About Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan
Biography
Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan (Sharath Chandra Ram)’s research at the Signal Cultures Lab, spans the fields of human-machine interaction design, cognitive psychology, auditory cognition, sound studies and the media arts. On one hand, it integrates methodologies from these fields to envision informational and assistive listening interfaces with the capacity to augment our perception and knowledge of the world using information sonification, multimodal interaction and sound. On the other hand, it deals with a socio-technical analysis of how technology design processes can encode values that affect society through technology policy decisions governing emerging technologies of human and machine listening. Extending upon his doctoral research at the University of Texas at Dallas (School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication), he seeks to establish new modes of transdisciplinary collaboration and community based design to overcome limitations imposed by the current industrial-medical model of innovation concerning augmented hearing technologies.
Previously, after having earned an MS in Artificial Intelligence with focus on HCI in virtual environments at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, he was Research Associate, at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India in one of the nation’s first fMRI labs. Here, he studied the capacity limits of information processing and networks of multimodal cognition, in a project that was funded by the Dept. of Biotechnology, Govt of India. Subsequently, in a departure from clinical neuroscience, he was Faculty at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art Design and Technology where he advanced a technical practice that integrated the cognitive arts and sciences.
His current research trajectory involves efforts that extend to more than a decade of being involved in community media networks, grassroot technology activism and communications technology design, catered particularly towards more admissible wireless telecom policy. This included setting up a technology policy and community lab at the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India and involvement in several networks in South Asia and South America (HONF Foundation in Indonesia, Bricolabs, Plato Hedro in Colombia, to name a few). As a licensed amateur radio broadcaster (callsign: VU3HPA) he continues to extend his creative technology and media arts practice as a ‘transmission artist’ in various international curations and forums, to engage the public while addressing contexts that bridge the worlds of media, science and tech policy.