'MATLAB bolti kya' (do you speak MATLAB), this is what
the advertisement put on the cover page of IEEE spectrum
magazine by Mathworks reads in Hindi to promote its MATLAB
tool. There is no question about its popularity; it is an
engineer's favorite tool. True to its words, MATLAB is a
key part of learning for today's engineers.
Engineering design is much about managing variables with
some known pattern. The variable can be discrete or continuous.
Figuring out visually how the 'n' number of related variable
behaves over time and space requires lot of imagination
inside the engineer's brain. Today's computers have more
than sufficient computing power to offload such analytical
works from engineer's brain. It's huge opportunity for software
developers to tap into this market of design automation
tools. Mathworks leads in the market of software tools for
engineers and scientists through it's two major software
packages MATLAB and SIMULINK.
MATLAB is an advanced software tool, comparable as current
equivalent to previous generation's ubiquitous scientific
calculator, which engineers could not work/study without
it. MATLAB is the most used software by widebase of engineers.
In a candid discussion with this writer, Mathworks India's
Managing Director Kishore Rao and Technical Manager Prashant
Rao share the relevance of this tool for students and their
efforts to make this tool even more popular in India.
In India Mathworks gets 30% of its revenues from Institutes
and colleges, clearly indicating the role this tool is playing
as part of engineering education. Both suggest Mathworks'
products serve the needs of wide range of science and engineering
areas such as core engineering, biotechnology, and also
in financial services.
MATLAB does the computing tasks by using high level programming
language with higher abstraction, where as SIMULINK is used
for modeling and simulating the behavior of engineering
systems. Both the tools houses huge library of application
specific data for different application domains.
The application domains these tools can handle are broadly
classified as Numerical Analysis, Linear Algebra, Control
Design, Signal Processing, and Image Processing.
MATLAB is widely used by researchers and product innovators
all around the world for designing solar powered cars to
space-vehicles to theater design.
As per Mathworks, the advantages of their tools for technical
education are, huge number of libraries, can be used for
simple to complex problem solving and the theory can be
quickly turned into practical experiments.
World's premier institutes including our IITs use Mathworks
tools extensively in their research. Nearly every engineering
college in India teaches MATLAB to their students.
Here is a nice comment from biology related scientific
institute, Medical University of Carolina, "MATLAB
enables young biologists to learn enough programming and
math without being afraid of the code . They can write in
MATLAB as if it were English"
In these days, for a job seeker, skill in using software
tools matters a lot. The fluency in using tools such as
MATLAB and SIMULINK is becoming a measuring yard for some
of the employers, particularly in electronics and communications
engineering.
Mathworks offers an online exchange called MATLAB Central
for engineers to exchange and share information related
to MATLAB. The MATLAB Central gets 662,000 visits per month.
Also there are 100s of books on MATLAB and SIMULINK, some
of them written by Indian authors. Mathworks also conducts
classes both for faculty and students.
Kishore Rao says, "MATLAB is an intuitive and graphical
tool to deal with the subsystem the engineers imagine."
"If you look at an educational environment, students
are taught theory and concept as fundamentals. The tools
like MATLAB allows them to visualize those learned concepts
and theory on software and can look at the result in a better
aspect. These tools allows engineers to simulate and test
the concepts. Say, there is an equation and the data, engineers
can run the data on the equation to see how the result are
and see what happens if each parameters of the equation
is changed.".
Prashanth Rao says, "typically, to do technical computing,
engineers have to gather data from different files, from
other software, hardware, and through data acquisition systems.
MATLAB helps to analyze and explore the data, can model
the data, and engineers can develop algorithms to work on
this data and at the end, this can be deployed in any end-application."
"MATLAB lessens the programming barrier generally
required in using scientific software tools so that the
engineers who don't prefer to learn programming language
such as mechanical and civil engineers find MATLAB more
easy to use." adds Kishore Rao.
To learn more on Mathworks tools visit www.mathworks.com
