Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cycles

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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!

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!

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 ...

Back home

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