Saurav Sahay's blog

Greasemonkey, jQuery and Strophe

2011-06-29T22:40:00.000-07:00

Greasemoney is a Firefox add-on that allows third-party applications to add functionality to any site. With javascript libraries such as jQuery, it becomes really easy for a newbie to do this now. In fact, there are thousands of example Greasemonkey scripts to learn from today.

I needed to connect a conversational recommendation engine that recommends relevant content including people for domain specific conversations. When recommending people for different conversations, there is not much transactional value unless the system can bi-directionally ping the users (the recommended user should also get notified about the conversation so that she can possibly respond to the users in the conversation).

Trying to implement this functionality for a third party site, I found this neat XMPP library called Strophe. With the new HTML5 CORS specification, it becomes straightforward to use this client-side IM library for Jabber notifications on external websites using scripts. I had to add just a couple of lines in my apache server comfiguration to enable this feature. I will be updating the scripts online (with notifications) here.

When Information Technologies meet Communication Technologies, a new dimension is added to the existing IT space that allows realization of Vannevar Bush's 'As we may think' ideas. For example, I used Google+ ysterday which seems to have twined a nice combination of these two technologies together (ICT) with feeds from various networks and a logical integration with mail, chat, buzz and blog servers. Google wave failed initially for many reasons such as arriving too early in time and poor interface(with becoming an Apache project, I am sure there will be many cool applications coming out using the technology) but I thought it was a very cool project.

Thanks to open source technologies and foundations (eg. Apache) that have made available tremendous high quality projects and resources available to community to build up on and do creative stuff with it.

Cobot: Modeling long term user activity with time

2011-06-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

What are users getting interested in with time?

How are the interests changing/evolving?

These are two important questions Cobot tries to ask and answer. More specifically, Cobot uses domain specific dictionaries (for Health and Education domains) to extract concepts from user's conversations and deciphers user's short term and long term interests based on her conversations.

Here, you will see a couple of LTM (Long term model) graphs for a user asking questions on a site about Math topics in March this year snapshot-ed every 3 days (or more depending on activity).

In these graphs, you will see some new terms getting added, and associations between terms (based on multiple co-occurrences in STM) developing and decaying with time.

What We are trying to do is to heuristically infer some parameters like window for snapshot based on activity(related to user's short term and long term memories), learning and unlearning rates (how fast are users learning and unlearning things - related to semantic memory) for every user, etc. This modeling (done well) eventually helps Cobot to pick right users for recommending in different conversations. (We do a Spreading Activation search in user's LTM graphs mixed with other techniques for user recommendation.)

(There is a similar vector space based model for modeling user's STM (short term model) interests as well in Cobot.)

News

2011-06-02T09:18:00.001-07:00

How should news look like for both publishers and consumers? Here is one quick sketch of a news publishing/consumption prototype.

There are some neat startups in this arena (like zite, flipboard, gabacus and ctrl-news) that blend together amazing UI with great backend filtering and communication technologies.

How do you think?

2011-04-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

CoC Research Day Lightening Talk

2011-03-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

I presented a 2 minute 'Lightening' overview of my research today at the CoC Research Day. There were some amazing presentations by students from different schools of CS! Overall, it was lots of fun to see other nice presentations and present my work!

Here's my 2 minute Lightening Overview of Cobot:

Cobot: Conversational Information Access

View more presentations from Saurav Sahay

I also presented an overview poster of the Cobot project. Here's the poster:

Cobot Overview Poster

View more presentations from Saurav Sahay.

Query Generation from Natural Language Text

2011-03-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

(The above sentences are extracted from WebMD forum discussions that are of Speech Act type 'disclose')

How does a Computer make sense out of People's Natural Language conversations so that it can augment the conversational experience by bringing in relevant information? As it turns out, even the problem of generating meaningful and contextual queries from conversations isn't trivial, especially if you want to avoid deep NLP (parsing, SRL) techniques (for reasons such as fast response times given the resources).

This diagram shows a part of Cobot conversational search system that bootstraps on ontological terms, dictionary entries and shallow Chunk phrases to build possible query term candidates using Augmented Transition Networks(ATNs). ATNs are recursive Finite State Machines that consult other machines during intermediate state steps for walking over words, chunks and sentences to extract information for which the machines have been encoded.

The advantages of using these machines is that we can easily add states and other machines to add complex extraction patterns from text. However, this makes the machines hard to manipulate in future as the complexity of encodings increases.

I am extracting the following simple templates from sentences to extract some candidates:

VP PP ChunkNP-DictTerm (eg. start with alcoholism)

VP ChunkNP-DictTerm PP NP VP NP (find a psychiatrist with experience treating adult ADHD and substance abuse problems.)

VP ChunkNP-DictTerm (quit smoking)

After generating several possible query candidates, the Snippet Analyzer stage determines the Speech Acts in sentences and applies several Query Generation Strategies to compose queries for different search engines and other document repositories. For example, if a user has asked a Question, the Query Generator applies question based templates to generate some queries. Similarly, if a user has given some advice to some other user in the conversation, the engine tries to generate queries to check the validity of advice and how to act on the advice, for example.

Intentional analysis of medical conversations for community engagement

2011-01-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

With an explosion in proliferation of user-generated content, the productivity of search is decreasing and quality of readily available online content is deteriorating. There is an increasing need for intelligent community based systems that can understand community conversations and proactively connect users together based on community information need and interests. We describe our approach based on modeling community utterances to proactively target the community for exchange of questions and answers. We envision a system that automatically encourages user engagement and participation by prompting questions and asking to suggest answers based on user’s and community activity levels. In this paper, we analyze health forum conversations from WebMD.com and learn to classify them in different speech acts using Verbal Response Modes (VRM) theory. We describe our approach for modeling an intelligent community to engage participants based on observations from our analysis.

Short Paper: Saurav Sahay, Hua Ai and Ashwin Ram. Intentional analysis of medical conversations for community engagement. Flairs 2011, Palm Beach, Florida. www.cc.gatech.edu/faculty/ashwin/papers/er-11-01.pdf

Socio-Semantic Health Information Access

2011-01-21T20:57:00.000-08:00

We describe Cobot, a mixed initiative socio-semantic conversational search and recommendation system for finding health information. With Cobot, users can start a real time conversation about their health concerns. Cobot then connects relevant users together in the conversation also providing contextual recommendations relevant to the conversation. Conventional search engines and content portals provide a solitary search experience inundating the health information seeker with a hoard of information often confusing and frustrating them. Cobot brings relevant healthcare information directly or through other users without any search through natural language conversation.

Read the paper: Saurav Sahay and Ashwin Ram. Socio-Semantic Health Information Access, AAAI 2011 Spring Symposium, AI and Health Communication Track.

Track

2010-11-12T22:28:00.000-08:00

Conversational Framework for Web Search and Recommendations

2010-11-11T19:43:00.000-08:00

We introduce a Conversational Interaction framework as an innovative and natural approach to facilitate easier information access by combining web search and recommendations. This framework includes an intelligent information agent (Cobot) in the conversation to provide contextually relevant social and web search recommendations. Cobot supports the information discovery process by integrating web information retrieval along with proactive connections to relevant users who can participate in real-time conversations. We describe the conversational framework and report on some preliminary experiments in the system.

Read the paper:
Conversational Framework for Web Search and Recommendations, by Saurav Sahay, Ashwin Ram, ICCBR-10 Workshop on Reasoning from Experiences on the Web (WebCBR-10), Alessandria, Italy, 2010.

Cobot

2009-07-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

It searches, it finds,

recommends and notifies,

Interacts with a group,

to inform and to improve!

It learns what you like,
And tries to surprise!

It 'lives' in short spurts,

And takes rebirth.

It is learning to reason,

and learning to like!

It needs your support,

To grow up wise!

And to be at your side,

When needs arise.

The art of forgetting: Bug or a feature?

2008-12-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

- What would happen if we didn't forget a thing?

Our brain, through our senses, approximately consumes terabytes or more of information every second. Actually, the brain is a much faster processor. With about 50 billion brain cells firing about 200 times in a second, and activating about 100 other connected neurons in this firing (hypothetical), the brain can do a raw 1 million billion calculations per second!!! However, even a fine-grained decision making process may involve all these cycles in the brain as we are only able to take quick decisions (for example, image recognition) in about an order of a second time. (This is a very naive and hypothetical analysis based on lots of unsupported assumptions)

The point is that our brain has to reject and forget most of this stuff and retain the aggregated contained knowledge in its knowledge representation mechanism. This is not a bug but a very good feature! If we didn't forget a thing, we would get slower and slower over time and not only physically decay but also mentally decay and die as very 'slow' human beings (which is actually seen in some cases with people have some brain disorders)

There are several ways we forget. But again, the point here is that can we forget intentionally? Can we learn to forget? Take for example, a fish in an aquarium. A fish, as I can 'remember' has about ~5 seconds (or milliseconds?) of memory retention time (Time to live). Then it forgets everything and again starts exploring the aquarium as if she was in some new place. How bored would the fish become if she knew that small space enclosure very well and she had to spend all time there itself!

The way these fishes permanently forget is actually different. If we can learn the way these fishes have the neuron structure and firings, we might gain some insights into the principles of forgetting. How would be just forget the things we remember to forget would be a very very interesting and challenging problem! "Did you remember to forget it?" :)

Desalination in Kidneys

2008-12-11T20:58:00.000-08:00

I recently did a class project on desalination for the Biologically Inspired Design class. We explored several systems and came up with a really elegant design based on bio inspiration from intestines. I had dwelled on kidneys as another viable desalination option for the project.

Kidneys are hugely complex structures that mix intelligent structure design with a 2 stage process for achieving their multiple purpose of filtering and maintaining the homeostatis balance.

The great idea that kidneys use is the principle of investing energy on just actively selecting (reabsorbing) the good nutrients and elements back in the blood once it has been freely diffused to the urinary system (where all the work happens)

The idea is that of 'Selection' in favor to active 'Rejection'. Manmade systems (like dialyzers) generally come up with single process designs that either select or reject depending on the task at hand.

This also helps in dividing the work into different components and not relying on the entire filtration and homeostatis process as a one step process where the kidneys somehow work and reject just the right amount of urinary fluid along with maintaining the ph balance. This rejection depends on how much of urine the body needs out of its system.

What is the difference between selection and rejection? If we look deeper in these processes, we may think of selection as the greedy process involving choosing the right amount and checking if the desired chosen quantity has been achieved. Whereas rejection in kidneys is a complementary and dumb process of diffusing out all the molecules that have smaller pores than membrane pores and meet the pressure conditions. A very complicated process would be involved if active selection had to be implemented just as a one step mechanism.

Overall, I find this an amazing strategy for choice and selection of desired features. There can be several computational and algorithmic applications of this strategy. The vague computational analogy of this system is preprocessing the data and then extracting the desired features without search (as in a sorted index) (The other being just searching and extracting the desired elements to remove)

Online social colonies as emergent systems

2008-12-09T04:36:00.000-08:00

There was a recent article in Nature journal regarding how Google detected influenza epidemics using search engine query data. This was an amazing display of the power of technology to decipher emergent knowledge that could prevent the spread of an epidemic. This was actually a very simple idea that can be abstracted to many new interesting unforeseen repercussion behaviors.

Identifying social emergent behavior using collaborative online technology involves capturing implicit user communication that is meant for fixed tasks and outcomes. We have generally focussed on and studied the vocal communication aspect of humans. Man portends several other social communication behavior that are (mimetic, stridulatory, etc) equally sophisticated such as in other social species like bees, ants, dolphins, elephants and pigs!

Some people are always interested to do things. Some want to do things because they like to work (like the workers of bee colony). Some people just follow other people. Some nag while the rest are either satisfied or scared and don't do anything. The communication pattern varies but has its own fixed role in a community.

The point is that there are implicit emergent behavior attached to all these activities as we are always in contact with other people and communicate with each other. Online technology is pushing this further in leaps because we now have the power to communicate with a very large number of people at once!

Interdependence is a higher quality than independence. Fighting social problems as a group using technology (any problem that adheres to the 'Tragedy of the commons' principle and falls in the general public property category of problems - example - scarcity of water and other natural resources, etc) using implicit user behavior modeling and optimization and learning from our 'lesser intelligent' but other social species will result in cool outcomes!

Game-theoretic Modeling of Incentives between Healthcare Consumers and Providers

2008-12-04T15:12:00.000-08:00

“The dollar isn't about expense, it's about selection and choice and commitment.”

Healthcare information access is one of the top uses of Internet today. The internet now has matched physicians as the leading source for health related information. Emerging Web 2.0 sociable technologies are also enablers that promote collaboration amongst the regular people and surge healthcare information delivery. This way, the Internet is redefining the healthcare industry. Internet- based technology is headed towards delivering certain healthcare services more effectively and at lower costs. Newly emerging Internet healthcare stakeholders are poised to wrest control from established “brick-and-mortar” entities that have dominated healthcare for decades. This phenomenon is like the battle between the established Fourth Estate and new media technologies that are giving a hard time to the Press. Press is forced to re-think its survival strategies to sustain in the new Incentive based economic model that has dissipated control from a few fixed established houses to the general consumer and provider masses.

These unforeseen transformations need to be anticipated and modeled to benefit the stakeholders efficiently. The Internet has the potential to become the venue for the delivery of certain medical services, particularly those that are information-based. Virtual clinics are already starting to happen and involve online interaction between registered practitioners and patients. Currently, these services have a fixed cost per time financial model for consultation services and completely avoid the insurance companies from this interaction. In effect, this model is in its infancy and does not close the loop between healthcare service providers and delivery.

Modeling this interaction effectively to analyze how the system performs is a very challenging task. This is more so important in this domain to avoid healthcare risks that may deteriorate the overall system by implementing not so thoughtful delivery channels.

Game Theory studies strategic interactions between players. Given a set of players’ actions, and their preferences, game theory helps us analyze rational behavior between agents. The art of game theoretic analysis of a problem lies in the formulation of the problem as a matrix of players, strategies (actions) and the payoff(utilities) of the actions. Analyzing this matrix helps us discover best possible cooperating rational behavior among the players (Nash Equilibrium). Studying game-theoretic models (or other models that apply to human interaction) help us suggest ways in which an individual's behavior may be modified to improve one’s own welfare (for eg., applications in economics, decision theory and lately in computer science). By such analysis, the hope is to see the advantages and disadvantages of various strategies.

More formally, a game is an interaction or a series of interactions between players, which assumes that 1) the players pursue well defined objectives (they are rational) and 2) they take into account their knowledge or expectations of other players behavior (they reason strategically). Players compete to maximize their payoffs with other players to reach an Equilibrium state.

Consciousness

2008-06-03T22:45:00.001-07:00

The awareness of my surroundings gives me a sense of heaviness! Yesterday, a man in front of my house was walking past crying 'I want to destroy' in pain! This is just one instance of exposure to the hatred, depression and desperation that is there in my not 'well-to-do' neighborhood! Regardless, even when I talk to people from the entire spectrum, it gives me a feeling that they are unsatisfied with life, moving forward not because of their will, but because they have no other choice!

The quality of life is also deteriorating with times! My grandfather was a man of style and passion. He enjoyed life to the full, was a social magnate and a very successful person. Even when he lost his eyesight during his last years, he would get dressed up, go out and sit in the garden (making sure that the garden umbrella was up!), make us read the newspaper (that we didn't really relish then!) and discuss issues with us! He had a well-balanced and complete life. I am quite young now, but as I am growing older, I am seeing that people in my times are all over-worked up, highly ambitious beyond their strivings which helps them stretch ahead but with paramount pressure and a sense of imbalance! The quality time with self, family and friends is decreasing very rapidly! This may be because my social circle belongs to a particular type and there is hardly any time to address all our issues in life!

All of us are shooting for growth and success and one of the direct measures of this is the amount of money we make! (Fortunately, in my academic and research inclined world, this is not totally true and we still look at the number of publications, quality of work, etc.)

Commerce and Economics govern the financial stability of nations, societies and its individuals - this has given rise to subtle policies that indirectly promote pressures on individuals to become rational machines and just perform in this beautiful world without any regard to one's intellectual, artistic and creative abilities. I have realized that my productivity is best when I am relaxed and happy but I am not relaxed and happy because I am not productive - this itself is a paradox and a vicious cycle! It is also true that as our race is surging ahead with times, we are becoming more objective and are able to manage more well-defined higher processes at ease with life (due to technology and collaboration).

I know that my current perspective is microscopic and I need more exposure and more quality time (yet again a paradox) to have a better understanding of macroscopic view of life! At least, we should try to enjoy life and live, love and let live our actions! One of my younger cousins once (when I was in ninth grade) wrote a letter to me (a postal letter from this country) where she wrote - 'the essence of being a person is to be content with oneself, love life and help others to love it as well!'

On campus

2008-04-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I went to some brilliant on campus events. The first one was a play called 'UrineTown' at the Georgia Tech Dramatech theatre. This play was a satirical musical comedy that addressed some profound issues in real life. This was about private control on the city's water resources due to scarce availability of water. The private company 'Urine Good Company (UGC)' charged the poor people to use the restrooms and those who did not were sent to an undisclosed place called Urinetown (they were executed)! The company was corrupt and connived with the government to regularly hike the prices and keep a control! There was a rebellion led by the beautiful daughter of the company's head along with her lover who was a poor victim of the circumstances. The public under these leaders took over control on the usage of these restrooms and a 'free for all' policy for everyone. For a brief time, people were all very happy at this justified rebellion! Then suddenly, all the water got used and the poor and happy people started dying! This was the irony! The story was very nicely built up and was a comedy throughout! It left the audience who got the inherent satire everywhere wondering what could be the solution!

The second event was this Holi Show organized by the GT India Club. It was a great show put up by a few students - an audience of 1700 attended this event and it was a mega success! They got famous artists to perform from different places and also a DJ from London for the club party!

One should try to attend the activities happening on campus and appreciate the tremendous creativity that happens as a result of a small dedicated extracurricular group effort! This also reminds me of the amazing Delhi university activities that used to happen all the time when I was an undergrad there (though Delhi University is 15 times the size of GaTech)!

Overall, a very enjoyable weekend! Now back to my creative computing, hopefully ;)! Between, enjoy this amazing satirical blog here :) !

People Power

2008-04-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

With the recent surge in interactive social applications on an internet-wide scale, the role of gofai machine learning techniques for solving knowledge-rich applications seems to be on a sinking boat. The phenomenon of Swarm Intelligence where actual intelligent people are helping each other solve problems is starting to manifest in neat ways! Thanks to folksonomy services and the web 2.0 infrastructure! For example, I have a feeling that people will stop using the current look and feel search engines like Google to find good and reliable information.

People are better today at most common real world tasks compared to the machines. Actually, people have just been using these machines to facilitate them concentrate on the harder problems and let these machines take care of the easier tasks. With interactive workbench systems coming up that allow people to empower these systems, people productivity is improving tremendously! I have a feeling that the mature web will be an intelligent network with personal people portals that will satisfy all his/her content based needs.

The need for machines helping us manage our content based needs are emerging in a different fashion - the object of these systems are changing from the content to the actual people behind it. Where is machine learning headed to in such a case - an interesting technical insight comes from John Langford's post.

Welcome to the new world of Human Computing!

Research Questions

2008-03-10T23:07:00.000-07:00

Premises in Online Social Theory:

1. Seeking information is an emotional experience.

2. Relationships are strengthened by positive reinforcements.

3. We have a small personal social network of people for our various informational needs.

4. Humans ultimately rely on their own problem solving skills, technology should be an efficient facilitator for enabling them to make the decisions.

5. Creating an identity(reputation) in an online community is a major motivation factor to remain engaged in the network.

6. Identity drives and limits actions. We start driving our actions according to our social identities. Driving ourselves according to our independent actions requires exploring different personal identities.

7. How can systems be developed that facilitate social interaction among humans or among humans and agents?

8. How do we make sense of the interactions between emotion, personality, and social behavior?

9. How can considerations of affective factors contribute to more effective human-computer interaction in general?

10. What is trust, and what does it mean to share it with a machine?

Synergistic Learning

2007-12-13T00:02:00.000-08:00

There is a sudden surge in applications that leverage the overall user experience by enabling the user with technologies to look at what others are doing with the system and use that additional knowledge in novel ways to let the user make more informed decisions. These enabling technology systems come under the purview of recent educational programs like Human Centered Computing at the intersection of AI, Algorithms, Databases, Computational Semantics, Humanities, Psychology, Sociology and even Economics!

The goals from the point of view of creating better intelligent systems still remain the same, i.e., to do more intelligent machine learning, but now, by exploiting this Social Semantic Infrastructure by way of creating, adapting and learning from it and then studying the implications arising out of it. This is the high level knowledge intensive functional approach of looking at the problem of creating better intelligent systems.

This recent paradigm shift in computing of focusing more towards the 'human' aspect is a major leap for the not so old field of computer science which now, instead of being called a spin-off of mathematics and physical sciences is becoming a true mature science on its own.

Getting back to talking about the recent surge in semantic applications, these basically try to create systems that focus directly on actual task that the system is designed for by helping the user in simple but powerful ways. For example, collaborative and recommendations systems draw analogies from the 'wisdom of the crowds' idea to make decisions based on what the knowledge authorities have to say about it. Such fine-grained systems give the normal user the power to rely on the knowledgeable teacher of teachers that is helping the user carry out her tasks much more efficiently. This 'wisdom of the crowds' concept compares to the machine based equivalent as in statistical machine learning systems which draws inferences using alot of training data.

The emergence of so many novel social applications have been possible because of the recent semantic web standards for interoperability and the open source community projects that enable small teams to build large applications within a short period of time.

Search

2007-11-07T23:03:00.000-08:00

Everything (all artifacts and activities) that exists in this world exists because we made it that way! We made it that way because we chose to make it that way! We chose to make it that way because we had a liking for it. Actually, we unknowingly made a decision to like it! And we decided to like it naturally because of our myriads of experiences.

We learn from our experiences. We acquire knowledge from our perceptions by a process of learning and reasoning. Intelligence is the outcome of the reasoning process happening continuously from our inherent knowledge. The gap between knowledge and intelligence is closed by this learning.

We are always looking for signals from this world to which we react. This process of search is fueled by psychological factors that are hard to explain. I think the most important of these factors is passion and the desire to evolve. A truly artificially intelligent system should attempt to encode 'desire' and 'passion' into the system.

Moments of Life - Smoky Mountain Trip - Sept 1 - Sept 3, 2006

2006-09-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Cycles

2006-07-06T19:29:00.000-07:00

My friend Vikram asked me this awesome question today... Is there some link between a woman's ovarian cycle and the cycle of the moon! Both repeat in about 29 days time! What a perfect coincidence! Nature has its own ways to amuse us! There is also this myth that there is a woman in the moon that is more prominant than the man in the moon! Even chinese astrology identifies moon as the feminine power or more popularly known as the 'yin' (and the masculine known as the 'yang'!) Another interesting link.

Whatever it be, it is something spectacular and worth giving a thought! A woman only has the power to create and sustain life which simply makes her way superior to men! Even recent scientific genetic studies have shown that the male genetic material (the Y chromosome) is decaying due to many mutations compared to the X chromosome over the centuries and there are very few active genes that remain in the Y chromosome.

Is astrology for real? I have heard some really interesting ideas about astrology being for real but somehow my reasoning system fails to register it. Even the slightest vibrations in the cup of tea that we drink causes such chaos on its surface that is linked to the gravitational forces from distances we can't even fathom! (I had read some very cool essay about this in Resnick and Halliday long time back) Life also (both physical and metaphysical) is a force that may interact with other forces in nature and have certain influences!

I really awe for people who study these extra-scientific questions - these things have no definitive answer (at least for now) and their entire life revolves around trying to find asnwers for these breathtaking questions (also considering the fact that I am struggling with my very very small research question)! Do these people ever get sound sleep, I wonder?

Change

2006-06-26T19:15:00.000-07:00

Very soon, I will have my personal webpage that will embed services provided by social networks, messengers, blogs and photo galleries apart from the usual content I will have on my webpage. (I need to write another one on Social Networks!) It will be very easy for anyone to spend some time on my 'webpresence' and get a fairly good idea of everything (abstract or otherwise) that belongs to me. There will be a whole new semantic web infrastructure where it will become almost necessary for everyone to have a unique web id.

This will lead to many unforseen repercussions, I imagine. A whole new field consisting of sociology, technology and psychology will emerge that will study the implications and consequences of this new way of living. New behavioural disorders will be identified and peculiar ways to combat them willo be sought! Overall, people will be kept busy. New occupations and new challenges will emerge.

Will all this be a boon or bane for our society? Today's already stressed youth who is managing myriads of cognitive processes will be exposed to many more brought about by technological as well as technologically induced factors. Some people will become even more effective than others, I presume, thus more widening the gap of equanimity and homogeneity!

What do you think all this will lead to?

meeting skills

2006-06-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

Overheard this excerpt from the people who conduct loud meetings everyday just beside my lab:
"Anybody who is working on anything would need something." (My immediate reaction was: Oh lord!, then I smiled, then I thought!)

This reminds me of a saying ... "If I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't have called it research!"

You can't possibly imagine how much of good work they do starting from conversations like these! O Lord!

Science - Art - Creation - Imagination

2006-06-20T17:20:00.000-07:00

For some people, studying Science is a difficult proposition. Others, they are generally considered the smarter lot! (This is the general thinking in my part of the world where I have been brought up.) I disagree with this line of thought. The environmental and some genetic factors (the genotype and the phenotype) develop the initial seed composite in every mind and life takes a random walk from there and achieves its own standards of self-established milestones. I think average minds remain complacent because they don't/can't think like Jonathon Livingston Seagull and don't harness their deep desires.

I think that creating Artwork requires a great deal of ability which involves analytics, interest as well as a deep sense of the abstract notion of the idea you try to breathe life into. What makes it more challenging is the fact that there is no proper theory behind art. In fact, the more I read about people with some sort of mental faculty, I find that they are more artists, more philosophers, more creative geniuses rather than mere scientists. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was a maverick, a creative genius, a scientist, an engineer and one of the greatest painters of all times.

Commerce and Economics govern the financial stability of nations and its individuals - this has given rise to policies that indirectly promote pressures on individuals to become rational machines and just exist in this beautiful world without any regard to one's intellectual and artistic abilities. This has led to regional instabilities and we see a drift in power-shift across time and regions.

Imagination is more important than knowledge(Einstein) and art is imagination. I just wish to be a creative person in life!

UStad Amjad Ali Khan, Sarod and Indian Classical Music - Being one with oneself!

2006-06-07T19:15:00.000-07:00

He creates magic - not music! Each beat from his Sarod is like a wave that touches each cell of your brain or perhaps your soul considering that the soul is the congregation of each dimension of your mental ability. This reminds me of a saying - "The heart has reasons that the mind knows not" Rather, I believe in this one - "The heart has reasons that the mind believes not." In fact, we don't know our minds ourselves. What we know is an artifact of the model the mind creates for itself.

Oh, I was talking about the magic of music, or rather Sarod, an Indian classical instrument. Sarod is a very rich many string-ed instrument like the guitar with a bigger resonating box base and longer wooden neck. Amjad Ali Khan devised his own 19 string sarod! It is much harder to play a sarod since it does not have any frets (the metallic part under the strings that is pressed to create the desired note) in it.

I have attended one of his shows in India. There, he was playing with his two sons (Ayaan Ali and Aman Ali) and Zakhir Hussain. He is a genius - there is a clear distinction between his music and the one his sons play! I remember the energy I felt during that show I attended. It was a feeling analogous to the synchronous dancing of all the brain cells in eternal light and immortality (free/endless energy)! (I am writing alot about the brain and the feeling because I am listening to his music even now and am totally enchanted and drenched/soaked in it :) You could really feel that top of the world (literally) experience in his live performance, the feeling that you may only get sometimes when you are very drunk! I also remember his rendition of 'Ekla chalo re' (by Rabindranath Tagore). It was exalting. His music is available on musicindiaonline.com under the Hindustani Instrumental section. Go, check it out and enjoy!

Summer of 1999

2006-06-05T04:33:00.001-07:00

A picture I had taken in '99 when I had visited Pokhra (and Kathmandu) all by mself.

Another picture : was reading a novel in style :)

Summer of 2006

2006-05-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Small waterfall beside the furnace

I am travelling alot lately. When I initially moved to NY for work, I had to travel long distances for a couple of weeks to reach workplace. Last weekend, I met an old buddy and visited Princeton university with him, It was a nice feeling there as I had gone to the school of stalwarts like Einstien and Nash. Next day, I went to Washington D.C. and enjoyed the Smithsonium Air and Space museum there. It was a fun place! Lots of rockets, spacecrafts, satellites and fighter planes on display! I even tried the F-18 Flight simulater and shot many enemies! I had thought that it would be so scary being upside down inside a fighter plane but it was fun!

Yesterday, I saw this new hindi movie called Fanaa - total crap! So many smart people get together to come up with such lack of creative work! It was frustrating.

In the morning, I went to New Haven to see one of my cousins who is studying at Yale. She has inspired me some way or the other when I was very young and used to listen to her intellectually stimulating discussions with my other cousins. Then I have come to this beautiful place with her in Litchfield at another cousin's big country house! Waiting for lots of family members to come here by evening for the long weekend.

Sunset at the pond!

Hoping to have a good time here, eat lots of home-made food and also work a little! The place is amazing and you can walk along the river, sit beside the pond, try your hands at fishing, go hiking or just sit in the sun and relax!

My foot!

The summer of 2006 has just arrived!

The inverse pandemonium

2006-05-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I chose this title but since I chose it by free will, I will write something about it.

The idea is something like that of the movie Unbreakable by M. Night Shyamalan where he says that there is a good for every evil!

There is an absolute balance in this world where things have a reciprocal at each end of the spectrum. Each piece of thought can be inverted and adjusted in any way one can possibly imagine. We haven't harnessed the power of the mind completely as we limit ourselves into mortality. Again, whatever we imagine can be deemed as null or infinite or anywhere in between by similar forces.

Is our universe a speck of dust in space? Is this not an inverse pandemonium in itself? We know what space is (we think we know) but what exactly is time? Is it a state of mind - can we control it? Are there other dimensions that we have not explored?

The whole world is a complex maze with so many beautiful patterns in it - do these patterns tell us something? Why do we find something beautiful and why do we find some other things ugly?

A child's brain is the most powerful machine - it can learn and adapt to anything it associates with - what exactly is there in a child's brain -does it have something to do with the fact that it has nothing in it. Does it have rules pre-configured in it?

How powerful are the five senses of human beings - is it not enough for everyone to achieve whatever they wish for. Then what is the sixth sense? Is there a seventh sense?

There are so many beautiful minds in this world - is it chance? Or is it some sequence of events in a child's brain that make it that way?

This is the inverse pandemonium!

Thou know it all!

2006-05-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

I will try to write a couple of lines about achievement, happiness and love. I am an abstract kind!

Achievement

Achievement is directly linked to your inner conscience. If you have the purity of thought and the passion to follow your dreams, things will slowly fall your way! It may start with an impulsive action or restless musings, you have to identify it and believe in it. Achievement has alot to do with confidence. Confidence has alot to do with depth of character. You should follow your heart and not compromise. You should also have the desire to constantly learn and update yourself. It all has to do with expending your thoughts and channelizing it in the right direction.

Happiness

Happiness is purely a state of mind. It is not the little things in life that make you happy, it is the dim sight of the blissful beyond that one identifies with. This translates to hope. Hope is what keeps one alive. And you smile even in times of desperation! You get sad and you get glad, this is a temporary state of emotion. Happiness is again an inner feeling. You have to be careful for what you wish for, as this can hurt you emotionally. This has a disturbing effect as there is only limited time, but this really does not have much to do with happiness. Believe in yourself, learn from life and you will be happy.

Love

Love is a nice feeling. It is the chemistry between you and the other object that you associate with. It is a dynamic function with many variables in it. Ya, this sounds stupid! So, love is complex! Love makes you high ... higher than you can ever imagine and it ceases the brain with emotional matter. It is difficult to identify love!

license to chill!

2006-04-20T18:56:00.000-07:00

I have been waiting for this for so so long! Finally I have really started thinking about buying my own car :-) The thrill is so much that I have started dreaming about it! My mom tells me that I used to stare at cars when I was a kid all the time!

Oh, I got my learner's license. Yeah, just learner's license!

I had gone to the license office more than an hour away from home for the second time to get my license. Not that I failed the first time, I did not have proper paperwork. This time I thought that I had the proper paperwork. But no I didn't. I had gone with 2 friends so I waited for them to come out victorious! They were sorry for me but it was okay. I consoled eating an apple given to me by one of my friends! Came back home really dejected around 2 p.m. and rested. As I lied down, I fumbled on an envelope on my bed. And that envelope contained my bank statement that I needed to get my license. I got up, lit a cigarette and started running. The license center was to close at 5 and it was already 3. Reached the center at 4.10. Luckily, there was no rush in the evening and I got to the test terminal in 10 minutes. Finished the test in 10 minutes and started smiling. The photo on my license is a proof for that reassured and happy feeling.

I have a dream
My car to zing
the roar of the machine
is so soothing
to get tickets
for speeding
to steer with
or against the wind
day or night
rain or storm
nothing can stop
the will to move on!
I have a dream
My car to zing!

:-)
I am renting a car this weekend for getting used to the roads here and getting my permanent license next week. Mustang, Firebird, Eclipse or a Honda Civic ... I don't want to buy a Honda Civic but that looks so convenient. I am not sure if I can afford a firebird or a mustang. I have started looking at all the Eclipse models very recently! Let's see what's in store for me!

Working since morning ...

2006-02-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

Back home

2005-06-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

This is my second trip home in less than a year's time. They say that I am lucky! Lucky I am. Here at IBM Research, the atmosphere is full of bright and talented young people. It's a good learning experience.

Delhi is very hot these days and the traffic is very bad as usual. I am having my share of fun here. Visited Haridwar, took holy dip in Ganges, went to Balaji temple, Salasar in Rajasthan. I am also watching lots of movies these days and eating lots of sweets.

I want to contribute in some way to the development and progress of my country. I have no clue right now how but I will do it some day. I just hopw that my faith and commitment towards my work is reinforced with time.

Saurav
8th June, 2005