Yaad aayenge ye pal...

15th August 2011...

64 years after the Indian Independance!! The day was special not only because it marked the 65th year of India's virtual freedom, but also because of the Silver Jubilee Alumni Meet of Sir MVIT. I was involved as a part of the event management committee.

Managing events has always been one of my passions since school. It is an exposure of working with different people,different minds,learning from them and sharing a bond with them with the common ultimate goal being the grand success of the event.

I must admit I had a few sleepless nights before the 15th of August 2011. I was looking forward to meeting seniors this day(the ones I have known,the ones I have heard tons about and waiting to meet and a few that I have never known and were probably 25years older to me).The nights were filled with apprehensions anticipating the degree of success of the event, the review from the seniors and what not.

The alumni meet eve saw loads of checklists being made,duties being assigned to volunteers,a few volunteers backing out,a few glitches...But there seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel. The positives were our prayers for a good event and our pre-planning skills.

The day finally arrived.. I was fortunate enough to witness my first flag-hoisting ceremony of Sir MVIT. The flag was hoisted by the Secretary of Sri Krishnadevaraya Educational Trust,Sri K V Sekhar Raju accompanied by the Director and Principal of Sir MVIT.I sang the national anthem and the national song after a few years. A few speeches were delivered as usual. We had arranged wrist bands and flag brooches for all the organisers and volunteers and we proudly flaunted it that day.

The event also witnessed its live screening through which people all over the world could witness the Silver Jubilee Alumni Meet live. Thanks to Vishal and Vishwanath for their effort.

The event kicked off with inaugration being delayed by half an hour which proceeded with the General Body Meeting after which it was the time for the alumni to enjoy with some games. We had "Bombing the City" and "Passing the Parcel" as the games. Ironically, we saw more enthusiasm from the alumni's tiny tots who were waiting to grab the prizes by displaying excellent sportsmanship. 3 out of 6 prizes were claimed by the kids. The games were followed by a festive lunch. One of the best lunch party thrown by MVIT. Right from the sweet to the desserts, it was a well-thought lunch menu.

The lunch was followed by the visit to department for the alumni.The alumni hour started at 3p.m which witnessed the alumni showcasing their skills on center stage a few years after they left college. The program started by a soothing classical music performance by Shruthi followed by an audience-attracting performance by Mr Ashutosh Dikshit. The dean describes him as "Name a talent and he has it". And I admit, he certainly does. The hour also saw alumni singing,sharing their experience and recalling the times they spent in college.Ranjani entertained us with her talk and songs. When we see one of the founders of Susamskruthi addressing us and singing songs, it certainly feels good.

The best moment of the day came when we had live performance by Mr Abhishek Kumar,Indian Idol. He is probably the most entertaining singer I have wathced live.It was a pleasure to recieve him from the entrance,watching him perform some of the finest music and watching him make the teachers,principal,dean and even the secretary dance to his tunes. His down-to-earth nature and love for the college left me awestruck. Being on stage while he was singing "Yaad aayenge yeh pal" was certainly a nostalgic moment.The day ended with loads of happiness and loads of photographs being clicked.

This experience was one of my special moments at college.
Working with the event organising team was a pleasure.The interactions with people of the college right from the top level till the foreman level was a delight. I will always cherish this synergy with the 15-member team. The reviews of the event by the alumni after a great time was even more motivating. It's always nice to see yourself and your team being appreciated.The day ended on a high!!

The week that followed involved attending a few classes, bunking some,registering for placement of a few companies among other activities both good and bad.

Susamskriti in assosiation with SpicMacay also organised a classical music concert by Vidwan T V Shankarnarayan this Friday.The music of the Padmabhushan awardee was extremely soothing and more importantly it was heart-warming to see the 65 year old connoisseur bubbling with enthusiam enjoying his music.

I had to sacrifice attending my Department fest,4th Dimension, conducted by Ganak for my GRE preparation.It would probably be the first fest I missed in college since I joined Sir MVIT. It also felt good after I heard that the fest saw particaipants in huge numbers. The positives from this sacrifice meant learning a few extra words for the GRE and a successful group study for the all important exam. Loads of bunking classes in store because of the GRE!!!

Present Perfect Continuous...

This post is to share with you all the things I have been doing(hence the title) in the past week or so. Continuing from my previous post, I have been attending seminars throughout but the one at IISc on the Frontiers of Computer Science was a little different. Reasons:
1. I had teachers and friends accompanying me to learn and have fun(For once, I was attending the seminar with a group I know..)
2. The college decided to take me to this conference.
3. It meant a few days of bunking college with attendance(Unlike my previous seminars which always happened on holidays..)

The international conference was conducted on "Frontiers of Computer Science" at the J.N Tata Convention Center, IISc by Atria Institute of Technology in assosiation with the IIIT-B,ACM,VTU,CSI and ACT from 7th-9th August 2011. It was a large-scale event featuring Indian and International speakers and a few enthusiasts submitting their conference papers.

No doubt, there was a lot to learn and explore in this conference although,a few things that the keynote speakers said, bounced over my head. Nevertheless, a brief explanation of the 3-day seminar on the sessions I attended would go like this...

1. A tutorial on Advances in Multimedia Surveillance by Dr Pradeep Atrey:
Safety is important for all of us. Surveillance(setting up cameras) enhances security. Multimedia Surveillance makes use of cameras, microphones, motion sensors, RFIDs, night vision camera,IP camera etc to keep a watch at other people's activities for security. By using multimedia, we enhance efficiency,reliability and scalability at a lower amortized cost. Face detection,face recognition, blob detection and tracking were the areas focussed upon by Mr Pradeep aided by his partner Mr. Mukesh. The key point was achieving security at the cost of privacy loss. They concluded the talk with a solution of a security-privacy tradeoff where the criminals can be recognised by the behaviour and other attributes, thus ensuring privacy.

2. Mr Pradeep Atrey also gave us an idea on "How to write a Research Paper":
Research can either be a theoretical research(developing theorems,statistical methods etc) or appliction oriented research(to solve a particular problem).
a. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION - Identifying your problem, establishing the importance of the problem, scrutinizing the existing solutions to identify their flaws, developing your core idea and solution, summarizing main contributions of your work.
b.RELATED WORK - Discussing the related work and explaining the novelty and distinctness of proposed work.
c. PROBLEM FORMULATION/STATEMENT - Formally stating or defining your problem in mathematical form.
d.PROPOSED WORK/METHOD/SYSTEM/FRAMEWORK/ALGORITHM - Describing proposed work in detail using scientific tools and notations.
e.EXPERIMENTS,RESULTS AND ANALYSIS - Reporting experiments to substantiate your claims, establishing superiority of your work etc.
f.CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK - Stating the conclusions and summary work.

3.A tutorial on Cloud Computing by Mr. Subbakrishna(Excel-Soft Technologiees),Mr Janakiram(Amazon Web Services) and Mr Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu(Microsoft):
Cloud Computing is the next stage in Internet's evolution. Cloud essentially means the Internet. It focusses on hosting applications,making computations on the web etc. The aspects of Cloud Computing include foundation,network services,infrastructure,platform and applications. The terminologies include IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service),PaaS(Platform as a Service) and Saas(Software as a service). It stressed on technology development and R&D drivers like scalability,deployment flexibiltiy,development flexibility etc.
EC2 is a service which facilitates resizable computer capacity that auto-scales based on the workload.Ramaprasanna, a developer evangelist from Microsoft demonstrated using Visual Studio 2010 with Windows Azure to set up servers.He lightened things up by cracking a few jokes and interacting with audience.

4. Keynote talk on "Multimedia Data Mining" by Dr Mohan S Kankanhalli:
Multimedia Data Mining is the exploration and analysis by automatic or semi-automatic means of large quantities of audio,video,image and text data in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules.
The techniques assosiated with MDM are clustering,classification and sequence of pattern mining. MDM can be applied in search and retrieval,sports video analysis and surveillance data mining. He familiarized us with open issues of MDM like inaccuarate concept detection issue,dynamic temporal relationships,automatic attribute construction,media stream synchronization,synchronous cross modal mining etc.

5. FUTURE OF WORK by Mr C S Murali from CTS:
This particular session was one of my favourites. The talk was initially not on the schedule but was added later. And it was worth the accident!!
The topic concentrated on the confluence of technology,demographics and globalization which is changing the nature of organization and work itself.
The four forces changing the nature of organization and work are globalization,virtualization,millenials and cloud computing. The talk focussed on how the number of Internet users have increased exponentially,the explosion of virtualization at the organisation,process and technology levels,the changes in the work-life of employees,impact of social networking sites,how the millenials(those born between 1975 and 1995) are important and different in terms of being digital naives,fierce multi takers who crave collaboration,travel in-packs and don't care about status,how work has transformed from being a noun to being a verb,the coming of cloud and rising of the knowledge process.

6.Keynote talk on "Correct Design of Enbedded Systems" by Dr Wolfgang Kunz:
Embedded systems are specialized for certain applications in a particular technical environment. Dr Kunz discussed on the challenges of a embedded system design, the functional correctness of a systems on chip,the role of formal methods and the Electronic System level(ESL) based design. He stated on how the dependance on computer systems has soared quoting an example of a modern ES car that has 70 processors,10 million lines of code and 40% of the value.
Dr Peter Liggesmeyer,then, discussed the current trends and challenges in embedded sofware engineering and how we could develop a practical model based approach for system engineering.

7. Workshop on Analytics and Algorithms for Business Optimization by Dr Indrajit,Dr Y Narahari,Dr Vinayaka Pandit, Mr S V Subrahmanya and Mr T S Mohan:
The marriage of mathematics and computer science with business applications was explained. The talk was about integrating the aspects of Mathematics comprising of linear algebra,optimization,probablitly,statistics,simulation,machine learning,game theory, graph theory etc with aspects of business applications comprising of advertising,product marketing,e-commerce services like finance,health,education etc,carbon economincs,drug design,intelligent transportation etc. It was a good platform to identify problems and take it up as projects for us.

8. Keynote talk on "From Cycles to Solutions" by Dr. Vipin Chaudhary:
It was about redefining the possible. It focussed on the evolution of high performance computers, the cycles of HPC, the exploision of choices in this field etc.It left us pondering over the message that we have to think about complete solutions in terms of applications,application workflows and systems and how the primary concern is to think about the end user and the solutions rather than the computer scientists.

9.Presentations: Apart from the tutorials,keynotes and workshops, there were also presentaions being made by students and teachers who have writtien a research paper and aspiring to present it in a conference.

The three days hectic schedule was combined with great hospitality,yummy food,mind blowing cultural programme on Day 2, the walk with friends exploring the IISc campus,clicking tons of photographs and above all a great learning experience!!

That's not all that happened this week. The week also saw me bunking classess after classes for the all important "Sliver Jubilee Alumni Meet" to be scheduled on 15th August marking the institutes' 25 years completion. Being a chief member of the event management committee feels great. Right from chalking out the schedule,games to be played,discussions with the higher authorities,piling up volunteers,getting things done at the right time and above all the responsibilty of hosting a memorable meet feels great...A cherry on the pie came when someone jokingly tagged me as the unofficial college captain..With that contentment deep within, keeping fingers crossed for 15th August..Live streaming of the event on the website is being planned too!!!

Rest in Next...

Potpourri of LIFE...

Before I begin, I would like to explain the title of this blogpost. Potpourri is a literary production composed of parts brought together without order or bond of connection. I was tempted to name the blog as "Potpourri" for two reasons. One, that it sums up the happenings of my life in the last fortnight perfectly. Two, because it looks very good to they eyes on screen(atleast to my eyes).

The first part of the fortnight mainly revolved around the family whereas the latter half concentrated on the professional aspect. Family time involved cousins coming over,late night snacks, visiting relatives and most importantly spending quality time at home with parents.

The highlight of the first half of the past 15 days is certainly the new addition to my life,to my family..my prized possession..A Hero Honda Pleasure..It involved some research,some googling, some brainstorming to narrow down to choosing a two-wheeler..Finally, I had the pleasure of owning a PLEASURE.. Now that obviously called for a learners' license, which meant I had to do brush up on the traffic rules. The LL too arrived in 3-4 days after a not-so tough viva at the RTO.

Amidst all these joys, there was a sense of excitement and a sense of nervousness to attend the Yahoo Open Hack 2011! I was sharp on time to the venue on a Saturday morning at the all exciting Lalit Ashok! The security was tight owing to the political events happening in Bangalore with Yeddyurappa resigning. We were then welcomed at the event by the crew at the registration desk.

It was the fourth Open Hack event at Bangalore. The session was introduced by Micheal Smith from Yahoo! which was followed by talks from Saurabh Sahni on YQL and Y! APIs,Natarajan Kannan on YUI 3,Pradeep B V on HTML 5 & CSS 3 and Harsha Rajashekar Vashisht(my super senior at MVIT) on Hacking with Node.js at the Kalinga room/ Parallely, the Siddhartha room at Lalit Ashok was busy with Praveen P N's on Building High Performance Web Sites,Prajwal B S's Y! Geo Technologies and Tathagato Rai Dastidar's Yahoo! Search BOSS.

The highlight of the event was Douglas Crockford,the creator of JSLint and developer of JSON discussing JavaScript. He was present at the event to give us talks on three main topics. a.Server Sidedness b.The JSON saga and c.Programming Style and Your Brain. A man with such credentials was very amiable and interacted feeely with the crowd. The technical talks gave us a sense of direction to proceed in this field and boosted out technical knowledge.

The rest of the event was filled with a few developers building applications, a few learning to develop and a few interacting with others and brodening their horizons. The hacks were based on the location ,mobile and entertainment challenges which led to mobile apps,web apps and hackware hacks. The top 50 hacks out of 111 were chosen and were presented by one team member. A few hacks were funny, a few aiding the social mass and a few were purely technical.

The winners' hacks were something that we could all connect to and use to make our lives simper and easier.

The grand prize winner hacks were Spotlight – Illuminate your part of the World(This hyper-local web app surfaces the best content in our area) and D.A.M.N. - Single Serving Friend (Connects people on demand to enable them to share meter fare in taxis / auto-rickshaws. This is done by finding out common routes that different people want to take at a given time).They would participate the the Grand Open Hack at New York this September.

The other winning hacks were fakemytrip, crosstag, devsync, StoryBoard and iCribber. fakemytrip was certainy my favourite and rightfully chosen as the popular hack by the jury.

I would sum up my experience as a place of learning from others and exchanging ideas that would soon become innovative products(hopefully). The experience included learning about hacking with plenty of fun(i enjoyed the foosball and the T-shirt is pretty satisfactory) and amazing yummy food for the weekend. The bean bag, that they allowed us to take back, is a tresure at home now.I carried it home by using the public transport..Anything for the bean bag!! The hospitality at the event, the crew, the mentors, Anil with his team and most importantly YAHOO! deserves a big pat on their back for organizing such a mega event!!!I am tempted to work for Yahoo! some day after this event. Amidst all this action, the VI semester results were announced too. It was,all in all,a perfect end to the semester holidays...

I could not ask for a better start to the final year. Three years of engineering have somehow have passed so soon and here we are,walking through the gates of the college as seniors. Seeing the college,friends and teachers after a month instilled a feel-good feeling. I already had a responsibilty at hand, even before I entered college. It was a great opportunity, more than responsiblity. I was asked to be a part of the event management committee for organising one of MVIT's milestone events - The Silver Jubilee Mega Alumni Meet to mark the 25 years of our college. I plunged into it as I would get to meet and interact with the seniors I know and the seniors who passed out from college much before I joined.

The latter week included some(very little) seriosuness to prepare for GRE which is less than a month away.The week also witnessed our first training and placement session by Prof S H Khan on the Do's and Don't s of preparing for an interview. After a month of attending seminars voluntarily, a new opportunity knocked at my door. I was chosen as one of the 10 students who would attend a 3-day seminar at IISc along with 4 teachers on Frontiers of Computer Science from 7-9 August. Awaiting to learn and have some fun!!