Note: This post is NOT a prediction of what will happen to the form or factor of computer and how small it will get!

Disclosure: As per the fashion of the current time to putt disclaimers and disclosures, I also put out one. I work as a Computer programmer for my living!

(And finally I start the post… )

I feel today’s computer is elitist’s device designed to tell the users that they need to “learn” to use it. Which I think is a very poor marketing strategy to build and market a product. (yet today their exists millions of computers out there, that shows the desperate need of those machines to aid humans). I feel that a computer should be designed with keeping in mind its use by a common man and by “use” I mean its use could very well be extended by the user by programming it to do some so desired function by him or her. Simply put it could be programmed by any and every user of it, to do what THEY WANT. An OS should be a basic layer that just allows the machine to carry out its functions (read: device drivers, memory management, intelligent displays for interactivity, interfacing with humans [think wild, neural connectors for brain projectors]) and understand some basic set of commands. What I don’t want to see is, a special language to communicate with the computer, the medium / media of communication could be very intuitive and simple to use (Apple like? May be!). It should be a generic machine that can carry out the task by combining a bunch of earlier built modules (Something very much on the lines of a Libraries in the prevalent programming languages) but something that can be done by every user of the computer. It is only then we can utilize the complete potential of these beast like machines of the day. Why do I say that? Take the case of your parents who when approaching a computer feel intimidated by its interface. Our parents and common users did not grow up hitting a horizontal board of plastic with quite oddly designed buttons which are surprisingly called keys(?) although they don’t open any locks! and move an odd shaped device that some how seems to move a pointer on a TV like device that somehow shows the result of all or some of the previous activity.

Instead of this wouldn’t it be easier if we had an interface where computer was like a home electric usage meter tucked away in some part of the house where it is in no one’s way and yet we have multiple portal like interfaces scattered around the house that can let you access it without having to key in the input. At the same time you should be able to intuitively program it to do a certain function like in case of a house process automation. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if you could add a reverse motion to your house robot which is hooked on to the home network and connected to the base computer using a generic programming interface that lets you graphically select the reverse motion sequence widget (you programmed for your washing machine motor, by graphically selecting the basic function of reversing the motor’s motion from the pre-built OS library) and insert at a certain point in the robot’s sequence of execution or working. All this on a wearable display that moves with you and lets move around and yet enables you to do this while you are doing something that does not need your complete attention, like talking to a boring friend on a video chat (construct your own boring example).

To support my argument I give an example of the current day evolution of computers, the smart phones. They are popular because you can carry your computer with you, you profile of work with you, you can carry your life out on the go with the machine that is with you when you need and want it, you don’t have to wait until you go home to see that latest news or read that email. Although, the displays are painfully small, and the keyboards are a nightmare to use (yet kids manage to send a few thousand SMS/Text a day, [read: NEED!!!]), what they have is a beast like computing power and mini-dinosaurs era operating systems (OS) on them that makes extending them a elitist’s (read: programmer’s) task.

They provide NO extendability for the  common users, they (common users) have to select from pre-built apps which in most cases are non compatible and do not talk to each other. It is painstaking to know that even after paying the seller they cannot reuse the app that they bought for their own use along with other apps to create an experience that they as a users want. Won’t it be cool if all these apps actually had an open interface to exchange information among each other and we could create a dashboard where we had the best of every app to get the best or personalized experience we want. In some cases despite of paying hundreds of dollars to the manufacturer you need to abide by their standards of use else they do not give you guarantee on their sold merchandise (this is like living in a barbaric times of cell phones!). Why this is happening is a matter for another post but for now, I think I have made a point. In future computers will have to come in a more  user friendly form that allows the user to extend it and use it the way they please and not the way manufacturer expects them to. Now with this freedom will come the responsibility on the users to own up to their mess, if they mess it up, then they should try to do their best to own up to it and if needed pay for it (Or in America you could just take insurance for that too! … ).

Of course I know their will be those who will still not want to deal with the whole “programming the device” thing, but believe me their will be enough who will make it a mainstream thing to program your own computing machine. Rest will just end up paying more for the same task creating some low skilled jobs… …

anyway, that is how I see computers evolve… thoughts welcome.

Today he has completed 50 test centuries. The most by any human in cricketing history (he held that one for quite some time now, since his 36th hundred). He has been playing the game for past 20 years and his lack luster years have yielded as many runs as an average cricketer hopes to get in the entire year as a best case. He started as an explosive teenager who showed the signs of his greatness within the first few test matches and grew in to a mature risk less human being with more than a billion followers all over the world.

He has scored truck loads of runs over the period of time but he still remains the same person shy, very modest, very eager to learn and a committed INDIAN! He does not speak much about his charitable work, he does not want media attention and yet he gets almost all of it. In a not shell a simple and down to earth human being. Yet, despite of all these very human like qualities he is one of the very few people in India who can bring the entire country together. I have seen during my growing up years many groups of people (men and women alike) glued to the TV to see him play. The TV showrooms in India have to have at least one TV showing the match for the collective viewing of kids who don’t want to miss their own batting but want to see Sachin bat, the common man walking on the street going through his daily chores and wants to keep a tab on Sachin’s score, for the “gali ke munde” and of course for the staff of the store who would otherwise collectively fall sick and take a leave. I am sure it adds to very few people walking in to the store to buy something. When he says “Mumbai is for all Indians” the entire country roars in agreement, the politicians have to retract their statements and issue clarifications. When he gets out short of a century it becomes a topic of discussion for the entire country for at least that evening and next morning. When he scores one, we can not stop watching the highlights (and fanatics watch the replay of entire match) over and over again. When he is injured we doubt, if India will play well (this use to be the case for quite some time in the 90′s and early 2000′s) in the bilateral series. We Indians will request a television at work to see matches and the corporates (money hungry?) oblige in order to keep people from taking half day or other ad-hoc short leaves. When was the last time 1/5th of humanity acted like this? When was it that Indians despite of their varied faiths (which in most cases become their undoing) pray in unison for that one shot from the master that will seal that win, will complete that arduous hundred, that majestic fifty, that artistic double ton and that patient 150?

More importantly, his career tells everyone how ever talented you are it needs extreme hard work, a resolute mind and an undying “passionate love” for what you do, that helps you in achieving every thing you want in your life. That man’s sheer conviction to getting up every day and putting his body through that grueling workouts  is something that merits nothing less than a standing ovation from everyone (a friend or a foe). He was ruled out by the cricketing greats after his injuries saying “end of his career is near”. I have only seen him improve the records over time. That end although inevitable is not in sight just yet. The Steyns and Morkels of the world who wants are raring to go at him know that, even if they get the stick they get it from one of the greats. He was plagued with back problems which forced him to cut on those gorgeous pull and hook shots, he did it. He worked on his back and got back running. People said he has been “worked out” by bowling him certain balls and making him play certain shots, he worked hard and cut those shots and invented some that baffled the people who had “worked him out”. He worked on his skills to take on one of the game’s magician bowlers (Shane Warne) and tore apart that scathing Ozie attack that was feared in the entire world. All through his life he worked hard at improving and has enjoyed what he does. As a side effect there are a billion people who love watching him take on those challenges thrown at him. They feel sad if he fails to solve that challenge the first time around and they eagerly follow him the next time to see how he overcomes that challenge. They draw hope from that attitude in their own life, they draw the strength to overcome their own problem. They remember the way he worked hard on solving the problem to solve their own problems. What else do the mythical legends tell you? What else does the holy books tell you? They tell you the same story, work harder at the problems and you can solve them. It is the same story of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. He may not have done all this with exactly that on his mind but one may argue the same about the myths and legends. …

It is hence, that we Indians call Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, the GOD!

~Atul.

Today while being on twitter saw a few tweets from some journos (@seemagoswami, @virsanghvi) about Pak not having civil society. It was some satirical tweet that u can find on their profile. Something that would surely spread the not so good message about our neighbor. My problem with that was simple… Why do you make such exaggerated statements about the country about which you really don’t know much? We have such elements (the mujahiddins, the hindu extremists, the senas) then are we to be branded the same way by Pak media?

The even bigger problem is that these stupid journos go on to make big statements for their own telecast TRP ratings. But they forget that they have some social responsibility of reporting without their own personal bias. They make the story sound so horrific that the people who consume the news without analyzing it then go to form opinions based on those blown up reports. They form a misinformed decision. I am sure their is an argument that the twitter messages are personal views. But to that I would say, it is a social media consumed by many people who trust these journos for correct information. If they are fed in with biased news then I think this is completely WRONG!! These journos leverage their celebrity status to gather their followers and then feed them their personal views without even mentioning it might be biased.

Another problem I have with this kind of reporting is, if can not bring peace to people’s life then at least don’t feed them with hate and anger or with information which will raise these two emotions. We must understand it is because of these emotions that people take to extremism and violence. Can you imagine 1 billion insane and angry people fed completely on irrelevant and biased information? I don’t want to… there is not enough arsenal with any army to eliminate those many humans. And well killing one angers 100s and going by this proportion we are looking at something TERRIBLE in the coming time. It is not all lost as yet, we can change this. We should demand for journalism and not biased, TRP motivated information for all of us. WE ARE A DEMOCRACY!!! Lets act like one.

Please consider this for all journos not just the two mentioned. They are mere examples…

Today is 31st of Dec 2009. We all are eager to welcome the new year 2010. I am very excited about the new year, as I hope it will bring me a good and interesting job.

But today I am writing this entry to review the past year 2009. 2009 started off with a party at Radhika Tai’s place in Portland and academically with the last semester in sight leading to completion of my degree. My last semester at the University was most fulfilling and enriching for me from the educational perspective. I loved the course Machine Learning and my research work turned out fine. I have been since hooked on with various machine learning algorithms and their applications to the real world problems. Personally, not everything went as planned but I would not talk too much about it here. Job hunt in the past year has been a rough one, my work as a RA at the Univ has been fun. I had to take a break in last few weeks due to an important function at home and return to India.

I hope next year will bring some zing in the markets and will bring cheer to the faces of people around the world. May the next year bring peace and harmony to the man kind. May we fight less and live more! Lets hope next year will be healthier for all of us…

May next year  be happy and prosperous one for everyone.

(WEIRD THOUGHTS ALERT: Some of these thoughts may offend you, hurt you or leave you with no reason to follow certain sects… reader discretion advised.)

This all started as a discussion with Archis Gore a friend of mine, we discussing some issues about human beings and how we follow religion and stuff. It got me started with the thought process to think and understand why did all of this come up? What must have been a purpose of such set of rules that we follow today? Rules that lead to the violence that might lead to the elimination of the entire human race?

Lets think about the time when man did not have any of these rules? Did we even have one such time? Probably we did. This all did not come form the blue, at least it does not look like. If we try to reason every rule that exits we can find at least one reason that must have been good enough to put the rule in place at that point in time. So, what was the purpose of this much hyped about species called HUMAN BEINGS or HOMOSPIENS? What did we do then? An answer that comes to mind looking at today’s world is probably reproduce and reproduce and reproduce even more…

I know it is kind of gross to think of our ancestors without brains, knowledge and act like animals. But well I am sure there must have been times like those, when we did not fight each other based on religion or may be then we did not fight at all. I think humans went through a phase on this planet when there was a tranquil and peace and then they started loosing their edge for survival, the sharpness of body and brain. It was at this point to save the human race from extinction and to improve the chances of survival we learned from the beings around us. We learned two most important things to humans, fear and anger. The two contrasting but potentially very basic instincts for survival. Then with these two came the feeling of intimidation. To award the intimidator for the being one he was awarded with some reward, something that he / she wanted. The award must have been the most vaunted thing at time. (Make a guess for yourself…) Now we come to a very interesting phase, the phase of competition amongst humans. If one thinks carefully even today this is the most important aspect of our race that keeps us way ahead of other species (at least to the best of our knowledge). That keeps us competing with each other for superiority, for the reward. The reward changed with time, I guess but aim to keep our species competitive remains still intact.

Now come to think of religion, why did we need to believe in something that is beyond humans? One reason could be we had not yet found the answer to the most mysterious question or death. Then, also to keep the ever growing power of these intimidators in check we had to believe in some super power that was beyond the comprehension of the common people. Now to avoid people claiming the closeness to the almighty and to give an identity to the community to distinguish them from the others outside we needed certain rules to be followed by the members of the community. Basically to bring order to otherwise orderless bunch of competing humans these rules were set. It was an attempt to make the race to the top of intimidators “interesting” and most coveted,  these rules were devised. The groups became jingoistic about their own rules and then started competing with others who followed other rules or did not follow any. As the number grew the stature of the almighty grew and those intimidators who revered them also grew in stature. I think these must have been the basics of our civil society as we see it today.

Now lets mix the above two things staying competitive and then following a set of rules. What we see is the so called unruly set of humans who have more rules to follow than their own populations. Who live their entire life for the simple purpose of keeping human race competitive by “improving their skills”, reproducing, teaching their off springs the same line of thoughts that they learned from their parents  and following those set of rules that they think will help them ahead of the rest of the creatures on this planet.

We are walking the path that our ancestors laid down for us as per the best of their knowledge at that time. You don’t believe me? Think about it with a cool head. Half the wars in this world are because we wanted to be superior than others, rest are due to the set rules that we follow and want others to agree that they are the best and follow them(again competition) and where are we headed? Towards a war where we will destroy each other because we want to prove to each other that we are the best. Oh! and we forgot it was for the survival of the human race. This surely is a contradiction and as would be in mathematics we would say our assumption was wrong. Can we prove something here? Yes the purpose of of human race as of now seems to be to destroy itself and they are heading very quickly towards it.

This must have been really absurd or totally crap or absolute truth for you… in any case I would like to hear back from you. Share your thoughts…

PS: These are my thoughts and I am solely responsible for them.

I have lived in the US for the past two years and prior to that have worked at various companies all of which were in the software development bussiness, mostly outsourced software development or off shore development as one might call it. Basically the term I prefer for this is cheap labor. Any company, you name it and I can bet the reason for an expanded Indian office catering clients far away, is cheap labor. At nearly 1/10th the original cost and for doing the same work. I know none of this is a news to most of you readers. Then what am I writing about?

It is a question, a question that I have asked people a lot times and answers have been varied. My own answer to this is not very pleasing to many around me. So, today I try to pose it to you all, my readers (in whatever short numbers you are, you are valuable).

It is about the outsourcing and relates the notion of pricing the product to the current market standards. If the demand is bigger than supply then price is up if the opposite then it is low. So, in this context how would you put the equation of outsourcing? Not a brain teaser, I suppose. India and China have large number of human resources, for one they don’t have one thing in scarcity and that is humans. In case of India engineers and scientist. There is a flood of them, thousands and millions graduating every 5 years. They are being added to the pool with similar skill sets, similar aspirations,similar desire to earn big bucks in small time. Now when you have this heavy flow of “Talent” (?) and that too at the 1/10 of the price, WHY WILL SOMEONE PAY THE SAME 10 TIMES HIGH PRICE?? Now come the grand question.

“IS THE JOB REALLY WORTH THE ORIGINAL PRICE WHEN THE SAME JOB CAN BE DONE IN LOWER 1/10th PRICE?”

Will the workers in the US settle for 1/10 of their salary because their job can be done at a much lower price. In fact let me put this with an example, will you buy a “shampoo” (please replace it with any product you like) from a store that employs expensive sales workers for $10 more than the lower price at Walmart or Target for the same brand and product? Whatever is your answer I would like to know.

I have the Indian side of out sourcing too, I will write about it soon. It is an employee’s experience. Till then keep your views on this one coming.

One of my friends Anand Kishore along with some of his friends at Yahoo built a nice Text summarising app “Dygest” using the Search Monkey and some other SDKs. Their nice achievement is they say they were able to write a statistical text summarising algorithm. Now I don’t have the details of the algorithm with me, but what I could see from the summary was that it was HELPFUL. So first up Kudos to you guys, Good Job. Next I was kind of intrigued by the thought how they must have done it, and that set my brain rolling and I started reading what they must have done.

Few Observations I made about their results,

1. Very well presented. , I am not good at web design and stuff so I really admire that.

2. Their results (sentences) were just too well formed to be machine generated. So, I was like where did they come from?

3. First hunch was, may be they just put out most interesting sentences.Which turned out to be partly true, their sentences are infact “picked” as is from the source text. But they put entire sentence so that it reads well, and also they probably put more than one sentence in order to make it sound coherent. They might also be doing some grammar analysis before putting the sentences together.

So these things were going in my head and I was like what would it take to pick up meaningful sentence form the text, the simplest thing. Then I set out to write my own code to do the same. I pulled from net a python script that could extract text from a url (it is not so powerful, but works). Then I took two web pages returned by Dygest for search term “Stimulus” and converted it to text using this python script. I wrote a small perl script to clean the text and build a matrix of the form “paragraph X words” and then scored them based on the number of meaningful words contributed by the paragraph. Here meaningful words are the words that are left after striping out the stop words (put together by searching some stop list online). The paragraph with maximum score is selected as the representative for the article.

I know this is really naive method of doing things, but I wanted to validate the thought I had in mind about the ability of this idea. And it turns out it stands validated. I don’t have results with me on this machine right now to put up here but will do that once I go home. Also, I was surprised as it did select some of the really good paragraphs as a answer.

There are a few variations I would have liked to try but did not, here are those.

1. Use a better importance measure.

2. Add more granularity to the text selected. I could easily go to sentence level and then show the top 3 sentences as answers.

3. Use second order context similarity for the search term and the paragraph selected. This would be really interesting but is a lot more involved and I did not have enough time.

All in all, it was fun app that it turned out. I will be uploading it soon here so keep watching this post or email me if you are in a real hurry. But again I don’t claim that the code is a top class code and is the best way to go. It is one of the way to go though. I also want to thank Andy (Anand Kishore) who’s post (Dygest) I mentioned before, inspired this act of mine.

I have been away from home for almost two years now. I talk and chat frequently with my mom and dad back home. My mom is more comfortable using my mother tounge Marathi to communicate with me and has to fight with the Roman Script keyboard that comes fitted to the computer back home. What is more annoying is despite of the fact that I am a computer science Masters Stuudent she still has to struggle, can’t I just write a small program that will encode the Roman key sequence and change it to the resective Devnagari Character? Well yes I can, but does she use the same key sequence every time to mean the same letter? Is she consistant with her spelling of certain phonemes? No she is not. Now should I make her mug up (Indan term for memorize) all the key sequences just coz she has to write to me in Devanagari script? Is it really worth the pain? (Well for those emotional types it might be, but my mom would say look kid, you want me to read this and mug it up? forget it! I will call you).  To all those of you who are by now eager to point me to Google’s Indic Transliteration web interface, my point is my mom is not great with computer and although she would be keen on doing it, it would be a bigger pain for me to explain her how to really do it. So forget it.

What do I do? Leave her to call me and not pick the call coz I am either in school or playing Cricket or cooking or out with friends? No I chose to write the code which will adapt to her key sequences probabilistically and then suggest some output of the word to select. I know this is really a long term project and needs a lot of dedication. Below is my plan of action.

1. Identify the phonemes that are formed with the script consonants + vowels and other combinations.

2. Build a probabilistic model for phoneme preceedence using the two Marathi corpus available form CFILT-IIT-B.

3. draw association between Roman key strokes and Devenagari phonemes.

4. Write up a predction algorithm that that based on the previous key strokes and the probabilistic models predict the nextt phoneme in the word.

I am through with step one. It has a small python file as code. I would love to write a C++ code but I am trying to write like a small app that can be used in a web browser hence I am keeping it in something like Python. But again I don’t know if Python will be useful. So for now I am designing and developing the algo and a sample aap as my weekend project. Lets see where we go. Feedback welcome!

This is one video form Google Round Table video series and you guys know what? They have shown a iPhone if I am not wrong in this video used for one of their maps products.

Did Google not have Android based phones then? Or they just goofed up?

Good question…

I happen to Read this article on Indiatimes.com about the Pune traffic condition and it made to the front page international edition for something quite interesting. This techie apparently beat up a cop, and now instead of putting him through the court case and stuff the commissioner of police has made him work with the same cop on the job that the cop was doing, MAN A TRAFFIC SIGNAL IN PUNE. Guys believe me it is as tough as watching the Indian borders for infiltrators from across the border. It is in the hope that the techie will realize how difficult it is to manage the traffic and then also may be have some sympathy towards the police men who work extremely hard towards managing the ever unmanageable Pune traffic.

Kudos to the cops for finding this innovative way of teaching lesson, it is the fact that lack of understanding and apppreciation of eachothers job is something that lands most of us in quarrels and arguments with other, which at times can be avoided by having this simple knowledge. BUT, Will the police send their men to a techie’s cube to sit with him and see what kind of pressure he handles, if in some (most?) cases cop is wrong? We shall see… for now it it is a good initiative.