Cerebral Workout

Ram Janma Bhumi Ayodhya verdict

2010-09-30T04:32:00.001-07:00

The Ram Janma Bhumi verdict is out.

Allahabad High court has given the verdict.

Summary of the result while the detailed results

Khan : The premisis must be divided into 3 parts. The place where ram was born must be given to Hindus.

Agarwal : Place where ram was born is a place of worship - give to hindus

Sharma : Entire premises is ram janmasthan

Awaiting Ayodhya Verdict Allahabad High Court Website

2010-09-30T03:26:00.000-07:00

The Allahabad highcourt website would be hosting the ayodhya verdict results. The site doesnt seem to respond. I managed to get a screenshot of the website. This website has a poor response time.

Waiver of Credit Card Late Payment Fees

2010-04-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

You have used you credit card instead of your debit card to gain those extra points.

You have been meticulous in paying the credit card bill just before the due date so as the avoid the late payment fees.

Your credit history has been good...

Till one fine day, you miss the credit card minimum due amount payment deadline..

In one shot, you loose all the bonus points that you had gathered till now ..

Late payment of credit card dues can be a costly affair.. And I realised that recently ..

Since I was travelling, I did not remember that I had to pay my credit card bills ..

And BAM! .. Rs 700 of late payment fees on my HDFC credit card .. Rs 300 on my citibank credit card ..

Not to worry .. I sent a mail to the customer care of both the credit card divisions, requesting them the reverse the late payment fees as well as the interest fees and I was lucky enough to get the waiver.. The amount will now be credited back to my card ..

Here is the mail that I had written :

Date: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 12:20 PM
To: India Service (indiaservice@citi.com)
Subject: Late Payment. Credit card ending 2007

Dear Sir / Madam,

This month, I did not remember to pay my Citibank payment by the payment due date. I remembered this today and made a payment immediately. Since this is the first time I have made this mistake in 3 years, is it possible for you to kindly relieve me of the late payment fees ?

I would definitely appreciate a favorable response from your end.

Thanking you,

Vijay

Response :

Credit Card blah blah

We wish to inform you that, with a commitment towards greater customer satisfaction we have reversed the Late payment Charges of Rs. 700.00. The corresponding Service Tax will be automatically reversed. The above reversal will reflect in your next monthly statement.

Similar was the case with HDFC bank credit card division too.

It helps if you create a reminder on your mobile phone / outlook as soon as you recieve the credit card bill so that you dont miss the payment..

AND

If it is the first time that you have paid beyond the due date, it is worth giving requesting a waiver a try ..

It is just an e-mail after all ..

Immigration to foreign countries - some numbers

2009-06-23T11:30:00.001-07:00

Leverage the Skills cost arbitrage - Immigrate.

Here are a few notes that I made. Please add to this if you have any other information.

- Improve your SW skills

Browse through the jobs, and look at the common things that are being asked for.

Keep learning the things. Try to apply them in freelance projects.

Applying for US :

find H1B sponsors.

http://corp-corp.com/h1bonlinejobfair_js.htm?gclid=COO7xd2ot5YCFRNPegodi0IZKQ

Foreign VISA consultants :

http://www.visahouse.net/career_guide.php

Online Job Search Sites

Naukri.

http://www.iitjobs.com

http://www.simplyhired.com

Salaries from payscale (software developer):

UAE 1,20,000 AED - 15 lakh INR

Singapore 38000 SGD - 12 lakh INR

Australia 53000 AUD - 17 lakh INR

Canada 75000 CAD - 30 lakh INR

United K 27000 GBP - 22 lakh INR

USA 64000 USD - 31 lakh INR

Switzerland 89000 CHF - 37 lakh INR

Ireland - 34500 EUR - 23 lakh INR

Denmark - 63000 USD - 30 lakh INR

HSMP program needs you to have 2 lakhs in your account

The fees are 350 GBP - 25, 000 INR

CANADA:

Canada - Federal Skilled Worker Program

greater than 67 points in the qualifying test - done

At least one year of experience in one of the NOC occupations list:

I come under : 0213 Computer and information system managers :

Software Engineers and Designers (2173)

Immigration Blog :

http://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-blog/

Federal Skilled Worker Program : (New Instructions )

http://www.canadavisa.com/new-instructions-federal-skilled-worker-applications.html

What all are needed for the VISA :

http://www.canadavisa.com/canadian-immigration-faq-skilled-workers.html

4 months prior to the evaluation

Settlement of Funds :

This is the amount that is required to pass through the VISA process (settlement of funds)

10 601 Canadian dollars = 4.2 lakh INR

this is waived if you have arranged employment in Canada

VISA application fees :

22,500 INR (550 CDN)

http://www.canadavisa.com/federal-skilled-workers-processing-fees.html

Arranged Employment :

http://www.canadavisa.com/fast-track-canada-immigration-visa-application.html

The Employer - Employee - Arranged Employment process :

http://www.movetoedmonton.com/foreign/arranged/

VISA processing time :

http://www.canadavisa.com/federal-skilled-worker-processing-times.html#asiaandpacific

Seems to take 72 months. Isnt that too long!

This 72 months is for the Permanent Residentship VISA. You get the Federal Skilled Worker program VISA earlier.

Pentaho Data Integration - Scalable ETL deployments

2009-06-04T07:39:00.000-07:00

Q&A notes from the following webinar for the benefit of PDI users.

"High Performance ETL using Cloud- and Cluster-based Deployment Web" which is based upon the following whitepaper"

Pentaho Data Integration : Scaling Out Large Data Volume Processing in the Cloud or on Premise

Session number: 713773880

Ranadeep Bhattacharya - 11:48 pm

Q: What do you mean by read in parallel? Does that mean only a part of the file is available in each slave?

Matt Casters - 11:49 pm

A: That's exactly what the algorithm does. It splits the file by size and divides data ranges over the available nodes.

_________________________________________________________________

Ranadeep Bhattacharya - 11:50 pm

Q: But is the file physically located on a single server or split between the 10 or 20?

Matt Casters - 11:50 pm

A: Located on a single shared filesystem. So the same file is read by N nodes.

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 11:50 pm

Q: So as i understand is their a limitation of clustering only possible if we choose CSV as our input step? I doesnt work on Table Input step?

Matt Casters - 11:52 pm

A: You can do the same thing with a Table Input node, but you need to tweak the SQL statement that is executed since you only want a part of the rows. Usually it involves using a MOD (%) operator and internal variables representing the node # and # of nodes.

_________________________________________________________________

Robert Folkerts - 11:51 pm

Q: Were there experiments with dimension lookups when populating a fact table? That is my 'bread and butter' case.

Matt Casters - 11:53 pm

A: Not yet Robert. With the new cache pre-load option it would make an interesting experiment for sure.

_________________________________________________________________

Dan Jolly - 11:54 pm

Q: When is 3.2 scheduled for GA?

Matt Casters - 11:55 pm

A: Dan, 3.2.0-stable was released last week.

_________________________________________________________________

Vijayaraghavan Amirisetty - 11:56 pm

Q: Does PDI plan to support other partitioning methods like key-range partitioning or hash partitioning in the future ? - Vijay

Matt Casters - 11:58 pm

A: It's not on our roadmap right away. That being said, it's possible to do now both though Partitioning plugins as well as though a calculation. (simply calculate a partition # and do a mod part on that)

_________________________________________________________________

Peter Schmidt - 11:55 pm

Q: Can you please re-explain the diff between 50/Sort and 100/Sort and 300/Sort.

Matt Casters - 11:56 pm

A: The only difference is the size of the lineitem.tbl file size. 300=1.8B rows, 100=600M rows, etc

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 11:57 pm

Q: So considering a scenrio where I have 80 small db inputs and I need to collate them in one central target db, with scehduling of once in a hour (24 times a day) for all sources, clustering make sense?

Matt Casters - 12:00 am

A: It can make sense if the CPU consumption on your one server is a bottleneck. If that's not the case, you don't really need to do it.

_________________________________________________________________

sanjeev sagar - 11:59 pm

Q: i joined late but which benchmark it is?

Lance Walter - 12:01 am

A: The whitepaper on bayon-technologies has more details. It uses TPC-H data, but is not a "benchmark" by design.

_________________________________________________________________

Dan Jolly - 12:01 am

Q: Is this cost model based on the EC2 costs?

Lance Walter - 12:01 am

A: yes, computing as well as storage costs on EC2

_________________________________________________________________

prem brahmandam - 11:54 pm

Q: Can we get a sample transform using "table input" step with tweaked query..

Matt Casters - 12:03 am

A: SELECT * FROM foo WHERE mod(id, ${Internal.Step.Unique.Count}) = ${Internal.Step.Unique.Number}

_________________________________________________________________

Peter Schmidt - 12:02 am

Q: If most of your ETL uses table input/table output steps, what changes need to be made to one's transformations, it sounds like if you were reading from flat files, you wouldn't have to do much to configure this to work?

Matt Casters - 12:05 am

A: Peter, it highly depends on the question if your source database can make use of multiple CPUs, etc. The best strategy is to partition/shard the source and target databases as well. (see also prem's question above)

_________________________________________________________________

Peter Schmidt - 12:08 am

Q: Quick question on the sample transform query, so I am assuming you'd have to put a wrapper around this that increments the count and number)?

Matt Casters - 12:09 am

A: It goes without saying that those internal variables are set automatically in a clustered run.

_________________________________________________________________

Bret Landon - 12:08 am

Q: Is any of this based on the hadoop methodology?

Matt Casters - 12:10 am

A: No Hadoop cluster is needed although we have plans to make use of Hadoop clusters in the near future.

_________________________________________________________________

Laura Moche - 12:10 am

Q: Were the EC2 servers from this test case dedicated to this test? Or were the servers shared with other processing?

Nicholas Goodman - 12:11 am

A: We dedicated the use for the transformations. But EC2 instances aren't dedicated - they are shared with other EC2 users...

_________________________________________________________________

Dan Jolly - 11:57 pm

Q: What is that top level number

Nicholas Goodman - 12:12 am

A: sorted 450k / rec / sec for 40 nodes

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 12:08 am

Q: No Matt, building on the Peter's question, what if the source database are really on different machines and partitioning/sharding is not an option as in case of mysql 4?

Nicholas Goodman - 12:13 am

A: There are things that can be done to partition the connection on the PDI side. ie - if you know that host xyz keeps partition 1, and abc keeps partition 2 you can set that up and we'll use just plain 'ole JDBC

_________________________________________________________________

Venu Ambekar - 12:12 am

Q: Is there a capability to handle only incremental changes from a datasource, instead of depending upon the time-stamps of the tables in the datasource.

Nicholas Goodman - 12:14 am

A: Yes. PDI has capabilities for detecting changes from data sources and you can help you only process those changes.

_________________________________________________________________

Lakshman Bulusu - 12:14 am

Q: What about EL-T in the CLoud?

Matt Casters - 12:16 am

A: It highly depends on the situation. It still depends on the capabilities of the database(s) (parallelism etc) used. Suffice it to say that we always recommend you to make that call yourself in PDI.

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 12:16 am

Q: Oh I see Partitioning on the PDI side itself, evn if not supported by underlying db ?

Matt Casters - 12:17 am

A: Yes, we refered to data partitioning in the PDI streams earlier, not just database table partitioning.

_________________________________________________________________

Tony Sidhu - 12:13 am

Q: is it practical to run processing in the cloud, that is inputing and outputing to a database that runs in the office?

Matt Casters - 12:21 am

A: Tony, barring any extreme case, I don't think so. We have another partner that did something similar but keeping the data on the cloud because of cost savings (30%). It has to be noted that the machine needed to be hosting reports, analyses, etc.

_________________________________________________________________

Scott Sorensen - 12:21 am

Q: Could you elaborate on 'capabilities to detect changes in a data source' - or provide a reference on how this is done.

Nicholas Goodman - 12:23 am

A: sure... couple of quesitons on this. There are a few different ways to approach this - none of which is any PDI silver bullet. There's a step to compare rows (one stream is reference, other is changed) and output diffs. You can simply parameterize your

Nicholas Goodman - 12:23 am

A: queries so that they only take "update_dt > {last_time_I_checked}"

_________________________________________________________________

Kamal Trivedi - 12:16 am

Q: what if in future the cloud location is moved overseas

Matt Casters - 12:22 am

A: If your infrastructure cloud is moved then it all depends on data volumes, internet speed, etc whether or not you would get in trouble. With the internet getting faster all the time, I doubt this will become an issue soon.

_________________________________________________________________

Steve McAtee - 12:18 am

Q: Will a recording of this presentation be available offline?

Matthew Papertsian - 12:23 am

A: Yes - the recording will be avilable within 48 hours and sent to you via email

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 12:22 am

Q: What's the role of Carte in all this clustering? I was under the impression thats its internal to PDI, if I going to EC2, where does it fit?

Matt Casters - 12:24 am

A: Carte is simply a small webserver that listens to the outstide world. It can be given transformations, jobs etc to execute. It's controlled remotely. It's launched during startup of an EC2 host.

_________________________________________________________________

Dan Jolly - 12:20 am

Q: are there any similar case studies?

Nicholas Goodman - 12:24 am

A: Hi Dan - It'd be great if we could get customers to publish some of their own results and case studies for "big data." I'm not aware of any case studies that look at CLUSTERING/PARTITIONING explicitly.

Lance Walter - 12:24 am

A: here's the best public example - here's the announcement http://www.pentaho.com/news/releases/20090210_nutricia_uses_pentaho_on_amazon_cloud.php and here is the technical case study http://tinyurl.com/q9b9hs

Nicholas Goodman - 12:25 am

A: PS - How's the weather in Colorado today?

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 12:16 am

Q: Can you give more info on that Nick please... on the incremental data?

Nicholas Goodman - 12:26 am

A: See below... there's nothing really "Big Data" special about change data capture.

Nicholas Goodman - 12:27 am

A: there's a variety of techniques.. check the wiki/pentaho training/dev lists for info on how to do this.

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 11:58 pm

Q: It may be obvious question, but in last 10 days I have touched the surface of PDI only and done sample test on single workstation of mine

Matthew Papertsian - 12:27 am

A: Abhishek - can you please complete your question as I am not certain what you are asking?

_________________________________________________________________

sanjeev sagar - 11:59 pm

Q: or which tools were used for these fig.?

Nicholas Goodman - 12:28 am

A: This was PDI 3.2 (pre GA it was inbetween release candidates). The exact build # is in the whitepaper.

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 12:28 am

Q: hi Matt, so you dont really recoment it for office use as you mentioned to tony?

Matt Casters - 12:30 am

A: Well, given the fact that you now have "local" clouds in large corporation and that virtualization keeps growing, I might be completely wrong. Then again, it was a very specific question that Tony had.

_________________________________________________________________

abhishek manocha - 12:30 am

Q: Ok, fair enough Matt

Matt Casters - 12:31 am

A: Sure thing!

_________________________________________________________________

Ulrich Riedel - 12:30 am

Q: I have seen in the webcast that sorting 1 billion lines a month costs app. 32,000$. Why is this price said to be cheap? Are there comparable prices?

Matt Casters - 12:32 am

A: It's only 4$ to sort a billion rows. I think the situation was that if you needed to do it every hour or so, you would spend that money. Cloud works best economically if it takes care of peak loads.

Matt Casters - 12:32 am

A: Sorry 6$ :-)

Payback (in km) when you go for a second hand bike

2008-06-05T03:37:00.000-07:00

I decided to go for a second hand bike as I do not prefer to go on a bike in city traffic.
I intend to use the bike for long distance drives on weekends. As you see in the calculations below,
one recovers the cost of a new pulsar in 24,500 km while a second hand pulsar's price is recovered in 16,000 km. The maintainance cost has been factored in the calculations ( it is twice the amount that a regular bike would have).

btw, I bought this bike from bike galaxy at basappa circle on lalbagh road. There are a lot of second hand bike dealers (agents in fact) near minerva circle and VV puram. The same bike would have cost be 3 to 4 thousand cheaper if I would have bought it from the seller directly. I had to pay 1000 Rs to the agent to buy this bike.
The agent gathers this bike from exchange melas, direct sellers, etc.
How far my calculations are correct?
Only time will tell :)

Bought a bike. Ready to go

2008-06-02T04:34:00.000-07:00

The bike, a 2003 pulsar (non DTSI , non alloy wheels, non kickstart) cost be 28,600 (This includes 750 Rs as insurance, 1000 Rs as commission, 450 Rs as registration charges). I bargained with the owner o reduce the price from 29,000 to 26,600.
The odometer reading has been manipulated, so I don’t know how many KM it has run. No idea of the mileage (trying to figure that out now), the RPM meter malfunctions and the idlng RPM has been set to 4,000 (2,200 should be ideal).
Meter has started, and I am in the process of learning the bike internals at present. I intend to use this mike for long distance rides, and the target would be to make a trip to Kolhapur from Bangalore (600 km one way on NH4).

Actually, it is always better to buy a bike directly from the owner as you can save the commission. But you can do this only if you have the ability to gauge the condition of the bike and judge the price of the bike correctly. I feel that I paid a bit more for the bike (I had started with a budge of 25,000!), but since I have already bought it, it is okay.

Here are a few tips that I found useful:

Mouthshut

60kph

btw, I bought the bike from Minerva circle. You will find a lot of shops selling used bikes there. Do check for the Road tax papers and the RC book before buying the bike. It is always good to take along a friend who is knowledgeable about bikes.

Yahoo Ad "Sense" screwed up

2008-06-01T22:08:00.000-07:00

I come to office on a monday morning, log on to Yahoo Mail and notice something
different. The banner ad was in Chinese! (Could be Japanese too). I am trying to understand the logic behind being presented this ad! There are no Chinese e-mails in my mailbox, no Chinese girlfriends. The only thing that is vaguely related to Chinese lying in my inbox is the eBay correspondence about the purchase of a Mobile Phone (CECT make) which is manufactured in china.
Funny!

PS: I use google Adsense on my blog, and most of the times, the textual ad's that are displayed related to the context of the blogpost.

Image Matching

2007-12-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

I had been toying around with the idea on extending Video search to include the audio and video (image) data associated with the video in addition to the user specified tags. This is one of my weekend projects, others being the semantic representation of knowledge and android app development.
This weekend I spent some of my time get out a rough cut of the "Image Indexing using Color Correlograms" [the same with my notes] which could be helpful in my Video Search project. The principle behind an image correlogram [Correloation + histogram] is the spatial correlation between the image colors. A correlogram can be defined as f(c1,c2,k), where f is the number of pixels of color c2 around a pixel of color c1 which are at a distance of k from the c1 colored pixel.
The results looked promising. At present I used only the G channel to generate the correlogram, and I would be refining it over time.
Some results : I chose come images obtained by the query: road via google image search, calculate the correlograms for each and then used the metric described in the paper to find the closeness. The number adjacent to each image describes how close it is to Image 1. Lower the number the closer the image is to Image1

Image 1:

Image 2: 16.32

Image 3: 4.84

Image 4: 9.51

Image 5: 15.06

Image 6: 17.03

Image 7: 15.05

The closest images to Image 1 are Image 3 and Image 4, which looks intuitive.
Image 5 and Image 7 have similar correlograms which also seems fine.
But the observation that Images 2,5,6 and 7 are at almost equidistant to Image 1 is not very palpable. Especially as Image 2 is no way related to Image 1. On the other hand, it is not possible to draw inferences on the robustness of this approach with such a small set of test images. I'd be do some more research and come up with enhancements to get better results.

At present I just used the green channel of the image in the creation of the correlogram as histogram of the green channel is closet to the luminosity histogram. [ The reason for this is that the human eye is more sensitive to the color green than any other colors]. The current algorithm calculates f using all the pixels in an image and computing f is quite expensive O(n^2*d) . [The complexity has been mentioned to be O(n^2*d^2) in the paper and I will try to clarify this with the authors]. The space complexity is O(m^2 * d) [where m is the number of possible colors] Further improvements in time and space can be made by calculating the correlogram for select regions of the image (high gradient blocks).

btw, it took me quite some time to set up a development environment in windows.
I used the opencv sdk for reading the images, eclipse IDE with CDT, and mingw (gcc for windows)for the compiler.

Some Informative links that I followed:
opencv
http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~laganier/tutorial/opencv+directshow/cvision.htm
http://www.cs.iit.edu/~agam/cs512/lect-notes/opencv-intro/opencv-intro.html#SECTION00041000000000000000
http://www.xpercept.com/opencv.htm

eclipse cdt:
http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~eclipse/7-EclipseCDT.pdf

updates:
Don Dodge on video search

Autorickshaw economics

2007-11-17T02:17:00.000-08:00

Today, while I was returning from a Shopping mall in bangalore in an Autorickshaw {Autorickshaws are 2 stroke, 3 wheelers which are a common mode of transportation in India. [Equivalant of taxi's in the US]} the autorickshaw driver said something to me in Kannada [local language]. I couldnt understand it, but, out of curiosity, I said "Nannage Kannada swapla swalpa gotthu; Hindi, English, Telugu". {this is what I usually say when someone talks to me in Kannada - I know very little Kannada. These are the languages I know}
The driver (about 25-30 years in age) then told me that he had been waiting for a passenger from 1 o'clock, and he did not get a single passenger till the time I asked him to take me home [It was 3:15. He had been idle for 2.25 hours!]. He also tole me that, he would have gone home if I hadn't boarded his auto.
The driver seemed friendly, hence I asked him some more questions. The information that I got is as follows:
mileage of an auto - 20 km per litre of petrol (gas). This costs him 2.5 Rs per km.
The standard charge is 6 Rs per km, thus he makes a profit of 3.5 Rs per km.
He travels close to 80 km every day [excluding the "idle" rides]. Thus, he earns around 280 Rs [7 USD] per day i.e. 2,600 USD per annum . That is pretty low as compared to and average engineer's salary [12000 USD per annum].
I can help these guys by getting them passengers. Using mobile phones to connect the prospective passengers to the idle auto rickshaws. I'll post the details of my idea soon.
Now, back to android!

I like this, I'd find it there

2007-10-23T05:26:00.000-07:00

WHAT DO I LIKE:
1. I'd like to do something where I could always learn something new.
- Travel [learn history / geography / cultures]
- Photography
- Reading Papers / implementing them
- Reading Blogs / Google Videos

2. Something that I feel that I can make a difference
- Semantic web / agents
- 3D Reconstruction
- President [MEA events / publicity]
- SEEK Teaching

3. Something where I could motivate others / teach others
- SEEK
- TA ship
4. Something where I find solutions to real problems
- planning a tour
- building an mp3 jack to plug in the iPod to the car system
- finding out a way to have the minimum trips to dispose garbage

All this with enough money so that I could pursue my interests and hobbies [travel / photography / etc ]

Where can I find all these ?
Working on Innovative / hard (not necessarily) and open ended projects
- Research Labs in Academic Institutes
- Open Source Projects
- (Google) Research Labs [Rich]

What do I do to get what I want.

Personal Productivity

2007-08-05T05:24:00.000-07:00

I thought that it was time to rethink over the way I work, prioritise tasks and implement them.
Hence, I read up a few things on the web.
Found a couple of good resources and suggestions.

I have bookmarked the links at:

http://del.icio.us/amirivija/Productivity

I also subscribed to a couple of blogs on productivity.

Here are a few notes I made for myself based upon what all I read:

Things to implement:
1] Keep a record of the start and end times of different activities
2] Cut down e-mail alerts. cut down IM. Look at the e-mails only 4 times a day. [Morning, After Lunch, Before Leaving - set aside time for rss feeds ets]
3] Clarify objectives, before starting any work
4] Break down the big problem into smaller ones

5] Work tends to expand in the time available.. [so compartmentalize the work] Hence, shrink the time you are going to work.. [ Plan to work only for 5 hours per day]

6] Stop multi tasking..

7] Do the task that gives the most benefit.

8] Join a group to keep you motivated
1] Apping group
2] Build an online programming network

9] Picture of a goal : expert computer science engineer

10] be patient

11] seek inspiration - blogs, people , articles

12] never skip anything two days in a row

13] Apply the ""do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it"" rule for all the stuff that' clogging your system

I also stumbled across the book "Getting Things done" by david allen. I would like to read this book too.

This one also has pointers to some good stuff
http://zenhabits.net/2007/02/beginners-guide-to-gtd/

And last but not the least, I reorganised my Google reader feeds

I am a Kinesthetic Learner

2007-08-04T20:24:00.000-07:00

This is what http://www.metamath.com/multiple/multiple_choice_questions.html has to say about my learning style.

The results of Amirisetty Vijayaraghavan's learning inventory are:
Visual/Nonverbal 30 Visual/Verbal 28 Auditory 24 Kinesthetic 36
Your primary learning style is:

The Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learning Style

You learn best when physically engaged in a "hands on" activity. In the classroom, you benefit from a lab setting where you can manipulate materials to learn new information. You learn best when you can be physically active in the learning environment. You benefit from instructors who encourage in-class demonstrations, "hands on" student learning experiences, and field work outside the classroom.

Strategies for the Tactile/ Kinesthetic Learner:

To help you stay focused on class lecture, sit near the front of the room and take notes throughout the class period. Don't worry about correct spelling or writing in complete sentences. Jot down key words and draw pictures or make charts to help you remember the information you are hearing.

When studying, walk back and forth with textbook, notes, or flashcards in hand and read the information out loud.

Think of ways to make your learning tangible, i.e. something you can put your hands on. For example, make a model that illustrates a key concept. Spend extra time in a lab setting to learn an important procedure. Spend time in the field (e.g. a museum, historical site, or job site) to gain first-hand experience of your subject matter.

To learn a sequence of steps, make 3'x 5' flashcards for each step. Arrange the cards on a table top to represent the correct sequence. Put words, symbols, or pictures on your flashcards -- anything that helps you remember the information. Use highlighter pens in contrasting colors to emphasize important points. Limit the amount of information per card to aid recall. Practice putting the cards in order until the sequence becomes automatic.

When reviewing new information, copy key points onto a chalkboard, easel board, or other large writing surface.

Make use of the computer to reinforce learning through the sense of touch. Using word processing software, copy essential information from your notes and textbook. Use graphics, tables, and spreadsheets to further organize material that must be learned.

Listen to audio tapes on a Walkman tape player while exercising. Make your own tapes containing important course information.

to READ

2007-07-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

http://code.google.com/edu/content/submissions/uwspr2007_clustercourse/listing.html

Another Idea - Speech recognition

2007-07-09T22:40:00.000-07:00

2-3 years ago I had looked up some work on speech to text conversion.
The approaches were based on Neural networks, and I did not find them helpful.

I dont know the as it is now, but here is the Idea that sprung to my mind yesterday.

Towards Semantic web. One step at a time

2007-07-07T03:52:00.000-07:00

I was traveling back from my hometown to bangalore when I came across this good science fiction article which revolves around semantic web and embedded devices.
Just reinforcing my vision of a world with information at the time we want and at the place we need. Basically it is the availability of information when needed.

I had been reading a few papers on Information retrieval, the semantic web [collaborative filtering/ social networks]. Few of these papers have fascinated me and I believe that they are going to make the world a easier place to live in.

Here is my iota of contribution towards this end:
This is a continuation of my efforts started here.

I implemented the concepts mentioned in the paper above to come up with a program capable to developing a concept map for a small document corpus.

Here is the concept map:

I used the Stanford NLP parser to extract the nounphrases from the document.
JGraphT to represent the graph (I used the DirectedGraph) and JGraph to display the graph.

Lots of improvements to be done:

At present all the document processing and generation of the concept map is done online. That sucks up a lot of memory. Hence I'll have to use persistent storage store the nounPhrase - Document association, the Document information, the nounPhrase - nounPhrase association. I am planning to try hsqldb for this. It supports inmemory databases.
Need to speed up the execution by having some parallel processing. I will try getting help from a professor at IISc [SERC] for this.
I need to add the relationship between two entities (alongwith their weightage). For example: Google has a relationship with yahoo. Right now my program just tells that there is an association. but what type of association [I can be competitors/ successful startups/ young CEO's/ web companies/ great places to work at/etc etc]
Optimise the code.

And I want to learn developing applications for embedded devices too.
I will start with image processing in mobile phones. I bought a second hand nokia 6600 for this.
The two thing I have in mind for mobile applications are:

An image processing program that will tell me the destination of the bus when I click the photograph of the destination board of the bus (which is in Kannada) so that I dont have to rush to the bus to ask "Bhaiya, majestic jayega?"
An image processing program (again) which converts my notes (which are quite random) into a good power point presentation (It should at least capture the shapes and the content)

Hmm.. seems that I talk a lot. Let me get back to work!

Distance Learning MS in CS

2007-06-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

This one looks good:

http://www.grad.iit.edu/bulletin/programs/cs.html#mast-sci-comp-sci

Cost: 20 760 U.S. dollars = 8,47 ,796.79 Indian rupees

Programming core courses
CS 522 Data Mining
CS 525 Advanced Database Organization
CS 529 Information Retrieval
CS 540 Syntactic Analysis of Programming Languages
CS 546 Parallel Processing
CS 551 Operating System Design and Implementation

Systems core courses
CS 542 Computer Networks I: Fundamentals
CS 544 Computer Networks II: Network Services
CS 547 Wireless Networks
CS 550 Advanced Operating Systems
CS 555 Analytic Models and Simulation of Computer Systems
CS 570 Advanced Computer Architecture
CS 586 Software Systems Architectures

Theory core courses
CS 530 Theory of Computation
CS 532 Formal Languages
CS 533 Computational Geometry
CS 535 Design and Analysis of Algorithms
CS 536 Science of Programming
CS 538 Combinatorial Optimization

The germ

2007-06-03T00:28:00.001-07:00

The 16th International World Wide Web conference was held at Banff, Alberta Canada from May 8 to 12th this year.
The web has revolutionalized the way information flows, the way people learn, the way people do their everyday things, the way people socialize and a zillion other things. In short, it has revolutionized the way we live.
And each year the www conference sets the stage to accelerate this revolution in the years to come.

Here are a few papers that I'd like to read up in the limited time I have.
I collected these docs by searching for pdf site:http://www2007.org/ with google.
I have skimmed through the abstracts of the interesting papers of the first 90 results
I found around 29 papers interesting.

Track: Semantic Web (2)

1] Analysis of Topological Characteristics of Huge Online *

Social Networking Services

http://www2007.org/papers/paper676.pdf

2] Combating Spam in Tagging Systems [Stanford]

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_97.pdf

Track: Search, Information organization, retrieval and processing (17)

1] Navigation-Aided Retrieval

http://www2007.org/papers/paper162.pdf

2] Supervised Rank Aggregation *

http://www2007.org/papers/paper286.pdf

3] Functional Faceted Web Query Analysis [NSU, Singapore] *

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_44.pdf

4] Efficient Search in Large Textual Collections *

with Redundancy

http://www2007.org/papers/paper800.pdf

5] Formalization, User Strategy and Interaction Design:

Users’ Behaviour with Discourse Tagging Semantics

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_30.pdf

6] Sponsored Search with Contexts [upenn]

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_83.pdf

7] Towards a Semantic Knowledge Base for Yeast Biologists

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_130.pdf

8] Detecting Near-Duplicates for Web Crawling [google] *

http://www2007.org/papers/paper215.pdf

9] Robust Methodologies for Modeling Web Click [yahoo]*

Distributions

http://www2007.org/papers/paper056.pdf

10] Random Web Crawls[criteo]

http://www2007.org/papers/paper339.pdf

11] An Adaptive Crawler for Locating Hidden-Web Entry Points [Utah]*

http://www2007.org/papers/paper429.pdf

12] Web Projections: Learning from Contextual Subgraphs of the Web

[Microsoft, cmu]*

http://www2007.org/papers/paper551.pdf

13] The Discoverability of the Web [yahoo]*

http://www2007.org/papers/paper592.pdf

14] Extraction and Search of Chemical Formulae in Text

Documents on the Web [PSU]

http://www2007.org/papers/paper100.pdf

15] Summarizing Email Conversations with Clue Words [ucb, cancada] *

http://www2007.org/papers/paper631.pdf

16] Answering Relationship Queries on the Web [IBM]*

http://www2007.org/papers/paper058.pdf

17] Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text

http://www2007.org/papers/paper194.pdf

Recommender systems, Collaborative filtering (4)

1] Improving Ontology Recommendation and Reuse in

WebCORE by Collaborative Assessments

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_8.pdf

2] The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging [Princeton] *

http://www2007.org/papers/paper635.pdf

3] Scaling Up All Pairs Similarity Search [google] **

http://www2007.org/papers/paper342.pdf

4] Applying Collaborative Tagging to E-Learning

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_56.pdf

Data Mining: (2)

1] Towards Domain-Independent Information Extraction

from Web Tables

http://www2007.org/papers/paper790.pdf

2] Page-level Template Detection via Isotonic Smoothing [yahoo]* omi

http://www2007.org/papers/paper588.pdf

Miscellaneous but interesting (4)

1] Optimal Audio-Visual Representations

for Illiterate Users of Computers

http://www2007.org/papers/paper764.pdf

2] A Mobile Application Framework for the Geospatial Web

http://www2007.org/papers/paper287.pdf

3] Communication as Information-Seeking: The Case for

Mobile Social Software for Developing Regions [Washington]

http://www2007.org/papers/paper669.pdf

4] Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_12.pdf

Know thy self

2007-05-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

I came across this blog post and found it very insightful.

I could relate myself to the author of this post.

A few points that I found interesting. [verbatim from the post]:

-
Beware the traps of justification and attribution when thinking about your life. Many people justify past decisions because they want them to make sense and feel better.

^-- This is what I have been doing the past one year! Fooling myself.

Yes, most clouds have silver linings. But sometimes getting hit in the head with a shovel is just getting hit in the head with a shovel. It’s not fun, there’s not much educational value, and your life really is better without it.

-
I really don't know what I want.
The author gives simple and effective tips to understand what you want:
1. A feel good list <-- In this, you note down the events that made you feel good. eg: understanding the paper on semantic search. eg: Explaining Sudhir on why I feel that semantic search would be better than textual search. eg: Telling a colleague that google patent search would be better than delphion.
eg: Helping a colleague finding a solution to the problem he was facing.

2. An ideas list <-- In this you note down the ideas that come to your mind. The author mentioned sometimes he gets a great idea in the sleep and he just gets up and notes that idea down. This happened to me a couple of times :). 3. Finally, get external inputs. Understand your personality and get inspired. I took up this personality test on: and found that : I was and ENJF http://typelogic.com/enfj.html

Extraverted	Intuitive	Feeling	Judging
Strength of the preferences %
33	38	12	11

I'd like to read it again.
In short, it says that people like me like to find solutions, look for greener pastures, help others and are pedagogues of humanity.
That is true I believe, but it is for the people around me to tell me that.

Here is something from a test that I took up previously.

More good talk. From the same blog:

This talk is good:

Richard St. John: Secrets of success in 8 words, 3 minutes

Do what you love: Passion
Determination: Hard work, focus, push yourself, get good in one thing
Make something useful: Ideas, serve others
Keep your chin up: Persist

I need to look at the highlighted points

One needs to persist in the face of failure and other CRAP:

Criticism
Rejection
Jerks (or another word for a non-nice person)
Pressure

Personality development for Kids

2007-05-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Here is something I wrote on a piece of paper.. This was an effort for the kids of SEEK, VISHWAS, Bangalore. A part of it has been implemented

Syntactic to Semantic Web. The search engine that "Understands" what you want!

2007-05-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

I have been looking for current work on text mining, knowledge representation/extraction from unstructured data. I have bookmarked

I found this paper particularly interesting:
"Knowledge Discovery from Semi-Structured Data for Conceptual Organization"

The authors talk about

creating a concept map (a graph of co-occurring [in other terms, related] concepts [noun phrases]) from a corpus,
then extracting cliques of a particular concept [using a topological sort],
and then assigning the documents to that particular clique

What you get a the end is the mapping of a document to concepts. In short, what are the noun phrases that describe the document.
These noun phrases may not always contain all the noun phrases that occur in the document [eg. red soil, which may have occurred in one of the documents containing the concept "rose", but it did not co-occur in any other document containing "rose"]
On the other hand, these noun phrases may include some concepts which were not obvious from that particular document [eg. a document containing "school kids" may not contain the concept "chocolate", but these two concepts have co-occurred in a significant number of documents in the corpus]..

I liked the paper, the concept is very similar to what we do in real life.
We have concepts stored inside our brain [connection between neurons?]. To extract the concept map stored in your brain, you just need to think about all the things that come to your mind when you think about a concept say "s e x".
When ever we come across something new (a new concept), we just associate it to an already existing concept map in our brain. These concepts are in turn linked to information about them (related documents?)

We can even take this a step ahead by assigning weights to the edges [based upon how frequently they co-occur, label the edges[and nodes] with all possible verbs that connect them ]

btw, the authors the Stanford Parser to extract the noun phrases.

you can try it online here.
Moving from syntactic to semantic.. arent we?

why are we [Indians] prosperous but not happy

2007-04-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

This post gives a good idea..
I'd like to read it once more in my leisure and ponder over it.

http://harmanjit.blogspot.com/2007/04/notice-period-to-god.html

Portal for Kids

2007-04-19T01:39:00.000-07:00

I feel that this idea would be a hit..

resources here
http://www.memory-key.com/Parents/strategies.pdf
http://www.journal.naeyc.org/btj/200407/OnlineAndPrintArtResources.pdf
http://www.surreymuseums.org.uk/somethingelse/psycho.htm

Cognitive Sciences

2007-04-10T10:25:00.000-07:00

I dont know what that means.. but some of the things sound interesting..
and maybe complex..

will just make a note of few things that I come across..

Please correct me if I am wrong..
Wordnet is a collection of synsets.. collection of groups of words which relate to a similar concept

Some resources:
A course at MIT OCW [mentioned in my previous post]

Some Papers:
http://www-tsujii.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yusuke/paper/eacl2003.pdf
http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/wnsim-bib/

MIT OCW. Real Cool Studd here

2007-04-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

I feel that I need to constantly keep learning..

understanding new things has always facinated me..
So has looking at the same thing from a different point of view.

Now and then, I take up a topic which it vaguely related to what I know or what I can comprehend easily and try to understand it.. But such efforts have not led to something concrete till now..
The good this is that I learn.. what next? What do I do with the things I learn?

cut the crap..
Here are a few courses that I'd like to look at in the coming months: [Apart from occasional Google Videos]

Will keep on adding to this list over time

Google Tech Talks I'd like to see

2007-04-01T02:30:00.000-07:00

Update [ Aug 5, 2007]: These are the ones that I would like to add - From the Google Scalability conference - from glinden
The Google tech talks are quite informative. Ranging from mysql query optimisation to psycology and economics.

Here is the list of videos that I'd Like to watch over the next few months...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879

Building GUI applications with Python, GTK and Glade
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5838951374743244232

Haiku: The Operating System
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=236331448076587879

Joomla!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7035976321528074794

7 Ways To Ruin A Technological Revolution
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8538240380002213699

Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606

Comparing American and Chinese Negotiation Styles
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4634363396909200237

GeoServer and Architectures of Participation for Geospatial Information
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3923618086187138447

Search Engine Strategies - Eric Schmidt interview
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5651532968895500419

Spatial Query Processing Utilizing Voronoi Diagrams
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2755539754474649930

A Live Motion Portable 3D Video Camera
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3656494784112768834

Toward the First Revolution in the Mind Sciences
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=983112177262602885

You Are What You Say: Privacy Risks of Public Mentions
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6474169875352273382

Code Generation With Ruby
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1541014406319673545

Peer to Peer Web Search with Minerva
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8710122769175704670

Journey Towards The Center Of The Earth
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5797001505961854840

Near-optimal Monitoring of Online Data Sources
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2567976561168591576

The New Digital Sky
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4364162621957872851

Python 3000
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6459339159268485356

How can we better understand customers?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1932851428624192110

Some Python Integrated Development Environments
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8158216898634409900

15 Views of a Node Link Graph: An Information Visualization Portfolio
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6229232330597040086

Competing and Collaborating in China with Bi-Cultural Competence
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6672770494265798071

People to People Lending with Prosper
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8082730452536323779

Becoming a Software Testing Expert
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6852841264192883219

Impact of Technology on Reducing Poverty and Alleviating Social Issues in India
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6671271293722797569

Introduction to Perl: The friendly programming language
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-876009974056913377

Building Large Systems at Google
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5699448884004201579

Leveraging India As India Stands Up
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2089147957292061314

Strike Up The Brand: How to Design for Branding
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5654878583447435228

Team Server / Ajax Development with IntelliJ IDEA
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5548138713037707664

The Next Fifty Years of Science
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6119231548215342323

Our Lives, Our Facebooks

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3910777240176719644

django: Web Development for Perfectionists with Deadlines
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-70449010942275062

Biofuels: Think Outside The Barrel
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-570288889128950913

Urban Sensing, Social Networking, And The Third Thing
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7829327427683569548

Predicting bugs in code changes using SCM information
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7802818288058377867

General Purpose, Low Power Supercomputing Using Reconfiguration
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4969729965240981475

The Reiser4 Filesystem
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6866770590245111825

Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2226061573523196174

Food for the soul

2007-03-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

Nowadays I feel that I am being overly disappointed with myself and with the things around me..
I told my friend about this and he told me that I tend poke my nose into other affairs..[ The things that are not in my "Department"!].. and that I tend to judge others..

I guess thats true..

I feel that one way to get rid of this disappointment and "blue" feeling is to look at some practical spiritual quotes.. I chose tao te ching.. and buddhism

Here are some quotes applicable to me that I collated

--

Therefore, stubborn people are disciples of death, but

Flexible people are disciples of life.

-Be impeccable with your word.

Speak little

Bold action against others leads to death

Bold action in harmony with Tao leads to life

-Don't take anything personally.

Be wary of both honor and disgrace

Honor is founded on disgrace

and disgrace is rooted in honor

Both should be avoided

Both bind a person to this world

Words born of the mind are not true

True words are not born of the mind

Those who have virtue do not look for faults

Those who look for faults have no virtue

-Don't make assumptions.

Through the course of nature

Muddy water becomes clear

Through the unfolding of life

Man reaches perfection

Stillness benefits more than action

Silence benefits more than words

Rare indeed are those who are still

Rare indeed are those who are silent

Rare indeed are those who obtain the bounty of this world

-Always do your best.

She who gives herself to this path

is like a block of wood

That gives itself to the chisel

Cut by cut it is honed to perfection

Only a student who gives herself

Can receive the master's gift

Buddhist Values

Right Viewpoint - Realizing the Four Noble Truths
Right Values - Commitment to mental and ethical growth in moderation
Right Speech - One speaks in a non hurtful, not exaggerated, truthful way
Right Actions - Wholesome action, avoiding action that would do harm
Right Livelihood - One's job does not harm in any way oneself or others; directly or indirectly
Right Effort - One makes an effort to improve
Right Mindfulness - Mental ability to see things for what they are with clear consciousness.
Right Meditation - State where one reaches enlightenment and the ego has disappeared.

Buddha Noble Truths

1. Suffering

There is suffering, dukkha.

Dukkha should be understood.

Dukkha has been understood

2. Desire

There is the origin of suffering, which is attachment to desire.

Desire should be let go of.

Desire has been let go of.

3. cessation of suffering

There is the cessation of suffering, of dukkha.

The cessation of dukkha should be realised.

The cessation of dukkha has been realised.

4. The eight fold path

--

I am gonna take the printout and keep it in my drawer and have a look at it now and then..

How good it would be if we had some "reminder" system that would just pop out an applicable wise saying based upon a situation..

dream along

list

2007-02-14T20:03:00.001-08:00

1. ST wildfire - Market, competitor survey
2. Portal for farmers - move it ahead
3. test humaa, be in touch with v Fernando
4. Improve intonation
Download, test adn choose onr speech analyzer.
5. get GRE podcasts/wordlists for the mobile
6. e-bike
7. webhosting and deploying my web-harvest application
8. goals, points for ems discussion, fix the tcp

Improving intonation, accent reduction

2007-02-14T18:32:00.001-08:00

I need to improve the "impact" of my delivery. This was one of the development needs that my manager has in mind for me.

Thats true, even if you have stuff, and you are not able to convey it in a manner people are impressed, most of the hardwork goes waste..

My voice is monotonous - no up's and down's in the frequency.. It is a drone.. When you listen to me, you would feel that you are listening to a truck that speaks :)..

I also need to improve my accent [So that my US counterparts get me properly]

I need speech processing software to analyse, improve and monitor my voice.
http://linguistlist.org/sp/SearchWRListing-action.cfm

http://www.sil.org/computing/speechtools/download.htm

Free Speech analysis softwares: http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsroach/phon2/freespeech.htm

It is known by: [Google search keywords]

voice training - this applies more to singers
speech therapy
improve intonation
speech training
speech analyzer
...

I will keep this post updated with my progress.

I should be done by end of March [Thought it is a continuous improvement process :)]

btw.. Clipmarks is a good mozilla addon to mark the pages that you would like to store..

Improving intonation, accent reduction

2007-02-14T18:32:00.000-08:00

I need to improve the "impact" of my delivery. This was one of the development needs that my manager has in mind for me.

Thats true, even if you have stuff, and you are not able to convey it in a manner people are impressed, most of the hardwork goes waste..

My voice is monotonous - no up's and down's in the frequency.. It is a drone.. When you listen to me, you would feel that you are listening to a truck that speaks :)..

I also need to improve my accent [So that my US counterparts get me properly]

I need speech processing software to analyse, improve and monitor my voice.
http://linguistlist.org/sp/SearchWRListing-action.cfm

http://www.sil.org/computing/speechtools/download.htm

It is known by: [Google search keywords]

voice training - this applies more to singers
speech therapy
improve intonation
speech training
...

I will keep this post updated with my progress.

I should be done by end of March [Thought it is a continuous improvement process :)]

btw.. Clipmarks is a good mozilla addon to mark the pages that you would like to store..

The best way to improve upon your speech is to be conscious of your speech.

Listen to good speakers[auditory training].
-> Knowledge@Wharton [Management podcasts], BBC and a whole lot of other podcast sites are good sources for materila to listen.

Record your speech [Impromptu speech, reading from a textbook, etc]
Anf then listen to it.. where are the places where you do not sound good, the places where you may be misunderstood, places where you stumble, etc

Note down the areas of improvement.

Practicing in from of the mirrir also helps. Pay special attention to lip movements [In my case, I do not flex my lips to the extent that is needed..]

And.. you need patience.. one cannot perfect it with a day/week etc.. it is a continuous process..

Gene Expression data analysis

2007-02-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

Paper: Graph-based iterative Group Analysis enhances microarray interpretation
Rainer Breitling,Anna Amtmann,Pawel Herzy
src: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/100

Gene Expression data analysis :
[from micro array data of a partcular cell state (during a particular phase in the cell cycle/diseased (brain tumor)/healthy) which we want to analyse]
microarray data only gives the magnitude of cDNA's of different genes

One needs to derive the relationships [cause -effect relationships]

metabolic pathways
signallin pathways
protein interaction maps

Identifying subgraphs (that form a community? [PNAS art]subgraphs having high clustering coefficient )

bigraph - Graph with two types of nodes

Good information on the existing methods of Gene Expression Analysis [And gene expression data too]
http://smd.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/search/QuerySetup.pl

good presentation : http://genome-www5.stanford.edu/help/TUTORIALS/SMD_Analysis.ppt

Slide 6 : Factors for Measurement/Process errors
Data smoothened out using normalization : doping controls

Imp: Clustering algorithms
good example begins: slide 21

Heirarchical clustering/Self organising maps

gene Expression microarray data converted into n dimensional vector

x[i] = log(ratio)[i] i=1 to n

How close the two genes are is defined by the distance between those vectors
Metrics:

Euclidiean - the distance between the two vectors in space v-u v and u are ntruple vectors
Manhattan - http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TaxicabMetric.html
Pearson correlation coefficient : It measures the tendancy of both the variables to increase and decrease together.<-- This is also a part of datamining

This can imply that the change in them is the effect of some other vector
or both the vectors influence each other [infinite loop till saturation?]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient

4. Cosine Similarity? [this is used in document similarity] : It is the cosine of the angle between two vectors.

Cluster the expression data [patterns] based upon the similarity[ metrics given above]
Similar to Kruskal's Minimum spanning tree algorithm.

this can lead to erroneous results (why?)

SOM's (self organising maps) <-- This is also a part of datamining
This is a single layer feed forward network connected to a grid of 2D/3D vectors.

Why dont I use edge betweenness based algorithm? [PNAS: community structure in social and biological networks]

Tools:
PAJEK
SMD - Stanford dataset

Good links -

2007-02-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

I would like to have a collection of links..
The links which I would like to read at a later point of time..
Bookmarking is one way..
It is a bit difficult to sift thru them.. especially if you have a lots of them..

This is my bundle of good links:

Inspirational posters:
http://www.businessballs.com/free_funny_inspirational_motivational_posters.htm

[Mar 27 Update]
http://admissionsourcehelp.blogspot.com/2007/03/computer-science-admission-requirements.html
http://www.slideshare.net/DERIGalway/conor-hayes-topics-tags-and-trends-in-the-blogosphere
http://webcamp.org/SocialNetworks/
http://csclub.cs.sjsu.edu/wordpress/?p=64
http://pimm.wordpress.com/tag/diy/
http://www.hung-truong.com/gradschool/2007/03/

[An informative paper on C++.. from the author of C++ itself!]
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/oopsla.pdf

[Apr 14 Update]
http://edcorner.stanford.edu/index.html

[Apr 16 Update]
Graph Algorithms
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=w.dgmrhftr_0ctq6mw

e-bike?

2007-01-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

My Office is around 15 kilometres from my residence.
And I am fed up with the traffic jams here in Bangalore, the periodicity of buses.

So I said, lemme try going to the office on a bicycle.
I tried it on the weekend.. and guess what it just took me 10 more mins than what the bus takes! [8:25 AM to 9:25 AM]..
But I was too tired and coming back from the office at night [10 PM] was miserable..

Bicycle is good.. but I need a power assist added.. Pedal whenever you can.. and if you dont feel like it, just turn on the motor and there you go!

It is not difficult to add a motor to the bicycle.. just a few hand calculations, few trips to the workshop and a few instructions to the workman.

Google is my friend:
This is a read good website:
http://www.peltzer.net/ebike/
www.estelle.de

The commercial e-bikes
http://www.electric-bikes.com/

I had seen a person use a 0.5 HP DC motor, 24V batteries.. the guy above uses a 1HP [746 Watt],3000 rpm motor.
btw, TXU Turbines are 1000000000 Watt [:)].. A thousand Megawatt

Say I want to go at a speed of 20 kmph and the wheel diameter is..
I need to do the calc and come out with the spec for the

motor,
batteries,
charger,
the speed reducer,
the motor speed controller,
dimensions of the supporting structure,
etc

Motor would be a major cost here I believe, Need to ask is some shop here or look for some flea market in case a new motor is too costly [A motor from a washing machine would do]

btw a new e-bike costs 16000 INR (The pamphlet said that it costs only 80? paise per km)
Will do some more research and come up with the design..

I want to be at the office tomorrow morning at 6:00 am.

Hope that such wishes get fulfilled in the near future :)

Update 1:
I bought a second hand DC motor[1200 INR], 0.5 inch [thickness] 18 and 38 teeth sprockets, a chain [all three costed me 768 INR] and two small metal sheets for housing the motor.. Will upload the photos of my endeavour later.
I need to go to the workshop to bore the sprockets and to drill them metal sheets and assemble all of them and get my bike ready [:)]
getting work done at the workshop is tiring.. so I would do this manufacturing/assembly thing the week after next..

My friends are excited about the effort!..
Will keep you updated

Network Analysis ...

2007-01-27T07:22:00.000-08:00

Need to Carry my thesis work forward..
My thesis was on Study of hub neighborhoods in some networks

In the thesis, I had come up with a few metrics to find the interconnectednedd between two hubs in a network.

http://www.genetics.ucla.edu/labs/horvath/CoexpressionNetwork/

I am not able to figure out what should I work on..
Will have to decide it by tomorrow..
so much to do. so little time!

More choices is good.... and bad too!

2007-01-15T10:28:00.000-08:00

A Paradox? probably yes.
Just had a look at the Google video by
The Paradox of Choice
by Barry Schwartz

Where he talks about the dark side of having more choices..

Paralysis: The choice make becomes overwhelmed by the deluge of choices in front of him. Thus, he either postpones his decision or does not make any decision!

Different types of choice making strategies:

Maximiser: These people look at all the options and make the decisions.. but these people are more unhappy [According to the speaker].. I feel that this is true in practice too!
Satisfisor: These people keep on trying the alternatives till they get the alternative by which they are satisfied. Their choice may not be optimal... {because they have not looked at all the options].. But in practice they are more happy than Maximisers!

Principal-Agent Problem:
In this case, the agent does all the work of choosing.. thus insulating the stake holder from the pain of making decisions.. The agent does not need to be a guru... if he has some knowledge of the products, he can come up with good choice for the stake holder. Both are profited.. both are happy..

The Speaker also said that Google was the part of the solution of this "choices" problem.

Where are our Energy needs taking us: A summary of Newsweek 2007 contents

2007-01-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

I started going through the articles and realised that I would be able to appreciate the implications of Energy supply/demand on various sections better if I had some background of Macroeconomics. I googled and got a fairly good introduction to Macroeconomics.
Here's the presentation on Macroeconomics. If you already have an idea of what/how/why of GDP, Inflation, bank interest rates, oil prices, etc.. then u can skip the macroeconomics presentation.
web.syr.edu/~bjdempse/Introduction%20to%20Macroeconomics.pdf

Create > New > Playlist

2007-01-14T03:53:00.000-08:00

It has been long since I have learnt any new songs on my guitar..
I need to learn new songs to play on the guitar..

Here's the list of the songs that I would be learning:
These are the the songs that are

1. Kya Mujhe Pyar Hai - Woh Lamhe

2. Woh Lamhe - Woh Lamhe

3. Show (Hey Oh) - Californication

4. Allah Ke Bande - Kailas Kher

5. Dil Kya Kare Jab kisiko.. kisise pyar ho jaye

6. Neele neele ambar pe

7. Listen to your heart - Avril Lavigne

8. One Tamil Song

9. One Telugu song

The Songs that I already know are:

I need to improve upon retention of lyrics,
Areas of Improvement
1. Knocking on heavens door - Bob Dylan - Lyrics
2. Californication - RHCP - Lyrics
3. Dum Maro Dum
4. Papa Kehte Hain - Lyrics
5. Hotel California - Lyrics, Lead
6. Yahan Kyun jee rahen hain [my composition]
7. over the mountains of the seas - Lyrics
8. Open the eyes of my heart - Lyrics
9. This one for the people - Lyrics

Will try to buy the Sony Ericsson Protable speakers. So that I can have the percussion and background music.. the portable ones (These run on the phone battery only)
or the ones that need the power supply.. I need to see how heavy they would be on my wallet [:)]

TRIZ - Become an Edison!

2007-01-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

"Make significant contributions to IP" was one of my long term goals that I put in my ems [ an internal resume where we list out our contributions to the business, strengths, development needs and our future plans]..

No the question is.. How do I make a "significant" contribution to IP [Intellectual property].. I am a bit creative.. and creativity coupled with science and technology leads to new ideas, new inventions and new technology breakthroughs. One way to generate a new idea to improve something (say coming up with a disruptive technology) is to learn more about the technology, and keep on brainstorming (with yourself) until u get an idea. And what do I do about a technology that I am not expert at.. I would have to become an expert in that field first.. and then think about the "creative" idea..

I dont have the luxury of that time.. Though I have the luxury of resources to become an expert in the technology I want to genetate intellectual property [Steam Turbines.. I dont want to be more specific]

I searched for something on innovation in our library .. and came across TRIZ.. it sounded cool :)
just googled for TRIZ (note that google is a word in the english dictionary. GOOGLE has become analogous to search)
TRIZ I learnt... was a method for inventors to come up with new ideas to solve their problems.

Genrich S. Altshuller, the father if TRIZ, used to work in the patent team of the Russian Navy.

He
Today I had a chance to look into the details of TRIZ.
Basic philosophy is to convert your problem into an abstract one.
find the abstract solution for the abstract problem [from a similar problem which has already been solved ]
convert the abstract solution to the solution of your problem..

This document gives a good idea of triz [Along with a good example of a beverage can desin optimisation]
http://www.mazur.net/triz/

An algorithm to solve your problem [i.e. move your system towards ideality] would be.
1. Identify the technical conflicts in your problem [Abstract]
2. Look at the TRIZ matrix and find the possible solutions [Abstract]

Convert the abstract solutions of step 2 into the solutions specific to your problem..

More when I file my first patent disclosure :)

Friends now : Friends hereafter ..

2007-01-13T05:52:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to record where the people whom I know are right now and how do they choose the road on the crossroads.. and where would those Roads take them.. just a small study..

Name: Education :
Current state : Possible next state..
Changes of state

1. Durgaprasad: BE Mech/ MSc Infosys [BITS Pilani] 2005
Microsoft Hyderabad, development[Mobile operating systems]

2. Srinivas : BE Mech/ MSc Infosys [BITS Pilani] 2005
MS Mech, Stanford. [1st sem CFD work. switching field to design. As CFD jobs require only PhD's]
MS->job->MBA

3. Gautam. BE Mech, BITS Pilani 2004
MS Materials Science. Among Class toppers. Applied for a Ph.D. (more inclined towards biology/ humanities).. Likes to influence people around him

4. Bharath BE Mech, BITS Pilani 2004
MS Mech. Looking for a job rite now

5. Chandana BE Mech, BITS Pilani 2004
MS Mech, Purdue

6. Divya (violinist) BE Chemical, BITS Pilani 2004
Did internship at JFWTC in summer hols. Completed MS in 3 sems [no final yr project]
currently doing a job in an Environmental Science company?

7. Dinakar BE Mech, BITS Pilani 2004
MS - No contact

8. Narayana Mech 2004
MS - No contact

9. Adi..

Address book is a better way to maintain this info I guess..

GRE Resources

2007-01-07T09:36:00.000-08:00

I this post I would be adding resources that would aid in the preparation of GRE..

http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~sdixit/gre.htm

The coming year

2007-01-07T01:53:00.000-08:00

There are three segments which I would be targetting
1. MS
2. EEDP
3. GE

Main focus would be:

1st half:
GRE, EEDP, POM, DREAMS

2nd half:
Knowledge acquisition, career shift (maybe)->depends on 1st half

The action items would be:

Jan -
1. Read about GA, ANN, and how it has been applied to optimisation problems. [//]
2. Apply GA to the design optimisation problem [FW 4]
3. Talk to IISc prof about the problem - Possibility of a paper. [FW 3]
4. GRE - wl [1 to30]

Feb -
1. Look at how you can improve the optimisation algo. Apply various optimisation algos to your design problem and benchmark performances. [ FW 7]
2. GRE - wl [ upto 60]
3. DMAIC ss [FW 8]

Mar -
1. GRE - wl [ pass 1 finish]]
2. Present in DREAMS

Apr -
1. GRE/EEDP - start trying for paper publication
2. GRE - pass 2, analytical writing, essays, etc

May-
1. EEDP [Revise CDC's]
2. GRE final pass

Jun-
1. GRE
2. EEDP

Second half:
DP's, Datamining

Research topic for Data Mining+Collaborative Filtering+NLP

2007-01-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

I am thinking of MS as a safety boat in case the ship that I am sailing in sinks :)
Moreover the pattern of MS is also gonna change.. So I feel that it is always better to have the score in hand.

I am planning to do an MS in computer science

I havent done any major projects in computer science..
To get into the top colleges [with aid] I feel that they would be looking at my inclination towards research..
I am planning of doing some project this year [and publish a paper.. maybe]

I am thinking of doing a project in collaborative filtering (involving NLP, Datamining)

Looking for some research topics..
Literature survey documented below

Searching in
ACM library, Google, Google Scholar, and a collection of search tools by Todd Veldhuizen.

Need an ACM account.. will finish the topic selection by sunday
[update - 5th Jan]
hmm.. friends say that I am becoming unstable day by day.. some even coined a noun for me - lahari baba.. the fickle one.. and here is another case of this behaviour..
I am thinking of a topic that involves [Artificial Intelligence - > [ANN or Genetic Algorithms] and design optimisation]..
One topic that I thought of is "Multi objective design optimisation of Steam turbine bucket and wheel using genetic algorithms" (This topic is research oriented, aligned with my work at office and also requires less effort)..
Now I need to look up what genetic algorithms are in detail.. I have a fair idea about them.. They operate on the principle of natural selection.. picking up the best qualities of the previous generation, generating new offspring with these qualities and then replacing the least fittest of the current population with the newly generated offspring...
I need to look at how I need to plug in the GA into the already existing program structure..

Books to read this year..

2007-01-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

I am looking forward for a great year ahead..
A year that would catapult me to great heights..
I am in the process of making a roadmap [both personal and professional] for the coming year.

Reading books (I am targeting 6-8 books this year) is a major item in the list.
The topics I am lookin at are
1] Innovation
2] *[Data Mining/Knowledge discovery/Collobarative filtering] **NLP& Aboutness
I feel that * and ** would be a good combination so that the text information can be represented in a structure understandable by the * algorithms

text --NLP*--> [ structured and representation] --User Data, CF,DM algos**----> good recommendations

3] Program Design : Algorithms , Design Patterns
4] Entrepreneurship [web based]

Here are some of the books that I came across in our library:
I am looking at amazon.com for the book reviews. I would writing my notes after each book.
Hope I come up with the final list by saturday..

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

INNOVATION:

Innovation on Demand: new product development using TRIZ Fey, Victor.
Rivin, Eugene I. [I feel that this book would be better. as it is written by mech engg profs maybe I can relate to the concepts better]
658.57522 FEY P05
2005

40 Principles : triz keys to technical innovation Altshuller, Genrich [This is book by the formulator of TRIZ]
620.0028
2001

Notes: TRIZ looks like a good concept.
>> TRIZ (some russian word):
TRIZ also evolved by transferring strong principles from one field to another.
TRIZ is also used in DFSS (for solving new problems using 6 sigma methodology)

This image compares TRIZ with other problem solving techniques

Biomimicry : innovation inspired by nature Benyus, Janine M.
600 BEN N97 [Looks like some stuff that they show in natgeo/discovery]
1997

--------------------------------
DATA MINING

The elements of statistical learning : data mining, inference, and prediction Hastie, T.
Tibshirani, Robert.
Friedman, Jerome.
006.31 Hastie, 2001
2001

Data mining : practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations Witten, I. H.
Frank, Eibe. [This is a must for any one planning to learn/apply data mining. Associated with WEKA]
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html
006.3 Witten, 2000
2000

Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining Fayyad, Usama M.
006.33 Advanc, 1996
1996 [This one looks like a good book]

Came across this nice pdf by usma fayyad and co
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/emner/it3704/lectures/papers/aimag-kdd-overview-1996-Fayyad.pdf

------------------------------------
ALGORITHMS

Learning to classify text using support vector machines: methods, theory and algorithms Joachims, Thorsten
005
2002
Algorithms in c,part1-4 : fundamentals data structures sorting searching Robert Sedgewick
005.133
2001
Multi-objective optimization using evolutionary algorithms Deb, Kalyanmoy.
519.3 Deb, 2001
2001

Machine learning Mitchell, Tom M.
006.31
1997
---------------------------------
NATURAL LAnguage processing

Foundation of Statistical Natural Language Processing Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schutze
410.285
2002 [This one looks like a good one]
The companion site for this book : http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/

Moreover this book is being used in the following Universities:

UPenn CIS530, UPenn CIS639, Berkeley SIMS 296a-4, Johns Hopkins: current (Eisner) and previous [lots of great slides by Jan Hajic!], Brown CS241, CMU 11-682, CMU 11-761, Stanford CS224N, Oregon Graduate Institute CSE580, Ohio State, U Chicago, Purdue [lots of slides], Tufts, Minnesota 1, Minnesota 2, SUNY Albany, San Diego SU, Mississippi State, UCLA.

Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing,Computational linguistics, and Speech Recognition Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin
410.28 DAN
2000
-------------------------------------------

Books That I zeroed in on:
First Half:
4. Artificial Intelligence [Genetic Algorithms, ANN and optimisation methods]

Second Half:
1. Innovation on Demand: new product development using TRIZ Fey, Victor.Rivin, Eugene I.
2. Data mining : practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations Witten, I. H.Frank, Eibe.
3. Foundation of Statistical Natural Language Processing Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schutze
5. [Design Patterns]
6. [Web entrepreneurship]

[update Jan 7]
I would be quite busy for the first half of this year.. GRE/EEDP.. hence, I would be stressing more on knowledge acquisition in the second half.

Ring out the old - Ring in the new

2006-12-19T09:14:00.000-08:00

12 more days and I would be seeing my 22nd year on this planet..
I have completed almost one third of my life..
I am getting a feeling that life is short.. There is so much to do .. so much to learn.. and so little time!

Each individual is an organisation.. The one with inputs/ revenue/ profit ramp ups/ knowledge acquisition.. and a lot more
Being in GE is a great experience.. There is a lots of stress on continuos learning.
"Life is like rowing upsream. To stop learning is to fall back" goes a Chinese adage..

It is really amazing of how such a mammoth like GE is able to move in an agile manner..
[It is not agile in all businesses]
As some GE veteran said, GE is a mammoth [huge company] with the soul of a teenager [a small company] (I dont remember what he said correctly.. but this is what he meant.. And with what I have seen till now, I feel that this i true.. [I dont feel that it is true]

Things that I have in mind [that are pending]
1. GRE
2. EEDP x
3. Get an electric gat
4. Learn Sanskrit x
5. Read the entire Bhagvad gita x
6. Learn swimming
7. Learn the violin x
8. Do some work on machine learning <-- x/ Collaborative filtering / Semantic search
9.form a band, Get an album out. x
10 . Do some work on ML/CF.. get some papers published.. [agressive goal. but need to chalk out a plan to achieve this]
11. Improve my accent/intonation.. Half of the time people do not understand what I say! : (

As of now, 1,2,8,10 and 11 are at the top of the stack. Their order would be
1. GRE
2. extraction of Semantics/Semantic search/ collaborative filtering + IISc

Need to talk to a friend on what he has to say!

I have three options right now
1. MS [Mech/Coms] Fall 2008
2. MBA 2013
3. Stay in GE for the rest of the life [I am enjoying it].. but paisa!..is the factor

I need to decide.. and decide fast

What is Web 2.0

2006-11-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

Just came across Web 2.0 conference in greg linden's blog. What is web 2.0 ? a new version of the internet :)).. How can the internet have a version.. Is is just a marketing hype?

The need to have this versioning comes from the fact that the business models/ technology on the web are changing.. The web is becoming user driven.. user generated content [Wikipedia], user centred content, content recommended for the user [Findory], user collaboration.. and the list goes on..

Oreilly has a nice article on this.

Here they mention the changing scenarion by example

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

Collaborative Filtering

2006-10-31T11:34:00.000-08:00

Directory of Related papers

TASTE
Wikipedia
WEKA

rashmi sinha's papers/ blog
jun wangs collaborative filtering resources

COLLABORATIVE FILTERING FOR USENET NEWS

search google for : "collaborative filtering" taste

Things I need to know more about CF.

1. Bayesian text classifier
2. Collaborative filtering. Neighbourhood based algorithms (KNN?)
3. Pearson Correlation

The Chain Game and its implications in Managing Companies

2006-10-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

I just had an outing with the children of Vishwas (an NGO) at lalbagh, bangalore. We played a couple of games. The children were bubbling with enthusiasm throughout..

One of the games that we played was the Chain Game. Let me describe the game for you..
1. One player is chosen as the initiator of the chain [The nucleus]
2. This nucleus has to catch the other players who are the part of the game.
3. Once he gets hold of someone, the victim and the nucleus have to form a chain and go after the remaining people.
4. This continues till only one player is left [he is the winner]

I observed that:
1. Smaller the size of the chain, the better the
a] Agility
b] Co-ordination
c] Swift reaction to changes in the external environment.

As the chain grows, the internal friction increases, coherence decreases, conflicts of interest arise, the system becomes clumsy [externally]..
Although there is lots of energy in the system in terms of [force]energy of individual components, the forces of the components tend to nullify one another...

Thats what happens to big conglomerates like GE, Intel.. and this may also happen to Google in may be 50 years or so..

Ideal strategy would be breaking the link.. This will create multiple nuclei which will act independantly of each other but work towards the common goal.. Capturing the entire market [or killing out the competition]..

Something similar to the Agent in Matrix [the virus]..
What do I name this technique.... Viral capture?