Mandyam Veerambudi Srinivasan

Mandyam Veerambudi Srinivasan AM FRS, also known as "Srini", (born 1948) is an Australian bioengineer and neuroscientist who studies visual systems, particularly those of bees and birds.

A faculty member at the University of Queensland, he is a recipient of the Prime Minister's Prize for Science and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society (elected 2001).

Early life and education

Srinivasan was born in Poona, India in 1948. His early interests included making transistor radios with his father. His family moved to Calcutta and Delhi before settling in Bangalore, where Srinivasan completed his schooling from the Bishop Cotton Boys' School in 1962. In tertiary education, he earned a number of degrees in the years following:
* 1967 - Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Bangalore University (5-year degree)
* 1970 - Master's degree in applied electronics and servo mechanisms, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
* 1973 - M.Phil. in engineering and applied science, Yale University
* 1977 - PhD in engineering and applied science, Yale University
* 1994 - DSc in neuroethology, Australian National University

Career

After completing his PhD in the US, Srinivasan moved to Canberra in 1978 to take up a position at the Departments of Neurobiology and Applied Mathematics at the Australian National University (ANU), where he stayed until 1982, when he secured a research position in Zurich, Switzerland, to work on insect behaviour. It was here that he learnt how to train and work with honeybees. In 1985 he returned to the ANU, and set up an interdisciplinary research group which focused on investigating how bees use their vision to navigate and land very precisely.

In 2007, Srinivisan took up a position working at the Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering of the University of Queensland.

Srinivasan delivered the 12th Lecture organised by the General K.S. Thimayya Memorial Trust.

Research interests

At Yale, Srinivasan did research on movement perception in flies, and became interested in the vision of insects.

Focusing his attention on honey bees, in particular the Western honey bee, Srinivasan has explored how simple animal systems display complex behaviours. This broad field has applications in robotics, especially unmanned aerial vehicles because of the competing needs for autonomy and a lightweight control system.

Bees are highly competent fliers. Srinivasan has shown that many ostensibly complex flight behaviours can be attributed to the tendency of the bee to keep optic flow constant. Some examples:
* They measure the distance they have travelled. This is important as distance is signalled to other bees as a component of the waggle dance.
* When landing, the ground becomes closer and therefore appears to be moving faster. By keeping the apparent velocity of the ground constant, the bee reduces its own velocity in a continuous manner.
* Similarly, bees slow down in a crowded landscape because nearby objects appear to move faster than objects on the horizon. This is a safety mechanism that reduces the incidence of collision.
* When avoiding objects, the bee will tend to take the optimal path because it will 'balance' the rate of the optic flow between the eyes. It will, for example, fly down the middle of a tunnel, because if it flew closer to one side the optic flow would appear to be greater.

Srinivasan's research looks mainly at "vision, perception and cognition in animals with simple nervous systems, and on how these might be used in machine vision and robotics".

Awards and honours

Srinivasan's work has been recognised and honoured by a number of awards and honours, including:
*1995 - Election to the Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA)
*2001 - Inaugural Australian Federation Fellowship award of the Australian Research Council
*2001 - ''Australasian Science'' Prize (for excellence in peer-reviewed research)
*2001 - Election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London (FRS)
*2003 - Australian Centenary Medal
*2006 - Royal Society of New Zealand Distinguished Visitor
*2006 - Fellowship of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World
*2008 - Queensland Smart State Premier's Fellowship
*2008 - Rank Prize for Optoelectronics (UK)
*2009 - Distinguished Alumni Award of the Indian Institute of Science
*2012 - Membership of the Order of Australia (AM)

Publications

, Srinivasan had authored 15 book chapters, 189 journal articles, 69 conference papers, and had registered two patents. The patents were registered with co-authors Javaan Singh Chahl and other researchers: a "novel system for panoramic video surveillance" in 1997, and an imaging system in 2002 (US).

Criticism

In 2020, a PubPeer comment pointed out issues related to undisclosed data re-use for two papers by Srinivasan. Srinivasan published two expressions of concern which confirmed the issues, but also argued that they do not affect the conclusions of the articles.

In 2024, in a non-peer reviewed preprint, allegations of scientific misconduct were made against at least ten of Srinivasan's papers regarding honeybee odometry and navigation, including miscalculations, reuse of images, and manipulation of data. Srinivasan and his colleagues, his critics, and outside experts have discussed the allegations in non-peer reviewed foru

https://github.com/pachterlab/LP_2024/blob/main/response_to_rebuttal.pdf]. Srinivasan and colleagues have pointed out that the critics do not work in the research field, and claimed that the critics themselves made errors in their preprint.

In an editorial in the Journal of Comparative Physiology A, Eric Warrant, the head of the sensory biology division at Lund University discussed the allegations and the process by which they played out. He said that the results of Srinivasan had been since been independently confirmed by other research teams, and maintained that though Srinivasan and colleagues are guilty of mistakes and sloppiness, the results of their work are valid. He particularly decried the manner in which the criticism was levied, which he says gave Srinivasan no time to respond before the claims were posted both on social media and Wikipedia.

References

Further reading

* The work of Srinivasan's group at the University of Queensland.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Srinivasan, Mandyam Veerambudi
1948 births
Living people
Indian Institute of Science alumni
Australian biologists
Fellows of the Royal Society
Members of the Order of Australia
Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science
Bangalore University alumni