What is home?

What do we do when we come home from an official function like a wedding? The first thing I do is to take off the suit and get into something comfortable, and then sit down and relax. Home is all about that feeling of being accepted as who you are without having to dress up or to act a role. I have lived in Boston only for 2 years, but that brief stay with colleagues at Harvard and MIT struck something deep inside me to prove that home can be in multiple places and it can get into us faster than we think. 

This time, on my way to ICRA2022 in Philadelphia, I stopped over at Boston to see some friends in person after a long time of isolation during the pandemic. Rather than staying at hotels, I chose to stay with friends. This is Maurice Smith, a Professor of Bioengineering at Harvard University. We were together at Johns Hopkins when I was a postdoc and Maurice was a MD/PhD candidate. Then he gave me a visiting position back in 2006 when things in Sri Lanka was not going well for me. That proved to be a turning point in my life.

 
It was great catching up with Jane Unrue to talk about the scholars at risk program at Harvard. She is a writer and a professor at Harvard. She directs the scholars at risk program and has been instrumental in turning the lives of many scholars from conflict zones. While I was at Harvard, this program helped me to connect with many other people whom I would never have met otherwise as somebody with an engineering background. The artists, poets, philosophers, public policy experts, security and conflict resolution experts, and other great thinkers I met though the Radcliffe Fellowship program came through the trigger given by few people like Jane.
It was awesome to meet Sheila Russo and Tommaso Ransani, wife and husband at Boston University. In fact, the first agenda item was to visit their labs straight after landing in Boston. Sheila and Tommaso were PhD students at Scoula Speriore Saint Ana (SSSA) who made major contributions to the EU funded STIFF-FLOP project I was involved back in 2014.  During a casual discussion during a meeting, I asked them what their plans were after graduation with PhDs. Their plan was to stay in Italy. I then talked about my story of travelling through Sri Lanka, Japan, then USA before coming to London. I just casually suggested them to explore some time in Boston. They took it seriously, and did a postdoc at the Wyss Institute at Harvard with Connor Walsh and then became professors at Boston University. It was so great to see that now they have their own labs right next to each other in the same department. What can be more awesome than that? Sheila and Tommaso have two great groups of such motivated research students and they continue to make exciting contributions to soft actuators and sensors. Visit Sheila's material robotics lab and Tommaso's morphable biorobotics lab

 
Then I visited Rob Howe's biorobotics lab at Harvard and some other labs of the Wyss Institute such as Connor Walsh's biodesign lab, Rob Wood's micro robotic lab. Rob Howe was instrumental in getting me research facilities to continue my work on bioinspired robots for landmine detection in tropical minefields while at Harvard. A Sri Lankan student, Lahiru Jayathilaka who worked with me at Harvard Radcliffe Institute later spun off the Red Lotus Technologies company that now provides a solution to reduce false alarm rates in mine detectors which is being used by the US army.
Buse Aktas, a PhD student at Rob Howe's lab organised my entire tour of the Wyss Institute. She does such exciting work at the intersection of crafts and engineering.

Then I visited Barry Trimmer at Tufts University. He is the editor in chief of the Soft Robotics journal and runs a biology lab to understand how completely soft insects like caterpillars interact with natural environments. For the first time I held a large caterpillar and felt their grip forces which Barry went on the describe to be nature's most wonderful secrets of passive reactions to external stimuli. It was awesome to see a neuron in action under a microscope. When I saw how neurons and cells wobble under the microscope it occurred to me that life is all about movements. After a long time we had the time to sit down and talk about our views about how the neural networks and muscles work together in one network to solve computational problems in natural environments. This is the cool thing about visiting labs than meeting in busy conferences.

 


On the third day of my stay, I gave a talk at the MIT Media lab.  This visit was organised by Ali Shtarbanov and Joseph Paradiso Ali is a great innovator. He designed the FlowIo system that broke the barriers for portable soft actuators. It was such a pleasure to see the work of MIT community. People like Russ Tedrake at MIT CSAIL were instrumental in supporting my research life in Boston and still I keep thinking about the discussions we have had on passive dynamic interactions and how they can emerge complex behaviors.

It was also great visiting Dagmar Sternad's human robot interaction lab at Northeastern University. We have written a recent grant together and hope to work together to understand some fundamental secrets of who the brain tunes the body to poise interactions with the environment at stability. It was great visiting other robotics labs at Northeastern and to have lunch together with Dagmar's lab members. Thank you Salah Bazzi for coordinating that tour at Northeastern. Great to see a booming robotics community there.
 
After finishing all lab tours, I spent some time walking along the Charles river that brought so many memories back. During our stay in Boston, the banks of Charles river were central in our lifestyle. Everyday after work, I spent time walking and reflecting sitting on a bench just looking at boats sailing people jogging along.
On the last day of this three day visit, I stayed with Swarne and Lukshi Adhikari, two Sri Lankan friends with whom we shared so many community activities in Boston. Like me, both Swarne and Lukshi put a serious effort in Buddhist meditation. So, while talking about life in general, we talked a lot about our meditation practice, its challenges and how it has been useful to spend a happy life that doesn't depend much on material wealth we may have. So, the last evening in Boston was one with very useful reflections.

 
 
After a three day visit from Wednesday 18th to 20th May 2022, I flew out of Boston to head towards ICRA2022 in Philadelphia. I cannot thank the Boston community of friends enough. It is a deep sense of gratitude that words cannot explain. In one word, Boston is home. Just home.














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