| I graduated from the Department of Information Technology, National Institute of Technology, Durgapur in May '11. I blog @ wordpress. I have spent four years learning to interact with machines in the mythical east. Have I have been successful in doing that? I would say that the question seems a little fuzzy :-) I joined Team Oak, INRIA from Dec '11 as a Research Engineer, and I am pretty excited about the tenure!!!
I ended up attending DubDubDub (WWW '12) again, in Lyon this April. Got an opportunity to volunteer for workshops on Linked Data and CrowdDb. Lucky me :-) Linked Data and Social Web were the buzz words. I loved the keynote by TBL:
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Interests
Previously worked in Tejas Networks from July '11 as R&D Engineer (Software) in the newly formed Wireless Division. In this limited time, my work involved profiling code for Cavium Boards as a part of the Platform team. Tejas provided a platform which allowed me to see how the industry functioned, albeit at a very abstracted level. The experience was enlightening. Attended the The 2011 Summer School on Security and Privacy at IISc, from June 18-30, 2011. It featured talks from prominent speakers like Marriane Winslett, Ramrathnam Venkateshan, Chris Soghoian to name a few. The agenda was how user privacy was becoming more and more of an important issue with the rise of the web, especially in areas like India where awareness is still comparatively low. One of the most interesting debates involved discussing how privacy brings both the legal framework and research at crossroads.
In final year, I got an opportunity to be one of the Tech Leads of Gnu/Linux Users' Group in college. To be frank, I haven't been able to develop or contribute to open source in the traditional sense (I sincerely wish to rectify it ahead) but I will be indebted to it for providing students like me with a platform to know about the world of computers from the perspective of both research and development. Python is one of language which eases development and I can't stop thanking Guido Van Rossum for it. Majority of projects I have contributed to, had this agile language (refactoring couldn't have been better) as an integral part. At the end of March, I got the opportunity to attend the proceedings of WWW '11 at Hyderabad. The experience was inspiring, more so because I was always interested in the internet and how it made a difference. I had attended the tutorial by Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates on Distributed Web Retrieval. He was extremely patient in clearing the doubts I had, which in the hindsight look quiet naive.
Summer 2010 was an eventful period, probably the most interesting time in my four year program. I had interned under Dr. Sudip Misra in IIT Kharagpur. The research problem involved IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. It was my first brush with research and to be honest, I was a little nervous. I got to learn a lot of things ranging from how one should be surveying literature and how ideas quantify to problem solutions. I also got the opportunity to test my work under simulation, after which I got to work on manuscripts too. In sum, the experience was humbling and I have felt more respect towards the research community than ever. I particularly like the idea of going out everyday to face the unknown. Afterall, uncertainity has been one of the driving forces in making us, humans reach where we are today.
As human knowledge is multi-dimensional, its quite difficult (understatement) to quantify it on paper or, for that matter on the display. This article tries to generalize all dimensions into one. It talks about how we grow intellectually in order to seek knowledge in a particular dimension. I really like the research part, about how one tries to strive for making a dent - day in and day out.
I am extremely passionate about Computer Science, especially how it has helped people in different ways ranging from online news to the commonly used search engine. These products have made information and knowledge accessible to people in a manner that has never happened before, and this is what has inspired me. I like/try to keep track of all the latest happenings in the world of software/hardware technology. Apart from academics, I like watching movies that cater to different genres, with biopics and fiction being my favourite. At other times, I either laze around or you might find me debating on stuff ranging from serious issues such as Global Warming to ranting arbitrary non-sense. Speaking of non-sense, I believe that sense and non-sense are not disjoint, in fact the former is a sub-set of the latter. What Galileo advocated during renaissance was condemned by his times, and today we read that same thing (ok, agreed there are some differences) in our text-books. What's your take on it?
