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Roman Skidanov, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, Professor at Samara University’s Department of Engineering Cybernetics, together with his team created a photonic computing device that can process video data hundreds of times faster than modern digital neural networks and quickly analyze hyperspectral data, as well as dreams of making the world a more rational place.
“Why did you choose science in due time?”
“Doing science can be stated as my childhood dream. I really liked physics, then I became interested in computing, and at some point I managed to combine both my hobbies. I also read a lot: at first I liked the image of the scientist in Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”, then there were the Strugatsky brothers, Lem, and so on”.
“Conan Doyle and the Strugatsky brothers usually created a romantic image of a scientist who has some adventures in his life. Now, having become a scientist yourself, can you tell us how much does real life differ from book life?”
“I would not say that it differs much. In any case, there are plenty of adventures: trips, prototype tests, etc. And in the 90s and the 00s, when every trip to a conference turned into a kind of adventure, it was even more fun”.
“Unlike the scientists of the new wave, who got engaged in science when the government set out to make science great again, you became a scientist at the time when it was taking some efforts not to give up. What helped you maintain confidence in future?”
“In 1995, there was no confidence in future, in terms not only of science, but also of any other field. I thought as follows: since I happened to live at the time, I would be doing what I loved. I gave up trying to earn much money, chose an almost monastic lifestyle and set myself up for the fact that I would not have many things in my life. But there would be science. I was ready for that”.
“If you hadn’t become a scientist, where do you think you would have been able to realize yourself?”
“There were quite a lot of options, including that of returning to my native settlement as a physics teacher”.
“It seems to me that the children in your settlement would only be happy to have such a teacher! But now you also teach, so I can’t help but ask: what is the first thing you want to teach your students, aside from laws and formulas?”
“My task – and not only mine, but of the University as a whole – is simple: to teach people to learn. Most of the information that we squeeze into a student is forgotten: in a year, only 20% of the information remains, and this is at best. But the ability to find information is a very valuable asset. And the person who has gained the skill, will get through, no matter where he gets a job. Even if he has to work outside of his specialty: if we manage to teach him how to search for information and perceive it, he will be able to cope with any problem. “Remembering everything is madness!” said one of my teachers. If a person knows how to derive a formula, he can always do it. And nowadays, there is a unique situation: any information can be found within a few seconds. This is a very valuable acquisition for humanity! It is a pity that the humanity uses this acquisition so crookedly”.
“How do you think the scientific community has changed since you started your career?”
“I started my career at the time when everything was being destroyed, and the destruction seemed to me to be of some kind of purposeful nature. Having survived this period of devastation, I was pleased to see how they tried to rebuild the system in some form, and watched as science funding shifted from the Soviet type to grant one. I can't say that grant financing is any better than the Soviet one, but we had to switch to something, we switched, and now everything is working quite successfully. Scientists who don’t have the habit of sitting around apply for grants, write articles, and work instead of complaining about being underpaid, and achieve good results. Although, of course, there are enough problems: today, for example, we are too snowed under with paperwork”.
“From conversations with your colleagues, I realized that a new image of a scientist is now being formed: if before he almost never left his office, today he is required to be both a marketer and an administrator. How do you feel about this?”
“I don’t feel very good about it. Because administrative work and market research are not my function. Why do my colleagues and I have to do this? Because there is some pressure on science: yes, you should be engaged in science, but your achievements need to be somehow implemented into life, and from this point – do it yourself. This results in forcing scientists to figure out for themselves where to place their invention, and bring it to the state of, say, pre-production or even a serial sample. In fact, I’ve always tried to ensure that the things I develop end up with their solid material form. And it was even in the 90s: for instance, I managed to give my first device a material embodiment, even though it was sold to Israel”.
“You have an impressive list of patents: can you tell us which of your inventions you are most proud of? Or rather, which one did you remember the most or influenced your career?”
“I have, at large, say, a cyclical change of themes. I have a principle: after my work has reached the stage of its embodiment, activities in this area can be slowly reduced, as my students will cope themselves. In the 90s, I started by developing the optodigital fingerprint recognition system, which was got by the Israelis. After that, I began to smoothly change the theme to optical micromanipulation and finished my work by creating optical tweezers that can move with focused light objects several micrometers in size – a living cell, or even parts of cells, or a bacterium, for example. We developed a unit to be placed on the microscope as an attached device, allowing objects to be moved to the desired point. Our attempt to put the unit into production through “Rosnano” ended with the situation when we were popularly explained: no one would let us enter foreign markets, and the capacity of the Russian market was two or three times less than the amount that would need to be invested in our project. I hope, over time, our device will still be in demand. And the prospects haven’t disappeared: our colleagues from the Novosibirsk Institute of Semiconductor Physics currently try to establish the production of domestic light modulators”.
“How common is it when you have to turn to long-created technologies literally being late for five, ten, or even twenty years?”
“I would not say that it is “being late”. More like a delay. And this delay is easy to explain: in 1991, our country experienced something comparable to the revolution of 1917. So, twice in a century Russia happened to have experienced destructing its scientific and industrial base. It's pretty hard to recover from this, but we’ve recovered. That’s good! But it will take time for the final recovery. How much? It’s hard to say. Today I am no longer engaged in optical manipulation: after trying to implement the device, I felt that the main goal of this cycle had been achieved, and then there was no special point in continuing to bang my forehead against the wall. That’s why my group and I switched to hyperspectrometers, devices that allow shoot images with hundreds of colours. That is, to represent each pixel in a spectrum stretched into a certain curve. That is, we don’t just analyze the spectrum, but we can see a picture at different wavelengths and try to analyze a combination of these wavelengths for the purpose of seeing something invisible to the naked eye. At present, their small-scale production is underway at Samara University, because no plant can handle such an order. We have already sold over two dozen hyperspectrometers, and three of our devices have even flown into space. Moreover, there was a period, when our hyperspectrometer was the only Russian one operating in orbit”.
“How much is it pleasant for you to read reports that your system has helped save from forest fires or find some new deposits?”
“I don’t know about the deposits. These were our competitors who work in the same area. They tried to attach their hyperspectrometer to a mining machine so that it could develop the most promising plots. We use our hyperspectrometers in agriculture, where they have many applications. For example, targeted fertilization, and targeted watering, when the watering machine adjusts the intensity of watering, depending on the dryness of the soil. According to the estimates by our partners from RosNIIPM from Novocherkassk, such a nonsense innovation will allow an average increase in yield by 25%. In Belarus, our hyperspectrometers help search for tourists who are illegally in the forests. They are not visible from the air, but trees change their spectrum because of prolonged human presence, and hyperspectral image analysis allows detecting them. They say that the money spent on the devices has already been recouped due to fines”.
“How important are diplomas, awards, or articles about the practical application of the devices, in which your inventions have been embodied, to you?”
“Let’s just say that I am completely neutral about diplomas. They lie in their closet in a pile, and let them lie there. I don’t hang them on the wall. Yes, public recognition sometimes is heart-warming, but in general, I just like doing what I’m doing now. And diplomas, well, it’s, say, a kind of related thing. Perhaps, it’s important, as well”.
“How do you, as a person who is inside our scientific system, assess our prospects? How enthusiastic are potential scientists that you train?”
“Quite enthusiastic. It’s just that now we have to pull people with scientific abilities out of very, very localized groups: three or four people from the university stream can do science, the rest just don’t want to. What surprises me a little is that today, in terms of activity, the university is a very good place. Anyone who is active in any way gets honour, respect and an increased scholarship. Nevertheless, many people do not want anything at all, except sitting around. That’s the main problem. Overall, we confidently move forward: we look for young people, we have the opportunity for involving young people in scientific research, and young people come to us. From my viewpoint, it seems to me that we have good prospects. In some areas, we are even slightly ahead of the rest of the world: I mean so-called analog computing. My group and I have now embarked on the program for developing an optical computing device, which, again, is linked to a hyperspectrometer: in fact, I have returned to the developments I was engaged in in the 90s, only at a new technological level. If then single images were processed, now we are striving to develop a video stream”.
“Should humanity expect some kind of technological breakthrough or some new super inventions that will change our lives in the near future?”
“I think it should. Here, for the most part, everything is tied, of course, to China, which invests much money in developing science. And they have no terrible misalignment towards electronics, which is noticeable in the world: recently there has been a terrible bias towards electronic devices, and the rest of science is funded so-so. As the result, developing some areas has almost stopped. In biology, for example, there is some development, but this science has recently been artificially limited by the huge number of legal prohibitions, with which, in my opinion, they have been gone too far. A few years ago, I had to work with ophthalmologists. We made a device to test their idea of instant vision correction surgery. The idea was simple: we made a transparent eye patch so that nothing got into the pupil, a laser shone through it, which resulted in local heating, and due to the fact that the patch had certain radii, the eye changed the shape of the cornea. As the result, leaving the medical room in just a couple of minutes, the person has normal eyesight. But the development did not reach the production stage: too many checks successfully stopped it. And this is just an example. As it is, I follow biological research all over the world and see how, due to prohibitions and overregulation, some scientists from the United States move to Colombia, for conducting their research there. Therefore, breakthroughs are possible in both physics and biology”.
“Roman, please tell us, what do you dream about?”
“My dream is simple human happiness”.
“Happiness for yourself, or like in Tarkovsky’s film: so that no one left offended?”
“For the whole world – It’s hardly possible. My dream is for people to start spending their efforts more rationally, and do more science. Doing science seems to me to lead us to a rational world, from my viewpoint. This is my dream: changing the vector of human development to a normal one, so that we stop focusing on our planet and start moving into space, so that we start paying more attention to physics, biology and energy, so that we stop spending too much time on electronic devices. I dream of the world to be a little bit changed, affected by my works inter alia. Today, in some cases, humanity simply accumulates knowledge, using just a share of the percents of the scientific and technical potential at our disposal. I hope that many interesting discoveries await us in the near future.
Source: sobaka.ru
