One of the brightest stars in the brilliant galaxy of minds at Bell Labs, Partha Mitra is a thinkera of international repute. Mitra graduated in physics from Presidency College and did his PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He has been awarded seven patents, received a number of grants, and faculty research appointments at Princeton University, New York University Medical School, and the California Institute of Technology.

His greatest achievement is leading a team at Bell Labs to answer how much information can be theoretically transmitted over a single strand of fiber. According to the team’s findings, it is theoretically possible to send 100 terabits of information per second on a single strand of fiber, an equivalent of nearly two billion telephones calls. This is remarkable considering the fact that commercial networks operate at about 1.6 terabits per second. A great believer in multitasking, Mitra at the same time was working with other Bell Lab scientists on an invention that triples the capacity of the wireless communication and hopes that tripole antenna for which he and his collaborators have received two patents will soon find its place in the cellphone. He has also coauthored numerous research papers in Nature, Science, and other leading journals , on topics as wide as optical and wireless communication, speech recognition, and neural biology.

The physicist believes that design principles underlying biological systems and those employed in building human-engineered systems are interrelated. Nowadays, he is studying the recordings of the birds as they learn their songs. This will lead someday to communication systems with true speech recognition capability and computers that can actually learn from their mistakes and modify their behavior. n