Biography

Welcome to the Home Page of Dr. Alam

Dr. Mohammad Sultan Alam is an Assistant Professor Grade 2 in the School of Computing Science and Engineering at VIT Bhopal University. Prior to joining VIT Bhopal, Dr. Alam was an Assistant Professor (contractual) at NIT Hamirpur. He served as an Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the CSE Department at IIT Kanpur for two years. Dr. Alam was an Assistant Professor (contractual) of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics and Scientific Computing at National Institute of Technology (NIT) Hamirpur, Govt. of India for the Even Semester (Feb-May, 2023). He was an Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, India from March 2021 to Feb 2023 (Two Years) where he worked on information theory, coding and their applications e.g., in machine learning with the research group of Prof. Satyadev Nandakumar. Before joining IIT Kanpur, I was a Senior Project Scientist on the Technology Innovation Hub (TIH) in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at IIT Mandi, India. He completed his Ph.D under the supervision of Prof. Satyajit Thakor from the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi. His PhD research area was Information Theory and Network Coding. The set of all entropic points is known as the entropic region. Characterization of the entropic region leads to the solution of many important and open problems in information theory and network coding.

Before joining Ph.D, he was a Junior Research Fellow under the supervision of Prof. Syed Abbas on a National Board of Higher Mathematics (NBHM) project “Periodicity and Almost Periodicity in Ecological Modelling” in the School of Basic Sciences at IIT Mandi. 

He received the Master of Technology (M.Tech) in Computational and Systems Biology which is taught in the School of Computational & Integrative Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. Here, he worked on the DNA sequences of the LINEs (Long INterspersed Elements) and SINEs (Short INterspersed Elements) of Entamoeba histolytica and the Quasispecies model under the supervisions of Prof. Alok Bhattacharya and Prof. Ram Ramaswamy (now with Ashoka University and IIT Delhi respectively).

Previously, he received a Master of Science (M.Sc) in Mathematics from the Department of Mathematics, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh, India. His M.Sc project was on the categorical study of some algebraic structures which was supervised by Prof. Syed Mahmood Ahad Zaidi.

He completed his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc)(Hons) in Mathematics from the Department of Mathematics, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh, India.

He was a guest faculty from July-Dec 2012 in the Department of Computer Science, Jamia Hamdard University, New Delhi, India.

“You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place, your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate, you will always have the advantage."  John Von Neumann to Claude Shannon