/]

  14. The universe down to it's constituents of particles; and life down to it's individual cells is just an extremely complex engineering project.

  15. We 'probably' will never make a machine that takes us back in time (based on intuition from philosophical and scientific works - such as, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

  16. Economics is as much of a science, as science itself.

  17. Just like 20th century dominated progress in Physics, 21st will be dominated by Biological breakthoughs. [Structure of Scientific Revolutions]

  18. Being happy is a full-time responsibility.

  19. No one goes through life without a blunder or two (or a thousand!). The trick to move on is to "be kind to your mind".


education

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, EPFL Lausanne (2024-28)
Research Affiliate in Physics, UC Berkeley (2019-21)
M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, TU Delft (2017-19) [Thesis]
B.Tech. in Electronics Engineering, UPES Dehradun (2013-17)


society memberships

            


research positions