After a fun trip to Mysore this weekend, I have landed at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (Bengaluru for those more PC), for SPCOM 2012. This is a 4 day conference (yesterday was tutorials) that has been held 8 times before (sometimes skipping years) here at IISc. I’ve never visited here before, but my father, grandfather, and great grandfather are all graduates, so it feels pretty special to finally see the place. My talk is dead last, so we’ll see how many people are still here by the time it rolls around.
An Ergodic Walk 
In fact, your maternal great-uncle is also a graduate of IISc though he was in the EE Department, not ECE. ECE (mostly electronics and wireless) branched off from EE (mostly. Power Systems Engineering) in the 1930s when ECE got into ionospheric and tropospheric propagation studies and EE into high-voltage engineering. The sparks and thunderbolts of one played havoc with the sensitive receivers of the other, and so the two Departments were housed on opposite ends of the campus.
Incidentally, I created quite a stir at a student pre-registration seminar at Illinois by claiming that ECE really stood for Electrical Communication Engineering not Electrical and Computer Engineering since nobody uses a computer for COMPUTING and everybody uses it for COMMUNICATION, and that research into antennas, DSP, semiconductor electronics etc would be mostly unnecessary if there were no need to communicate. Long before Facebook and Twitter too….