Akshya K. Swain graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology, Burla, India with a Gold Medal and received Masters of Electronic Systems and Communication from National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. He was a Commonwealth Scholar in the United Kingdom from 1994 to 1996 and received Ph.D.degree from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, U.K. Since 2002, he is with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of The University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests include Nonlinear System Identification and Control, Fault Tolerant Control, Big Data, Machine Intelligence, Biomedical Signal Processing, and Control Applications to Power System and Wireless Power Transfer Systems. He has authored/co-authored over 170 papers in different international journals and conferences. Dr. Swain is an Associate Editor of IEEE Sensors Journal and Member of the Editorial Board of International Journal of Automation and Control and International Journal of Sensors, Wireless Communications and Control. His teaching interests at graduate and undergraduate level include courses related to Control Systems, Power Systems, and Computer Networks. He is from Odisha, a state in Eastern part of India with rich cultural and spiritual heritage. He is interested to know the relationships of science with spirituality. He is an avid reader of various spiritual books and it is one of my favourite pastimes. Some of his favourite books are:

• Autobiography of a Yogi
• The Second coming of Jesus Christ : the Resurrection of Christ within you
• Living with the Himalayan Masters
• The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
• Kriya Yoga: The Scientific Process of Soul-Culture
• The Universe Within
• The Torah,the Bible and Kriya Yoga
• A Transformation of the Heart, the Path of Saint Francis
• The Power of Now
• Autobiography of an Western Yogi
• Modern Physics and Vedanta
• Celebrating Silence
• An Early Chapter in the Mother’s Life
• At The Eleventh Hour

Some of the related links which are of interest to me are:

• http://www.kriya.org
• http://www.srisathyasai.org.in
• http://www.belurmath.org/
• http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/works/