Design and Analysis of Living

Blurring breadth and depth

2011-06-30T13:26:00.005-04:00

After a gap of almost a year I felt like writing about my recent flashes on breadth and depth. But first I want to say (for my own record, which most of my blog actually is ;-) that the main reason for not blogging is being at the Waisman Center, surrounded by people who can articulate feelings in a much more rigorous way and make real living out of it. I felt silly to blog about design and analysis of living while the journal club here is named Design and Analysis where they talk real scientific ways to backup the articulation of hypotheses in feelings.

Okay now to breadth and depth. So my academic experience has been (1) wanting to go to a top-school in India and ending up in a local college, (2) wanting to do a PhD in theoretical computer science and ending up in applied fields like computer vision, robotics and for the past two years medical imaging in neuroscience. (2) is an outcome of (1) because my of limitations in math training. I always felt I didn't have enough depth in a mathematical field to be able to prove theorems for living. But I haven't been daunted enough to beat my love for the academic setting which is why I find creative ways of making myself useful in the research endeavors of this rich country. In this process one thing that happened to me is get exposed to a wide-variety of topics like protein folding, tomography, genetics, physical chemistry, etc. - Wisconsin's really good for such cross-fertilization for whatever reason.

Given this exposure that I needed to survive in academia and guided by perspectives from my dearest field (mainly due to Scott's articulations) I feel like I am able to blur the effect of lacking too much depth by having breadth in boosting my academic self-esteem. Breadth after all is a form of depth except for semantics. Being forced to cross the vocabulary barriers (e.g. terms in statistics & machine learning, "science" & engineering, hypotheses & models), I realize more and more that the underlying models of discovery, limitations of pursuit styles are all same and I can (and increasingly quickly) map the apparent "difficulties" of a research topic: whether it is due to vocabulary barriers or due to real hardness of the quests that challenge our potential bestowed on us by (very slow-paced) evolution. For me, articulating isomorphisms between fields is scientifically rewarding both in terms of intellectual satiation as well as (less surprisingly) career.

All these experiences only reinforce my belief that complexity theory is one of the most apt theories to be flourishing at this point of our evolution of our brain which is why Scott keeps reminding us of how forefront is the question of P vs. NP is in our pursuits. You should also checkout his amazing talks.

So basically the distinction between breadth and depth is blurry when focusing on higher-order bits in terms of giving gas for scientific pursuits and can safely say that breadth is the new depth that people should focus on for efficient fruition of many projects funded by US govt.

Time travel, aggressiveness and cleverness

2010-08-28T10:28:00.000-04:00

Several times in the past during my philosogossips with my friends I used to mention that if not for British's ruling, traveling to India would be like time-travel into the past. Recently I was watching an episode on a popular-flavored time travel episode on History channel. The episode makes it reasonably clear that although science does not prevent time travel (something like we can not prove P not equal to NP), it's the amount of speed that's needed. For now nothing less than needing (exponential) energy seems possible for general purpose time travel although there seems to be a case of one person being 1/50th of a second in future because of his space travel.

And a few days ago while biking it just occurred to me time travel to the future might be thought of as already happening in our daily thoughts. See for time travel we need speeds close to the speed of light. Now, its easy to follow the thought experiment.

1) Thoughts can take "you" (make you experience) instantly across vast distances so lets say they have high speeds for experiential purposes.
2) Some people whose thoughts travel fast can "see the future".
3) They can "come back" and to let everyone see that future have to invest energy. In general they would require exponential amount, but thanks to collaborative efforts we "can pool" that required energy.
4) The time scale for everyone else to experience that future depends on how fast the pooling happens.
5) Coincidentally I can cite the example of Dr. King's vision for civil rights as the news on rallies in DC is running in the background on CNN.

So in a way if some one is aggressive enough to envision a future, clever enough to pool the resources by smartly tapping the collaborative instinct available abundantly in life, we can travel to the future. For e.g. if there wasn't such effort our grand-parental generation would not have seen the "future of such high technological advances". Whether time travel is good and wise (for survival) is a whole another topic! So far advances in civilization seem to be strong in saving lives, whether it's taking us on a sub-optimal time travel path instead of the "regular speed" time travel to the future, I don't know if it's possible to answer.

BTW everyone is forced to time travel in the forward direction, I am talking about the speed which distinguishes future from the present. Past I don't know much, although some cyclic experiences or deja vu's seem to be occurring sporadically :)

World view, social stock and self-esteem

2010-06-19T12:43:00.005-04:00

I was traveling for about 5 weeks outside the US, one week in Stockholm and then four weeks in Hyderabad, India. Last year on my blog, I mentioned that traveling can be revealing and this time it was revealing but totally on a different (extremely personal level). While in India, I got married to my beautiful and very sweet wife, Anusha Rudravaram.

Heuristically speaking most people's perspectives are shaped based on their body chemistry (which is shaped both by long-term evolutionary forces and mid-term societal forces). World views are plausibly the most probable causal forces in shaping our civilization and it got good amount of attention of Scott Aaronson (my hero and inspirational guide on many levels).

Social stock of a person, like his/her financial stock, indicates how good and purposeful one can feel. After achieving certain levels of financial stocks in lives people tend to shift focus to self esteems in their respective circles of life be it scientists, military, academics, plumbers, construction workers etc. Mostly because gaining self-esteem provides newer challenges (feasible ones) and hence can be stimulating and satisfying! Marriage can certainly boost ones social stock especially arranged marriages. Arranged marriage system allows for many more marriages to happen giving chance to those whose self-esteems might otherwise prohibit them from getting married. As with any stock value (opinionated value) sustained growth of stock value actually takes balls, to be able to stick to ones original values and opinions (those before gaining the stock) and not get too distracted. Otherwise one can risk too much and might be a victim of bubble bursts.

There can be social stock only if there are overlaps in the world views of two people or two groups. It's actually proportional to the amount of commonalities among the world views of people one interacts with. Now depending on the level of commonality it might be easier or harder to find overlaps between different cultures. I once mentioned that it might be easier to date someone from a different culture (because one can focus on more instinctual level overlaps). But if we are focusing on cultural level overlaps it's obviously easier with ones own culture. Of course depending on a situation one might focus on different levels of overlaps and that can change world views, social stocks and self esteems. As Scott also says his talks (scroll to the bottom for Notes) represent what he thought at the time (which is robustly consistent though as his talks are based on more objective stuff :).

CAMINO-TRACKVIS 0.2

2010-04-29T11:27:00.000-04:00

Thanks to Maxwell Collin's expertise in using nifticlib our new version of CAMINO-TRACKVIS becomes much easier to use. Key features in the new release:

1) One does not need to provide the volume and voxel dimensions.
2) The orientation information needed in Trackvis is automatically read from a NIFTI file so that overlaying FA/MD maps onto the tracts in Trackvis is much smoother without manual editing of the Trackvis header!
3) We also released SOURCE CODE!

Please feel free to share your experiences on the NITRC website so that we can keep improving the tool!

P.S.: Max is really awesome to work with and as promised he made the release possible before my summer travels!!

Emotional bases

2010-03-05T01:56:00.000-04:00

People take risks all the time at different levels. When people want to take risks in life especially emotional (non-documentable) risks how can they be calculated? To calculate anything we need a base system. The most popular base system currently for arithmetic is decimal system. Binary system is the most efficacious though!

Given my inclination towards computational perspectives in life and above all my faith in spirituality I think that the most efficacious base system for calculating risks in emotional adventures is {S,B,F}: S-your soul, B-your body, F-your faith. Now as time goes the number of "trits" you use to represent your emotional state keeps increasing (like in a typical decimal/binary system) and everyone's state depends on what kind of arrangement these three values take.

For e.g. One emotional state can be represented as FFSSBFBFS which means that person has his/her faith as the most recent and actually as in numerical systems the highest order values are the left most and in emotional sense the most robust and reliable. For eg. 101 and 102 are similar but 101 and 201 have a large difference. The left most digit plays a huge role.

Now given that to be able to calculate risks involved it is important to start with most reliable and high order values. So always try to begin your adventures before starting to write new emotional states in your life with F,S that way the small fluctuations that happen towards the right side of your emotional state won't matter as much! For e.g. FFSFFFSBFSSBBBB is much more robust (in terms of efficient/stable survival) than BBBSBBFSBSBFFBFFFS. So people who have firm faith in something abstract and are clear in mind about that can try and take risks later on in life and minimize impact as much as possible. That's why cultures try to inculcate faith in children as they grow up. Those left most values value the most and having that perception allows you to calculate or cope with risks involved in emotional adventures.

Depth of a culture

2010-02-09T13:26:00.000-04:00

I am notoriously unpopular for my pro-American attitude partly because of my blunt straightforwardness which might be considered extreme. While different people I argue with have different reasons to find faults with American culture some say their culture is not deep and is superficial and materialistic.

See, cultures that are based on or adapt modern science are bound to be like that. In fact the materialism is what separates impulsive judgements from rigor of the reasoning. Sure impulsive judgements might be handy at times but more often than not they are are not dependable with the given size of human population and scale of interaction on the planet.

Older cultures obviously are not based on modern approach to reasoning and tend to associate mysterious depths to understanding of life etc. Thanks to the western influence on the approach of reasoning we have tools to embrace uncertainties in a much better way. Why should we take that embracing uncertainty is a good thing? See, this is based on western influence and western cultures have had to evolve under harsher conditions of life because of climate and landscapes etc. Tropical countries naturally support life without requiring much effort from the human side at least not on the scale needed in colder climates. Well why we do we need to live in harsher climates? Well as I said before the size of human population you know, we can not cram lot of people in one place without dropping the individualistic animal instincts within us. Why do you think western influence resonates with many modulo survival fears!

Embracing uncertainty can seem to be superficial but actually it's deeper on the scale that actually matters for survival. It might seem majority of American export being "service" is superficial but re-think and adjust your views. They know how to run empire at least without repeating mistakes (on a relevant time scale). One can ask why am I so certain about my views. It's mainly because one has to instantiate at a certain level otherwise there won't be any objects of decision and I instantiate (am certain) where there is representation/room for uncertainty.

Obviously America is a big country and I don't have samples of interaction from all of it but from east coast which I believe is the strength of the US in causal terms. Coasts stimulate not just America but most countries on the planet so no big surprise. My experience in the mid-west through Madison also reinforces my hypotheses but I am glad and grateful I experienced east coast first as there are many local optima that can make people get stuck in mid-west type areas.

Steps to install Shogun

2010-01-01T19:30:00.001-04:00

Shogun's a huge collection of machine learning tools implemented in C++ and wrapped for MATLAB use. With help of Chris Hinrichs I started using the package for my work in DTI classification. They keep coming up with new version every so often and I needed a lookup place for the set of steps to perform. It is linux based software and it's not as simple as double clicking a setup.exe

So here's the steps assuming you have limited access on the machines:

Download the latest release from http://svn.tuebingen.mpg.de/shogun/releases/ (As of today the latest version is 0.9.1)
cd download_dir/src
./configure --interfaces=libshogun,libshogunui,matlab --destdir=install_dir --prefix=local -enable-glpk
make
make install
Edit .bash_profile in your $HOME directory to add the following line export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:install_dirlocal/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
In your MATLAB code: addpath('download_dir/src/matlab')

Look into download_dir/examples for examples.

Happy new year

2010-01-01T18:28:00.001-04:00

Today marks the beginning of 2010 and a new 10
Approaching the teen years of 21^st century
Makes me both happy and wary
Happy because we seem to be on the road to recovery
Wary because we can't be complacent too early
For the dynamics of our entropy are too hairy

On a personal level I hope
Everyone can at least glance
At romance
For an awesome blissful trance
That can fuel
One to reach your crowning jewel

The journey of romance
Might not all be rosy
Well what else worthy
Can one get without being risky?

At any rate
Here's the poem I wrote
For a new year
Summarizing my newest experiences in the previous year

Refreshing creativity

2009-12-30T15:00:00.000-04:00

I found this post on the math prodigy,Terence Tao's, blog. If not for any of the content just the creativity of using English can get attention and trigger some useful empathy. Creative communication is very refreshing to me!

Consistent performance

2009-12-21T15:58:00.001-04:00

I have been in the trance of watching a really great movie, Avatar, since last after noon! See I like Hollywood movies for their outpouring risks that show up as variety and quality! I liked Terminator 1 and 2, True Lies, Titanic and have had great opinion for James Cameron. Now after watching Avatar in 3D IMAX I became a life-long fan of James Cameron. All the movies I mentioned have been a "world wide phenomenon" in movies. There is one other James I really admire: James Horner! The score of A Beautiful Mind has a long lasting impression on me and the score of Avatar is excellent!

See producing something great is great but consistency in it is what really impresses me!

CAMINO-TRACKVIS

2009-12-19T22:28:00.001-04:00

I have been using CAMINO and TRACKVIS since mid-summer and along the way I built some in-house utilities that I thought should share with DTI researchers. I had written the utilities in C using malloc for memory management but that type of management didn't scale for over million tracts. Then Maxwell Collins suggested to using the "piping management" employed in CAMINO. He then extended and made my code into "releasable format" so in addition to being able to download the utilities package from here, you can also download it from SourceForge and it has been posted to NITRC for review. Below I am pasting the "public description" that I entered while submitting to NITRC.

With increasing efforts on brain connectivity analyses it becomes important to have tools that can allow increased interoperability among different tractography tools. This package allows interoperability between CAMINO and TRACKVIS. CAMINO is a leading software package in DTI processing. The package is from University of College London. TRACKVIS is a tract visualizing utility with capability of visualizing up to and over a million white matter tracts seamlessly. The package is from Massachusetts General Hospital.

The tools in this package allow conversion of tracts from one format to another in a very effective way with ability to handle over a million tracts.

I plan to release some more tools soon.

Military and free market

2009-12-19T13:31:00.000-04:00

The two most important (overriding) systemic forces are military and then free market. Free market has some influence on military but the latter overrides in case of a dead lock. There might be (are?) other meta-forces that actually "cause/control" these but these are the objective forces that can be manifested to actually make a difference in the living. It does help to detour (as long as the objective is kept in mind) into some of the spiritualities to have some entanglement effects on the forces but it's hardly replicable or communicable. One has to figure ones own way by honing the empathetical skills which are more or less like theorem proving skills in terms of communicability.

More grease and more

2009-12-14T13:43:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I posted a small demo.m. Today I made another small demo.m to convert ROIs in NIFTI format to text files based on a request from my mentor Moo K. Chung, which reminds me also to point to another piece of source code I worked on for Cosine series based representation of white matter tracts.

As I mentioned in my previous post I will soon release CAMINO, TRACKVIS interoperability tools.

Switching gears

2009-12-13T17:38:00.000-04:00

I posted a few times based on my encounters in brain image analysis at the Waisman center. Today I wanted to post a sample demo script on reading output from DTI_TK in MATLAB. Then I realized I will wrap the demo script in a meta post about how important it is to be able to switch gears (if one wants to reduce overhead in interdisciplinary research) not only in terms of conceptualizations but simple things like being able to use multiple platforms and software packages. Since I joined Waisman, I got more comfortable with MAC, LINUX etc. I am no longer just a WINDOWS person although I still cannot trade WINDOWS for any other platform. I plan to release some tools for CAMINO TRACKVIS interoperability as well.

See, all research in interdisciplinary at some level and needs ability to switch gears but applied research just has higher demand (for doing noticeable (even locally) research) on the gears and needs sufficient investments in greasing it properly. I worked on projects in collaboration with Psychology departments before while I was at Temple. I interacted with "psychologists" working on computer vision problems. There the research is aimed at hypothesizing human perception based on Gestalt psychology (and here's the kicker) eventually leading to machines with perception. While working with psychologists in neuroscience like Kim the results should eventually lead to interpretations of human behavior for clinical purposes. Both these objective functions have quite different properties!

Most of my palpable research experience has been in coming up with heuristics motivated by Gestalt principles and apply blackbox methods from simulation based statistics, specifically particle filters for perceptual grouping and robot mapping problems. More lately I have been working with passionate young Assistant Professor,Vikas Singh whose interests are actually in applying and analyzing techniques from optimization theory and machine learning. This is opening up a lot of opportunities for me to actually start think and work on actually analyzing the efficiency/complexity of heuristics. I am seriously hoping to build some skills in "smoothed analysis". Then I need to be able to switch gears from thinking like complexity analyst, to psychologists, to being software engineer (one of my key skill-strengths). Anyways I will blog more specifics on that when I have some real progress in that line. Without further wrapping I will present what I originally intended to present that is a simple demo script to read output from DTI_TK in MATLAB.

You can download the package from here and run demo.m. I am not explaining the details because what I am offering is possible grease into the gear of DTI processing (to save some annoyance) not building the gear. The actual gear itself can be built pretty nicely using the documentation on the DTI_TK website itself.

Estimating empathy

2009-11-30T23:43:00.000-04:00

This post has been on the "Set of possible upcoming posts" for over an year now. I have been wanting to write this post since last election campaign. I just had become a big fan of Obama and his stress for inclusive politics to improve the way DC operates the US (and the world :). Then I joined Waisman center whose mission coincidentally focuses on foundations of life, developmental disorders and Neurodegenerative disorders. A few goals essentially are about "understanding" psychological disorders and especially empathy deficits that can produce dysfunctional families!! Obama had mentioned about empathy deficits in Washington while people at Waisman focus more on a social, personal level. Obviously there's empathy involved at many levels of human life.

The main reason I wanted to write about empathy was that although mentions empathy many times in his speeches and which underlies his inclusive attitude, rarely did he say how others can acquire that skill. If you think about it you quickly realize that empathy is the most basic psychological quality (instinct) that creates any value in the society! Think about stock markets, music, movies, any art for that matter, even intelligence, quest for survival etc. So it makes sense to attempt to quantify such an important quality keeping such a scale of human civilization functioning so that there are guidelines for people to try to acquire such ability in an effective way. As Scott always says the meat of non-trivial reasoning is typically in quantifying, since it captures the complexity of the task without taking about trivial (im)possibilities in the rationale-extremes.

So what tools can we rely on! My favorite is obviously computational. As I mentioned before too the notion of computation is really unifying many spheres of knowledge since it tries to model the though process of human beings that underlies every sphere of knowledge. Its impact on all fields is so insuppressibly real that if there is no impact of computer science on a field then its realisticness can be questionable! Studying emotions like empathy and qualities like intelligence are a tricky thing. But as long as we have end goals for these computational thinking can help ask real questions. A few successful examples are the quest for artificial intelligence and computational game theory which ties up computer science and economics which helps design good societal games to keep the society stimulated in a healthy way. Hence for psychologists to ask truly relevant questions about empathy or other types of emotions its important to be able to take the machinist approach.

For e.g. we can rely on tools from interactive proofs (IP) where we can convince others of the truth of the statements using some communication protocols. The IP class is very powerful that means there are lot of things can in theory be communicated with others in effect creating empathy. Of course finding the protocols itself might be exponentially hard based on what we want to communicate. Usually experience in survival (survival instinct) seems to be the closest causal reason for intelligence which can be efficiently verified (polynomial time verifiability). Isomorphisms across spheres of knowledge and across time actually indicates that and actually realizing those isomorphisms actually fascinates me and indicates robustness of our human survival instincts.

The key to pick on survival instinct as the cause is the assumption (axiom) that everyone wants to survive. But how do you communicate with those who don't view this axiom like suicide bombers etc.? Well that's why we need some sort of enforcement of axioms otherwise there can be no basis for reasoning. Usually the best way to enforce axioms is to show the benefits of having those axioms like let's say proving non-trivial theorems (consequences) of those axioms and hoping that at least one of the consequences impresses them to fall for the axioms. For e.g. people fall for America for various reasons, like money, liberty, luxuries etc. etc. Empathy can only be verified after achieving it. Actual way of achieving is like coming up with theorems. So estimation of empathy is equivalent to theorem proving which means it's NP-hard! We can only hope to achieve practical approximations assuming P!=NP.

Computer Science in Neuroscience

2009-10-14T23:30:00.001-04:00

I got a job basically through a fellowship which wanted to bring in graduates in Computer Science to look at biological problems. For the past 9 months I have been looking at brain image data especially Diffusion Tensor Data trying to do basic processing and also applying classification methods and developing segmentation methods with several collaborators. Because of the channel I was hired through and because of the circle I am spending my working (and social) hours I can clearly see how Neuroscience (and biology in general) can drastically benefit from CS wisdom. It's an intriguing thing that our quest for machines laid the foundation to understand their language which in turn gave a fresh perspective for the foundation of modern science that in turn can help define our understanding of life.

CS wisdom can affect research pace in neuroscience on many many different levels. Just by applying software engineering skills you can grease a lot of processing. Machine learning/data mining/Artificial Intelligence methods can obviously help making sense of the biological sensor data. CS wisdom can help apply blackbox type research style to start making progress. This wisdom is almost always the fundamental tool in complexity theory: we need to start somewhere for the general problem setting and then dig deeper to exploit specific instances of problems as needed. One thing I noticed is that lack of such perspective can hold back lot of progress. Also another wisdom you can get from CS scientists like Umesh Vazirani is to focus on higher order bits. Well as I mentioned in my previous post building bridges for wisdom between CS and Neuroscience is allowing me some good times.

Building bridges

2009-09-28T20:57:00.000-04:00

We all want to work in a way we like and these likes evolve over time based on amount of success (positive feedback) one has in it. Typically in an academic career path one has to build either a combination of consulting + research or teaching + research. Teaching + research is a bit harder path and typically requires shiny background like top schools top thesis etc. Consulting + research is more viable for average PhDs (like mine) and not so ivory background. Good thing is transitioning between the two is possible thanks to interdisciplinary and more importantly applied research. It's always nicer to be able to communicate between seemingly unrelated groups of research as it can save lots of redundant efforts. Having strong bridges between spheres of our knowledge makes the knowledge base only stronger. There is lot of opportunity currently in building bridges in research which in my opinion is another crowning impact of Computer Science in terms of actual machines, software and most importantly complexity theory.

Streaks of thought: Streak 26

2009-09-26T23:49:00.000-04:00

A while ago I had a post on human rights and money. The point kind of was that our progress can be measured by our affordability of human rights. Well why do we call that progress? It's because it gives more chances to people to spring back from honest mistakes. There might be some abusers of the progress but usually those can be caught. This is because giving second chances to people is inherently rooted in wanting second chances for oneself! It all has to do with estimating empathy in lives. I have been procrastinating to write a post about it. Hopefully I will finish it sometime this year!

Animal analysis

2009-09-16T14:42:00.001-04:00

For past two nights I was watching Animal Planet before going to bed (to avoid repeats on CNN). One night I saw "Monsters Inside Me" which showed the dangers of parasites lurking around us. The wilder the environment gets the more danger we run into. The show reminded how our "civilization (= rights + responsibilities)" process was not just for sympathy, empathy in the high-functioning sense but essentially a Darwinian process. We had to cluster around to separate other killers and the purpose of clustering is defeated without civilization because we would kill among ourselves. We still do but we came a long way.

Yesterday I watched "Killing for Living" which showed how in many species many babies are born-murderers and kill their siblings and in some cases parents kill their children etc. for food. Males kill each other and get killed by females for mating etc. The show said "Just because you are their kind doesn't mean they won't kill you!" One particular instance was striking: Typically stags fight almost to death for mating with female deers but one specific sub-species just have an "abstract fight" where they decide who the winner is without touching each other just by making abstract fight moves!! That is an instance of using brain more than bran! We probably evolved from such sub-species of apes who loved being alive more than sex and reproduction! This probably was the first instance of questioning the instincts! Of course now questioning is one of the seed pillars of our civilization!

Sometimes when things in our high-functioning world relationships (both professional and personal) are frustrating such animal knowledge can give good perspectives on how better off we are in the race of evolution. Killings in today's societies are still very marginal (except for extreme cases like Darfur etc. where the population is still behind in civilization) and most of us get food and get to mate without getting killed!!

Streaks of thought: Streak 25

2009-09-13T12:21:00.000-04:00

CNN is a great way to get political news! Being liberal I tried MSNBC and did not like the certainty pitch. I didn't even bother to try Fox not for their rightwingness but because I assumed their certainty! I like CNN's certainty in uncertainty. Watching news gives me some nice streaks for my blog: American democracy is strong because it has strong middle class. But what does it take for a society to have a strong middle class. As a gross oversimplification I had a streak saying that we need people with balls. Then a strong sense of entitlement and a pinch of empathy (added with lot of perspiration to enforce, of course) can produce both world class rich people and constantly strong middle class!

Vacation by choice

2009-08-31T19:53:00.000-04:00

August 2009 has been a great month in many aspects which kind of means lesser posts on my blog as well. More or less after graduating it's been harder to wander in meta space of analyzing life since I am actually living the life!

For the first time in my life every I had a vacation by choice/ Although I managed to sneak in a few hours of meetings this has been a great vacation with my friend Amy! I have taken time off from work a few times before but it's mostly been very situational and for others and not really by choice for the vacation sake! After a wonderful weekend trip to Niagara falls (trying hard not to get trapped on the Canadian side) we spent the week just in the wonder of taking a vacation!

In creating value I realized the concept of affording (not just financially) vacation is a good indicator of measuring the success! Even religions also encourage this idea by concepts like keeping sabbath etc. It's just probably trivial to acknowledge that relaxing for relaxing sake is a good idea to being balanced ensuring long-term productivity. But actually experiencing that is not so trivial experience especially for someone growing up in a lower middle class in a third world country. The fact that such experiences are possible is a good way to keep human efforts for progress stimulated!

Affording half-knowledge

2009-07-25T17:24:00.000-04:00

I wanted to write this post in late September 2007 when I was still figuring out how to create enough value for my work in computer vision and robotics that would be worth an average PhD from CIS department at Temple University. Growing up in a country not only with low resource/population ratio and system's quite immature (relative to US standards: look we need some standards and I prefer US standards!) it was a common thing to hear "Half-knowledge is dangerous". Such perspectives are so deeply rooted in the culture that risk taking is almost impossible (probabilistically people who take risk is roughly 0.000001=1/Million).

Risk for potential embarrassment and failure is a necessity for growth! This assumption was revived after watch season 1.4 of The Universe which inspired me to finish this post. One episode on "Beyond Big Bang" was really appealing as it showed the journey of humans' theorizing about the universe. History channel put together these events nicely in perspective of how the current established theory (still of course incomplete) about universe is an outcome of so many attempts which were either only partially correct or wrong. So essentially we all survived through "half-knowledge" phases and still do not have complete knowledge about anything. There are dangers in having half-knowledge but this is a necessary transitional stage to attaining full-knowledge as it is continuous process. So it always essential to be able to afford half-knowledge.

To afford half-knowledge we need to create value which is a very important part of the survival business. Creating value obviously needs forward filtering and backward smoothing by developing models, gathering observations and evaluating them by communicating with the rest of the human community. The key point I want to make though is that we need to start with some model, some proposal distribution, some importance weighting scheme so that we can eventually get it right. The point is there's is no point in waiting for ever to get it all right since that would mean not being able to afford half-knowledge. Scientists or systems that can afford half-knowledge are analogous "bullet-swallowers" unlike "bullet-dodgers". So questions like: When are you ready to graduate? When is a romantic relationship good enough for marriage? How much money do I need to open a company? When do you sell a product? etc. all can be answered only if we can "swallow" and create value to be able to afford half-knowledge.

Reasoning reason

2009-07-17T14:37:00.000-04:00

We all crave to know reasons to different levels. The pathway to peace is having control over that craving as well. We need to have a balance (as always) between

1) actually discovering reasons that can be "objectively communicated" for better lives and
2) bettering our lives by knowing the limits of objective communication and letting go.

The level of detail of reasoning we would be aware of is influenced by the amount of survival stake in knowing the level. The more we grow in number (population) the more detailed of a level we would need. Also there are many equivalences among different types of reasoning like for e.g. there are many "equivalence" theorems and laws in our knowledge base. This is another reason you should reason yourself not to reason every thing in your life.

Reasoning with people in relationships is pretty hard mainly because of assumption-mismatches. There are two ways out:

1) Either try to control the craving to reason everything or
2) Try to have relationships with people from different cultures where you can comfort yourself because assumption-mismatches can be justified to be more valid easily!

Old website on a new server

2009-06-30T11:03:00.000-04:00

I no longer can host my website on Temple so I moved it to Waisman's hosting server here! I hope to redesign and update my website sometime.

Track record

2009-06-28T16:17:00.000-04:00

Coming from a not-stellar undergrad college I not only got a chance to have a closer look at the value of "track record" in academia and life. Thanks to transition to America I also got to see how system designs can make a difference not only in realizing ones own potential but in essentially defining potentials of human beings.

Lately I have been looking at an inverse problem of learning classifiers for autism using DTI. Not being primarily a machine-learning researcher I focus on an "feature-selection" process for achieving better classification accuracies. Thanks to Chris Hinrichs' help and amazingly useful implementations of Support Vector Machines, I am now able to use these tools to play around verifying the power of different features. It's generally known that any generic computational learning problem is usually infeasible whether using Monte-Carlo methods or using deterministic methods. Feature selection is a very important problem in itself that demands exploitation of structures of the problem at hand. Just this morning I had a nice experience of using a priori information in extracting the features from the DTI data for the autism study and was able to get 100% classification accuracy using leave-one-out cross validation. The features were extracted by Nick Lange using statistical tests and more importantly using biological prior. Statistical tests are usually only a verification step.

Now why all the feature selection mumbo-jumbo for the post titled "Track record". Well, recently Scott posted on his blog about "two-conference solution" for better feature selection in theory community using Innovations in Computer Science (ICS). See, besides which schools you have graduated from, these conferences, journals are fundamentally involved in feature selection process for either a binary classification (good researchers vs. bad researchers) or multi-class problem (exceptional, average, survivalist, bad etc.). Every field has these coveted conferences (like SODA/FOCS/STOC for theoretical computer science, ICCV/CVPR for computer vision, IROS/RSS for robotics) people die-hard to publish in. Even though publishing and bringing in grant money and good feedback in teaching etc. all form huge part of track record for a tenure track publications are the most important and independent dimension necessary for discriminative analysis. There is always a need to balance between "false positives" and "false negatives" in any learning problem in addition to taking care of "outliers/wrong labels".

Since it's hard to change the influence of publications (or find another as uncorrelated feature) on a track record it's important that we try to keep the data in that feature as independent and unbiased as possible. For that there have to be "checks and balances" between types of efforts encouraged in research. This might involve creating new venues for newly discovered efforts. Thanks to worlds most individualistic and worlds biggest democratic society America tends to find such balances in time most of the time (even in establishing track records) and that's what keeps doors open for the underprivileged while banning imposters!

Can traveling be revealing?

2009-06-27T19:17:00.000-04:00

My life for the past few months has involved lot of traveling. I heard on TV sometime that traveling to places can be "revealing" and that you get time to introspect your life and find what's most dear to you etc. Well it seems to hold true best when traveling to new and unfamiliar places can give stimulate the urge of introspection. If it's more about traveling to known places and meeting already known people it becomes more of nostalgic and less of revealing.

The most revealing place was watching variety of animals (many for the first time) in the Madison zoo! Different animals were doing different things in their containments. It was amazing to see chimps giving facial expressions ridiculously close to ours and then cute rodent family animals. By watching other animals we realize our most basic assumptions of what we do in our lives rely on simply that "we just evolved to create". Creationism seems to have helped our species much more than anything else in terms of dominating the planet. We create stuff ranging from materialistic things (like food, tools) to objective abstract concepts (like math, science) to subject abstract concepts (religion, spirituality, love). In my opinion "discovery" is only a by-product of our basic creationism. We get bored and loose purpose in life if we don't feel we are creating something. To me it precedes even peace!

Streaks of thought: Streak 24

2009-05-21T17:00:00.000-04:00

Credit is obtained using communication. Systemic credit is maintained using interpretations while karmic credit is maintained using intentions, above the limits of language! Karmic credit is superset of systemic credit: every result in system can be justified by karma but not vice versa.

Well at least that's what we like to tell ourselves until we have better communication capabilities :)

Brainalysis

2009-04-11T14:35:00.001-04:00

A while ago I had a post reminding that heart-breaks have more to do with brain than with heart. My blog has a theme of meta-analysis of living. I recently started working on brain image analysis thanks to the inter-disciplinary thrust in academia that permits researchers like me to survive. After baffling with the basic problems of data process pipelining for about 2 months the data has been slowly growing on me (as with pretty much anything in my life: besides my very basic curiosity instincts and love for brilliance, everything else has grown on me starting in about 1-2 months :)

Psychological analysis until the advent of brain image acquisition and computational learning has mostly been non-rigorous and often can lead to faulty conclusions. For example: "guys can do a lot for a girl merely by evolutionary instincts but in olden days when knowledge about biology and psychology was limited when we don't understand it fully we can conclude things like females are witches they can take control of men etc. etc. That's what made people in ancient days conclude such things. " Such psychological analyses also can lead to creating characters like confessor in Legend of the Seeker series. They are so attractive that the opposite person if confessed becomes an obedient slave!

The psychology people look at behavioral data and try to perform some statistical tests (typically t-test) to see if null-hypothesis can be rejected. The main problem with behavioral data is that usually conclusions would be "trivial" or very questionable if they are non-trivial! Ability to look inside the brain and work on that data can (to some extent) alleviate such problems because in some sense we are looking at the data more close to the "causal" processes of the behavior.

For the past two-months I have been looking at an dataset. At first I had hard time understanding autism but then I realized the effort to understand some out of the norm behaviors is rewarding in itself as it can help us build tolerance and de-couple the actual person (soul?) with his behavior. For the past few weeks I have been seeing lot of "brain related" news on the media: Natasha Richardson's death, Michael J. Fox's appearance on talk shows, Jim Carrey's support for autism etc. etc. I guess when you are working on something and you have access to the world you will filter the information through your own lens :)

Brain image analysis is a one of the very important inverse problems as it can not only have many many applications relevant for day to day life but also give insights into the origins of our life the answer to which can satisfy every single soul on this planet! I never saw a real brain so far (I might soon) but one of my colleagues here saw human, rat and dog brains and she tells me that rat and dog brains are much flatter than ours. It makes me wonder if our never ending self-referential questioning might have created those "folds"! Well we don't know if our questioning is from folds or we form folds because of our questioning instinct. But something interesting can be observed in children's behavior. In general a child is much more curious and can learn faster than the adult counterpart. I think this is because a child is inherently more vulnerable. than an adult and he craves for knowledge and information that can help him survive. Since our bodies are not "wild" compared to other animals we needed to fold up our brain a lot to be able to exist so long on this planet! And so far it seems to pay off to focus on brain. So roll up your sleeves and tone up those folds by working out on relevant hard problems! By analyzing brain data I hope I am doing it :)

Communicative ads

2009-03-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

Lately because of watching CNN I ran into two appealing advertisements which I am embedding below. Different ads appeal to different people. I like inspirational and inclusive ads with good music.

I met many American undergrads here in Madison who major in journalism, communications and some of them want to direct ads. Creating excellent ads is a very very creative job! Any skill eventually gets recognized only when communicated in some way or another, for almost trivial reasons. The better the communication skills the sooner you can further you can your career. American products, research, service etc. all usually lead the world because of both good communication and content. BTW it does not pay to just learn the superficial presentation skills. In fact a good communication actually involves real underlying content!

Earth hour

2009-03-28T14:11:00.000-04:00

I have been posting a few times with environment awareness this year. Today evening 8:30PM local time is a call for a world-wide symbolic event about earth consciousness where people involved turn off all unessential lighting for an hour. A similar type of event happens more on a regular basis (third Sunday of every month) for world peace through their meditative perspectives.

Without getting too much into what's essential and what's not to pick on this event just think about adding "earth factor" in your life in general. See people always make decisions by using many variables like money, subjective satisfaction, long-term (conceivable) benefit, short-term reliefs etc. Just add one more to that list. It's not that hard actually. For e.g. limit hot water usage, don't use straws, lids when you are not drinking while moving, check the size of napkins before using them (tear them into two if they are too big, for reuse), volunteer at your house by separating trash from recyclable stuff (win at home before winning outside) etc. etc. Your brain becomes a bit sharper too!

I had started liking actor Edward Norton since his performance in Illusionist (actually knew about him since only then :) Recently I saw him on Larry King live where I learnt he is an activist for earth consciousness related stuff. My admiration of him grew very much. When he said he does not own a car and drives only hybrids when he rents one, I was totally flat and actually felt proud because I have been successful so far in not buying a car even when some of my friends suggested me to buy one in since I have a "job" and the car market's kind of favorable for buying!

Stand as an example in your local neighborhoods of influence and slowly it can become global process. One thing I learnt that helps is not to preach. Just do it if you believe in it. Time will select those who pass the tests anyways.

Versing in inverses

2009-03-25T22:26:00.000-04:00

Inverse problems form a central part for researchers in pattern analysis and machine intelligence. Data is assumed to be generated by an "underlying process" linear or non-linear and the goal is to "understand" the process. By understanding here I mean having an increased control on the predictability of the data. There are two main top-level categories of processes that effect the data we observe: (1) The true/hidden process and (2) the data acquisition process. The actual goal is to understand (1). The more we account for (2) explicitly the better versed we can be in the real inverse problem of understanding (1).

I have worked on contour grouping and robot mapping problems where the goal was to use 2D spatial data and range data respectively for recognition and navigation applications. In computer vision and robotics main stream pretty much focuses on inferring the computers very specific abilities of humans like recognition and navigation without worrying the true underlying process that generates recognition and navigation abilities. It's like relaxing the problem of predictability to constrained replicability using the observed data without all the way going back to the process that generated the original data. I should mention some people are working in that direction.

Lately I have been working on brain image data. Besides using 3D spatial data there is quite an effort to reach closer to the original process that still has a lot of fertility in terms of academic careers. Since brain imaging has medical implications the conclusions/applications tend to be conservative and hence the goal becomes to get to the real process as closely as possible before we generate new applications from observed data. To put it in different words, it's a very conservative data mining AI application. Yesterday I met Daniel Rowe who was all advertising about his grand unified theory (GUT) about fMRI data processing to account for (2) as much as possible in a unified way. This is very useful as it allows us to get closer to the real (1).

Life is a very interesting process too that generates lots of data in Nature. Understanding life is a very hard inverse problem. We need as much data as possible to be able to confidently understand non-trivial facts about life. Hence the basic assumption of life is to sustain it as long as we can and for that we need to make it valuable and interesting without influencing independent will too much that can reduce the utility of the data. Many generations have been trying to understand the process using contemporary analytical tools. In some sense its hardness is what actually makes it interesting, as I kind of discussed about it before.

I thought about writing about this about 6 months ago. Finally almost as a total random event, I just decided to write it up tonight! It's hard to completely explain the underlying process of my thoughts :) A key problem in data analysis is scale. I would like to post about it sometime but for a nice discussion about this problem in the context of computer vision, look at this paper by Song-Chun Zhu whose work I really admire.

Is 200 years long enough?

2009-03-04T12:47:00.001-04:00

Thanks to my roommates' TV I watch news these days more regularly and also today started to use the "TeVo" feature to record British Prime Minister, Gordon Browns' address to the joint congress session in Washington. I saw the first few minutes and he was all praising US for it's leadership for the past 200 years and all. I hope to watch the rest later (if my TeVo recording trial works).

When people praise America for its greatness and leadership that it has shown so far, the nay sayers tell that 200 years is not that of a long time. My argument is that 200 years is really a long time given the strides of changes we have seen in the past two centuries. In my opinion a lot more recordable and impacting things happened recently. Science has seen tremendous progress mainly because of its impact on our survival abilities. We are more globally connected than ever before. And besides that all these things happened very fast. When the Great Depression that happened in 30s the world was a different place than what it is now. If the economy goes down in one major country then the rest of the world kind of goes down with it and vice versa. Word Wars brought a lot of changes in the world but at a cost of lot of lives. This economic crisis is better than those wars because atleast we are not paying lives. I have strong faith in resilience of the human civilization.

Infact you know I see this crisis as a kind of progress in our civilization because instead of needing "deadly-life-threatening" crisis to become better at survival we just need a "deadly-economy-threatening" crisis to make a new stride in terms of improved survival like becoming more aware of the climate in terms of reusing, recyling and optimizing energy usage etc., becoming more aware that peace and security are more feasible by better means (like giving hope and opportunities) than just killing etc.

It's not the absolute number of years that matters it how much we got done during those years that matters if those years are long enough. So yeah I think the leadership shown by US in the past 200 years is not just beginners luck or random chance but an outcome of a strife towards achieving a principled approach in dealing with human civilization.

Streaks of thought: Streak 23

2009-02-14T12:45:00.003-04:00

People whose lives revolve around issues way beyond survival are the ones who often need justifications which undeniably rely on the faith in survival. That's probably one of the reasons life is valued much more (in terms of investing money for a system) in US compared to other poorer countries.

An instance as simple as deciding to board a roller-coaster at Six-flags can highlight the importance of faith: Do we check for each nut and bolt of the machine we are boarding? Do we know for sure if everything is safe? It's just the faith in the system that if something goes wrong things will be "justified" appropriately by the system. Since human made systems cannot be perfect we ultimately tend to show faith in karmic system.

Have faith, fun and a happy Valentine's day whether you have a Valentine or don't.

Human rights and money

2009-02-03T22:52:00.000-04:00

Recently I had to take a few courses on issues involved in researching human data. There I got to see some of the basic assumptions (beliefs) guiding the system design to protect human rights. An e.g. is: "Respect for Persons incorporates at least two ethical convictions: first, that individuals should be treated as autonomous agents, and second, that persons with diminished autonomy are entitled to protection."

The ability in sustaining, enforcing and evolving such basic assumptions are a measure of development of a society or system. Only a handful of countries in the world have measurable development. What I mean is that for example in the assumption in above there needs to be clear quantifiable measure of autonomy or amount of protection etc. There's some level of such analysis based on money in US. I heard from one of my previous colleagues that for e.g. a law enforcement should not cost more than a million dollars per life or something like that.

Without human rights all the fight in making money for life is useless. Money and human rights advocation have to be grown on par because of the mutual-dependency for any sort-of real value of either of them. After all what's the use of money if we don't spend it! Spending on human rights is a smart investment because it motivates human life perpetuation: a self-justified anthropic reason:)

Recyclemania

2009-01-23T10:42:00.001-04:00

Recylemania is a way to motivate those who have a "need to be rewarded immediately" to care about the environment. Well it's how societies are designed anyways. Top 1% of the population has the global perspective for long-term benefits and they design (at least ought to) the structure for the rest 99%.

I hope I get to see even more of such things starting this year! I am proud to be part of Temple :)

Inauguration of power

2009-01-21T10:42:00.002-04:00

I missed watching Obama's inauguration live but did watch it yesterday night and boy can we ever not learn something new from him! He is as focussed and empathetic and energetic and enabling as ever. I have always been thinking of America in a way which he beautifully orates but listening from him renews our timeless creed in hope, faith and hence dignity of life. His inauguration of power surely will help harness inner most powers of millions to maximize sustainable life on this planet.

Video wishes for 2009

2009-01-01T11:53:00.001-04:00

With my recently discovered ability to add music to making videos I decided to convert my textual greetings into a visual one!

First amateur video for social work: feels good!

2008-12-12T14:56:00.003-04:00

Together with my favorite group-fitness teacher Jennifer Habeeb I made a video for a Social policy class to capacitate community efforts for improving lives of kids in Northwest Philadelphia region. We made the video two days ago and after struggling to upload it to youtube I want to share it with others here.

This is my first video with music and it feels really good because it is for social work. I hope to make many more movies over time towards topics like Ecopsychology (official subject name was introduced to me by my friend Pauline Romas). I have been passionate about our environment for a while: I am a member of Penn-Environment and contribute some money to the organization regularly, I recycle as much as possible even to the point of holding on to the stuff till I find a recycle bin, I use plastic bags only minimally, turn off lights in restrooms in our building at nights, etc. etc. The next revolution for ensuring our civilization is going to be Energy Technology (ET) similar to what we had couple of decades ago with Information Technology (IT). Ecopsychology is going to be ingredient of that progress similar to the progress made along civil rights (civic psychology) of humans.

The language of thoughts: intelligence, artificial intelligence and super natural intelligence

2008-12-11T17:42:00.002-04:00

I wanted to write this post a while ago and then I wanted to write a philosonomicon for my thesis. Because of the deadline yesterday I finally finished the prologue and am using some of it for this post.

Scott already blogged about this almost over two years ago. The basic standard of modern science is that communication is a key aspect in any analytical ability or intelligent activity since it is the first causal step in achieving repeatability leading the eventual goal of our persistence. For communication we need material. Hence materialism is one of the foundations the modern science. Languages evolve over time and the more precise one can communicate the better will be the ability to learn, behave intelligently, lead the food chain and hence survive through odds. Since the beginning of enlightenment era around late 17^th century and early 18^th century "reason" began to be the basis of authority. Hence the quest to understand human intelligence can be thought to have begun since then.

A hypothesis that is very plausible is that all actions are seeded in thoughts. Our understanding of human intelligence will be limited by our understanding of the language of thoughts. Hence the pursuit of understanding the language of thoughts is well justified.

Understanding Nature for engineering purposes has to do with what is observable, measurable and repeatable with certain level of predictability. Even though logic and math existed for centuries before the advent of computers, a new era of science was ushered by efforts of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church who came up with the famous Church-Turing thesis. Turing's famous paper "On computability..." essentially can be thought of as a heuristic explanation of the human thought process which has proven to be very successful. Thus Turing proposed a language for the machine human interaction. The book "The Language of Machines...", co-authored by my Masters adviser should provide a nice introduction and perspective to the theory of computability.

Turing's famous test for Artificial Intelligence involves modeling thought process as a computational device and comparing it with behavior of a human. Even though computational model of human thought process is only a heuristic it nevertheless models many many human thought processes. With the advent of complexity theory it became apparent that computation may not efficiently model all thought processes as argued by works like Scott's thesis.

But as Niels Bohr once said, "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature." efforts in artificial intelligence also concern themselves with what we can say about intelligence not what it is. This lead to the modern approaches in machine learning. To summarize the efforts in one long sentence would be to say that those are essentially based on principle of Occam's razor to explain the unknown distributions of observed data using different efficient algorithms and models of data. Different sub-fields (like vision, bio-informatics, medical imaging, robotics etc.) essentially involve in coming up with those efficient algorithms and data modeling. For e.g. artificial vision deals itself with understanding data obtained using electromagnetic waves starting from X-rays (CT-scans) to visible light (photo cameras) to radio waves (MRI). Goals in artificial vision and intelligence thus don't necessarily restrict themselves to human abilities. Humans just form the lower bound of what we want to do with machines (like for e.g. super-man has X-ray vision).

While applied researchers work on developing artifical intelligence that can mimic natural and super-natural intelligence assuming a computational model, complexity theorists work on building computational models and shedding light on their limitations. As long as P!=NP we have to design the learning algorithms for the machines to learn and behave. Understanding the way human brain really works may help to come up with better ("generative") computational models that actually mimic the underlying process generating the human intelligence. But it's a long way to go. Right now Turing model is the most promising because of the enormous creative abilities of humans in designing clever algorithms. Evidently even quantum computation models of thoughts do not give us much more power.

Congratulations to America

2008-11-05T13:24:00.000-04:00

Last night was an amazing night! It was much much more exciting than any event I ever followed. I feel fortunate to be right here in the US and be part of this historic election in someway.

The outcome of this election process clearly presents us many many aspects of true America or the concept of America:

For a country to be a true beacon for democracy we need good people who can make the actual definition of democracy (Govt. of the people, by the people and for the people) work.

People should be smart, open and stand for their beliefs, looking beyond their prejudices, to actually tap the full potential of democracy.

The freedom and power that the US has in this world gives room for lot of possibilities and it has been making better choices than almost all powers in the past, this being their latest accomplishment.

The true meaning of the opportunity is best demonstrated with this election.

It's resilience is a true demonstration of the saying: "Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Counting days to 4th

2008-11-01T19:07:00.001-04:00

There is space-time continuum in this world but we know that there's no absolute measure of time. Sometimes days feel like seconds and sometimes seconds feel like days. With only two days left for the defining moment in 2008, the days feel like too long! Americans, PLEASE VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA on November 4th (Tuesday)! Polls sure boost our confidence but please do not let them increase your complacence.

Summarized view of his campaign is below:

Polls and Powell

2008-10-20T23:30:00.002-04:00

I wanted to add this video with some meta analysis of Obama's campaign style. But I wasn't very sure about it. Looking at Terence Tao's post on the same topic I got motivated again.

See I mentioned before we can learn a lot from Obama's campaign style for better. Obama's self-criticality, empathy, uncertainty actually add to his focusing ability and thus lead to confidence and success at least as measured by polls and lately by Powell's endorsement. Of course there are 15 more days left and nobody can become complacent now.

Like millions I love (because I feel I can learn from him) the eloquence of Obama for e.g. when asked by someone something like what are you mainly worried about regarding election he said "What keeps me awake at night are not prospects of losing but prospects of winning because there is so much work to be done by the next president."! This again shows his focus! Running an exceptional campaign is only part of the game and he is really targeting to be an exceptional president which America desperately needs one now.

Streaks of thought: Streak 22

2008-10-11T11:11:00.001-04:00

I just wanted to share the thrill of seeing the next president of the United States in person just four blocks away from where I live :)

This coupled with other incidents made my day today. It's amazing how resonating with someone can give that extra energy to make more out of life. Being able to resonate is important to have real life!!! As always I say this again: America is not just about money. It's a wonderful concept that we humans can look up to and protect it with all we got. I cannot imagine a world with any country (actually concept) except America leading the world.

Procrastinate on politics

2008-09-23T22:00:00.001-04:00

A few months ago I had post on ways of procrastination. Since it's almost inevitable I urge everyone to involve in politics in some way. Talk to people to register to vote. Display political messages in your online profiles. People spend a lot of time online so create events, groups, threads etc. It's already being done and I am doing my part by posting this.

Streaks of thought: Streak 21

2008-09-18T22:42:00.002-04:00

Civilizations constantly try to evolve a system in which making choices is neither very hard (e.g. not being able to make choice in time) nor very easy (e.g. locally greedy choices) so as to sustain interest in living and letting live.

Obamagain

2008-09-02T23:16:00.001-04:00

A year ago these youngsters and many others wouldn't care to talk about politics....I mean what happened...It's simple....Here's my pick...

I wanted to write this post right after watching Obama's speech at DNC but because of an extended deadline, a labor day weekend at six-flags and an informal talk at Penn, I am writing it now.

A few months ago, when some of my friends asked my opinion about presidential candidates and whom I would support, I said I don't follow politics. If I have to answer I would depend on opinions of those who I look up to since at least I know who I choose to look up to. And the answer was Obama as his name was resonating in academia.

But see Obama's exceptional performance is drawing so many's attention to politics and making many others to actually recheck their stand in politics: excellence by definition attracts interest of many people. I have a strong liking to the foundational concepts of this country and his speeches and especially his speech at DNC 2008 renewed my beliefs in the concept of America. He is really self-critical and is basing his entire campaign on the bedrock principles and ideals of this country. As I mentioned about year and half ago self-criticality is a necessary (but not sufficient) quality that any leader should have. Scott also rightly mentions here that "Any worldview that isn’t wracked by self-doubt and confusion over its own identity is not a worldview for me."

People who are undecided or think McCain is not bad and Obama cannot be as good as he sounds should keep the following in mind. See it's easy to argue that McCain is not totally bad because generally no republican is completely bad, of course they love this country very much. The resistance to choose Obama has an analogue to that faced by "reason" in struggle between Church and Science. And further more why is it that talking big should prohibit him from doing big things. He is talking big not because he is not aware of "realities" but rather he actually understands the current realities and realizes they have to change to keep the true American concept alive. Of course he is not all powerful and has limitations but that's no reason to risk not choosing him. The question to be asked is not whether he can solve all the problems but whether he can renew the politics so that it is back on track to be able to solve real problems in a responsible, accountable and democratic way. He certainly seems to have a great potential to do such things. The very fact that he became a presidential nominee of a big party proves it. "Inexperience" is only an excuse that is so unamerican because when America was formed wasn't it the wildest experiment to declare a real independent country against the will of the greatest empire with a strong hope in democracy? The founding fathers did not have "experience" in declaring independent countries, right?

Usually I would like to identify and associate myself with those who have similar values which happen to be being self-critical, open-minded, challenging perceptions from time to time, thinking for greater good etc. etc. Hence even though I am technically not American caring for this country is a high-level goal in my life. Prayer can have "positive entanglement effects" and hence I urge everyone to pray and urge everyone you know to pray for his victory. Of course those who have right to vote must and should vote for Obama. Furthermore who can do even more sophisticated game-theoretic practices please checkout this for Nadertrading etc.

Gain from Obama campaign

2008-08-23T23:18:00.004-04:00

Lately, I have been increasingly gravitating towards following Obama's talks in his presidential campaign. Needless to say his speeches are very enticing. His audacious "walk-through reasoning" approach is quite refreshing and rigorous and can stimulate lot of ordinary people to improve their efficiency in dealing with their day-to-day issues. He clearly stresses on a contest based on relevant observables and merit based on policies instead of fighting on something personal and irrelevant. Sounds like a computational guy to me. Alan Turing (a Computer Science hero) argued something like this on defining artificial intelligence and you can see a nice post on it by Scott here.

Now this is very refreshing to see a politician with such perspectives. A lot must be learnt from him by politicians in India and probably all around the world. To contest based on reason with rigor avoiding "easy" and "nasty" tricks is no simple task. In his interview at Google last year one of the audience asked him what he had learnt from past democrat candidates who lost the elections, he said the main mistakes were that they were not clear of what they stood for and hence became defensive when they were attacked and actually sounded like their opponents. Being clear and honest and courageous and rational all go together. It's takes a holistic approach to be rigorous and effective in getting things done.

He admits he may not be perfect and may make mistakes but will make his government very transparent that can actually unleash the true power of democracy. His repeated indications that a democratic government's success is measured by the standard of living (including freedom) of majority of the population show his strong understanding of the fundamentals. There will always be ordinary and extraordinary people in the world at any given point of time. It's the self-justified goal of humanity that the quality of life of all humans should increase. Simply speaking it should be ordinary that ordinary people should be able to dream, strive and hope to be extraordinary while pushing the bar being of extraordinary to next level. He is a great example to show subtle differences between idealism and extremism, between fundamentalism and being strong in fundamentals, between having true high-level knowledge and hand-waving.

For me Scott:Computer Science :: Barack::Politics. Scott's core love for science, his results and his talent in presenting the results and Barack's core love for democracy and his talent in pooling people together are truly truly awesome. I truly wish (unfortunately I cannot vote this time, not being a citizen) that he wins but we surely can gain a lot just from his campaign.

Democrats and republicans

2008-08-18T21:36:00.002-04:00

I have not been following the US presidential campaigns closely but lately I have been listening to some speeches by Barack Obama (thanks to my brother, Ganesh's enthusiasm in his speeches).

Just yesterday I listened to his (only part1) and John McCain's interviews with Rick Warren on CNN videos. Both speeches were good and clearly represented their parties' ideals. McCain's answers were short and clear while Obama's were long and complex. This was apparent starting with response to simplest questions like "State three wise men you would seek advice from" to complex issues like "Abortion". McCain's answers reflected gradient descent type approaches while those of Obama did MCMC type. No doubt both parties are dedicated to USA's growth and its benefit to the world. Both greedy deterministic approaches and probabilistic approaches have advantages and disadvantages depending on problem space: distribution of the problem instances. The main challenge in deciding whom to vote is ~~what is~~ to clearly understand the current problem instance and intelligently choose the better strategy. As is evident from the history republican strategy works most of the times. This is true in many optimization problems: gradient descent, though a local optimizer works in many many practical cases. But in hard cases when we need real "landscape shifts" in searching for the solutions we stand a better chance with probabilistic and "holistic/global" approaches. Such approaches tend to be computationally hard and require cleverer design of algorithms for feasibility.

Citizens of USA have been smart enough to choose Democrats a few times but I hope they realize this is one of those times again.

Streaks of thought: Streak 20

2008-07-21T13:58:00.000-04:00

There is a simple difference between having multiple personalities and having multiple personality disorder. All superheroes like Batman (The Dark Knight is awesome: super entertainment package that appeals most), Spiderman, Superman etc. have multiple personalities that they maintain in an orderly fashion. It's when they cannot handle them in order that they run into trouble.

Many of us also have several moods. Having moods is not a bad thing (in fact if we don't have moods life becomes trivial) but having them out of order is not desirable with limited resources around. Mood distribution and personality of a person are correlated. Having strong moods gives you some sort of extra strength but "strong moods come with strong responsibilities".

Faith in machines

2008-07-20T22:59:00.000-04:00

In many of my previous posts I stressed, efficiency and local perspectives. Such emphasis can be traced back to faith in machines which reflects the faith of theoretical computer science community that polynomial amount of resources is efficient while exponential is not.

I love studying machines as the results can so much help understand ourselves (modulo communicable understanding). Computer Science provides a nice unified way for studying machine characteristics. This reminds me I have to finish one of my posts on language of thoughts :) It has a rough precursor which I posted about 2 years ago.

Practical and efficient statistics relies on Bayesian and Markovian principles which allow principled way of working by understanding limits of machines. It's amazing to know that lot of lower bound results in complexity theory and almost entire applied statistics can be traced back to the contributions of Markov brothers! All the extensions are non-trivial but behind the non-trivial efforts of later generations was the motivation based on faith in practicality or in more crisp words, machines.

Streaks of thought: Streak 19

2008-07-14T21:40:00.001-04:00

For a country to be a dream of many, it has to build and evolve a system that can foster hope so that a common person becomes courageous enough to work towards her/his dreams without requiring her/him to handle exponential amount of resources on tangential problems. Basically it should be able to breed dreams efficiently. America has been doing a really great job in this regard.

Importance of being normal

2008-07-11T21:14:00.000-04:00

In my previous post I discussed how variance in abilities and needs in a local neighborhood is necessarily a result of efficient resource management by Nature for sustenance of life. Then how change is essential to keep the variance (multiple hypotheses) over time to avoid getting stuck in local optima. I also mentioned that being around normal value is important.

In statistics filtering is a problem of estimating posterior of a random variable given observations correlated with the variable over time. Life can almost be treated as a random variable with some moments. In a more global perspective it's hard to characterize these moments and hence the posterior is usually represented using just random samples. I had a related post about six months ago. But our lives are mostly dominated by local perspectives. Actually if we had true global perspectives all the time we would be super natural!

In statistics a very popular technique of estimating a complex non-linear probability distribution of a random variable is non-parametric kernel density estimation. Intuitively it says that any complex distribution can be approximated using sum of Gaussians (or normal distributions). Let's say if we can track these individual Gaussians then we automatically track the overlaying complex distribution. Kalman filters are useful when the Gaussians undergo linear changes that is the mean and variance of the Gaussian only undergo linear transformations. For reasonable non-linear changes there are linear approximations resulting in extended Kalman filters. But for highly non-linear transformations the approximations made in extended Kalman filters are not good enough. Hence people developed unscented Kalman filter which is a combination of sampling based and closed form trackers. The key elements in unscented Kalman filters are the a set of sample around the mean of the distribution. These "sigma points" are the ones that undergo non-linear transformations which can then lead to recovering the necessary moments! See it's quite important to be around the normal distribution especially in the era of highly non-linear changes to actually "participate/contribute" in successful propogation of moments.

Need for change

2008-07-06T19:45:00.002-04:00

Most of us agree that change is important yet hard. All of us can understand the benefits of change but the reason it seems hard is partly not having an "causal understanding" of why it is important. In this post I try to analyze why change is necessary for our survival. For that first I generalize the perspective of change to be more than just variance in temporal dimension of life. This means change characterizes any variance in the needs in any of our effective neighborhood. For e.g. it could be variance in the tastes of your roommates or variance in the goals of your friends etc. Having this generalized perspective, as I will try to argue, helps to see that variance in temporal dimension is not much harder than issues like tolerances etc. and that variance is essential.

Let's see why we need variance in the first place. There is high correlation between the composition of various chemicals in the body to the personalities and behaviors we manifest. Nature which has limited resources. For life to be persistent it is important that life can sustain on variety of resources so that Nature can efficiently "refill the resources". Based on the refilling abilities of Nature our bodies evolved to incorporate variance in the needs. We are not that variant in terms of needs for oxygen for e.g. since Nature seems to be very efficient in that resource regeneration. Hence the variance in our needs can be roughly traced to the variance in the availability of resources in our Natural neighborhood. Since Nature cannot handle all (varied) needs of all the life in a global way efficiently it decentralizes need fulfilling activities into the life forms itself. In other words the body chemical compositions are evolved in such a way as to locally have a cycle of supply and demand: starting from the most obvious examples, some are male, some are female, some have strong feelings about environment, some have strong feelings about high energy colliders creating black holes (see here), some are interested in making money, some are interested in education, some are spiritual, some are materialistic, some are good in theory, some are good in practice etc. etc. So to summarize we can think of local variances in needs is an efficient design of Nature for long-term sustenance of life. Something like: For a rope to be strong the individual fibers and yards and then strands have to be intertwined with friction among them. One other important thing with variance is that variance has to be "normal" locally so as to have the benefit of decentralization otherwise it would demand redundant effort. For e.g. if the friction between the fibers or yarns or strands is too high the rope might self-destruct under it's own friction without additional effort.

Now since the cycles of supply and demand usually are formed locally we might get stuck at local optima (which would be evident by diminishing returns in the cluster etc.). Change in temporal dimension would shuffle around the neighborhoods and gives us a chance to get out those local optima and form new cycles. Eventually we hope to find global optimum configuration. But as it is well known such optimization problems though can be "solved" require exponential amount of time in principle. So enjoy the journey and don't be scared to enter new cycles. It also helps to keep in mind an important property of stochastic optimization methods that not every move is better than the previous move which precisely is its strength. Of course blind (ignorant) change is not great since there are lot of probabilities (based on evidences, priors and likelihoods) you could compute to figure out the types of changes (moves) to reduce the mixing time.

I would ask the readers to pay attention to the words "efficient" and "local" as they carry the central message. Of course what all I discussed above (or in general in this blog) is not always new but is based on original thought. Lot of economists study such behaviors professionally and it would greatly help design your lives better by reading papers in such fields (I don't though): that's why the mathematicians who study and contribute to understanding such patterns are eligible Nobel prizes.

Being yourself

2008-06-28T17:33:00.001-04:00

It is widely accepted that being someone we are not, is very uncomfortable. But it is important to first understand who we actually are. Richard Feynmann once said "What I cannot make I do not understand." To actually understand who we are, we need a process (life) that we actually can analyze. We need to be someone who can sustain the process and focus on aspects that are most dear to us simultaneously. Both of these sub-processes give us some understanding of ourselves and can help us in being ourselves. So there could be cases when you are not being yourself. For e.g. when the sustaining process is not interacting with the focusing process properly or when one of the processes is not functioning.

Based on the situations you are in you get leverage and help in running the two sub-processes. You are usually in the situations you choose to be. If you choose to be emotional you get leverage on the second sub-process. If you choose to be less emotional you get leverage on the first sub-process. But as I said before the leverage on one process could be nullified if the other process is not taken care of. The leverage you get is usually in the form of experience (learned concepts from the data we are exposed to). So for e.g. having a leverage emotionally means that you are very experienced in various kinds of emotions and actually (un-emotionally) use those experiences in focusing properly. But gaining experiences is not easy either. It is well know in the learning theory that even though we need on polynomial number of sample data for learning concepts (hypotheses) it's actually hard to find the concepts. Experiencing is a hard task and so is being yourself.

Streaks of thought: Streak 18

2008-06-23T19:08:00.001-04:00

Sometimes even though we know we have almost all reasons to change, we find it hard to change because of just one missing (wrong) reason: A reason to convince others around us that we need change.

The reason is wrong because others will not understand until you actually change and show them the benefits. So don't get stuck in the dead-lock.

A reason to be fan of computer science

2008-05-28T14:14:00.000-04:00

Having computational perspectives in life can help design your lives so nicely! Here's a solid example which many singles can use, thanks to Scott for including the dating protocol in his lecture 18 :)

This can not only help in dating but also classifying people into jerks and reasonable ones. If the dating protocol does not work then the conclusion is at least one of them is a jerk, hypocrite, liar or whatever in which case you at least have a solid reason not to worry. Of course it is not necessary that you won't worry though!

Depth of knowledge

2008-05-26T19:21:00.002-04:00

The amount of knowledge one has is measured in the number of truths he can handle efficiently in some beneficial way. Truths are deduced essentially using logic even though the deduction process is not always deterministic. The depth of knowledge one has can be measured by quantifying the resources needed for the deduction process: the most important resource being time.

A person is said to have deeper knowledge than another if the other person needs more time for deduction than the former. Having deeper knowledge hence can buy you time! To increase the depth of your knowledge you need to improve your deducing abilities and for that you need to constantly practice it so that you become fast. One useful improvement technique is memoization where you do not recompute the same sub-problem every time: if you solved it once just remember and use it. Don't resolve the same puzzle over and over again. The goal is to constantly build a global lookup table for your life. This will help not only you but also those with whom you can share the table.

This is basically why experience can help increase your depth of knowledge.

Ways of procrastination

2008-05-19T22:36:00.001-04:00

Procrastination is the trough in the cyclic process of being productive. It's almost inevitable for everyone in all tiers of society. To scroll to higher tiers you have to adapt their working styles which include their procrastination styles as well!

A simple and good indicator for a better way to procrastinate is to see if you get something everytime. By that I mean stuff that can actually be of value when you use it. Some such examples are reading papers from other fields, reading blogs of good guys, blogging about good stuff :), refreshing relationships with people you care about (which should actually mean who care about you). Some bad ways of procrastinations include watching repeats, talking or chatting with too many (I say this because it's more likely than not that you won't be cared by more than a handful which usually is composed of family (long term) and professional friends (medium term)), basically any activity that you cannot share with atleast 3 different people without getting embarrassed or feeling stupid.

Entanglements and emotions

2008-05-14T21:33:00.001-04:00

Entanglements are very commonly observed at microscopic level. These phenomenon were discovered when classical physics enabled us observing the microscopic phenomenon. The entanglements don't commonly manifest in the same way at macroscopic level but I think they do in some fashion. Think about it. Emotions like feelings of togetherness, compassion, right or wrong and on the whole the subjectivity of human beings is kind of entangling behavior. The subjectivity is like an evolving function until it is actually observed when it collapses to objectivity. The cultures which focus on the latter part of trying to observe and collapsing things to objectivity are currently leading because they are capable of supporting more biological life. The older cultures which focus on the former part cannot support life as efficiently but they have their own definition of life. They rather prefer life to be non-mechanical and mechanical life just isn't life for them! But see this is just a matter of choice. And see the choices one makes defines his or her characteristics and personality. Usually heroes stand for the objective strategies which favor purely rational arguments. As Scott put it they are bullet swallowers instead of bullet dodgers.

Heart & Mind

2008-05-09T23:05:00.002-04:00

Heart & brain are the two main contending organs for definition of life & death. They are also the two contending organs in decision making. In decision making heart is usually associated with emotions. It's mainly for historical reasons even though there might be some physiological reasons. Brain is associated with logic. More specifically with verifiability in a mechanical way. Since the notion of computation unifies the concept of machine it means verifying in a computational way.

We know a lot of details of working of heart: at least to the extent of having mechanical hearts that can simulate the pumping blood which is the primary functionality of heart for life. While mysteries of brain are still abysmal, self-referentiality of thinking lead to computational model of brain which lead to the dream of artificial intelligence. Efficient computations are usually based on local information which limits its powers in this physical world. In fact the limits of logic as pointed out by Godel are based on the fact that logic is based on local information. In general the locality principle limits us from having God like powers. The more experience we gain the better is our global perspective. Hence experience helps!

Emotions are usually mysterious and quite "non-mechanical" to deal with. This hints us that we might be processing something more than local. We feel emotions instantly about someone miles away something like the famous "spooky action at a distance" phenomenon of quantum mechanics. The typical explanation of the "entanglement" behavior in modern physics is that the particles all belong to "same system" and that's why they are somehow "connected". Though they usually say this so that classical principles (like constancy of speed of light) of physics are consistent with modern principles. Thus there is something global happening with entanglements and hence hard to be verified mechanically. Hence for e.g. even though "heart-breaks" is a common term usually the mysteries of emotions are rooted in the brain NOT in the heart. This realization will atleast let you focus on using appropriate resources for specific problems. Specifically, when you are baffled with emotions you should rely more on brain to help yourself.

N.B.: Updated May 10, 2008. 1:36 AM.

Uncertainty - a life force?

2008-05-05T23:32:00.002-04:00

Randomness in computation is very useful to understand some hierarchies in complexities of problems (probabilistic complexity classes, zero knowledge proofs, probabilistically checkable proofs). Randomness (or pseudo randomness) is the key in preventing adversarial attacks. It is the key in simulating physical processes of Nature. It is the key in many practical applications.

Now coming to life part. Imagine if the viruses all know how our entire body works then they can attack us without leaving us any choice of survival. But fortunately future is non-deterministic that is there are uncertainties in future, our genes mutate, the entropy of the universe keeps increasing at least until the pathways of the universe start interfering which is not supposed to happen for a long long long time. Even better: at microscopic scale even past is non-deterministic! All this can lead us to wonder if God wants to keep His power of designing Nature and life and let us just experience/measure and play around with randomness with regularities (bounds) but without complete derandomization. I think there is a good reason in doing this. First it let's us value life (because we don't know the causal reasons to replicate it) and two it keeps the "feeling of quest" alive which is the basic feeling of being alive anyways! The goal of AI as defined by Turing test is to create a machine whose responses can not be distinguished from those of a human being (of certain background). Without uncertainty such AI becomes impossible as well! Remember this is only about artificial intelligence not artificial life because it only talks about "conversations". Simulating the functions involving our intelligence itself seems very elusive. To simulate artificial life we need to simulate even more complex distributions.

About year and a half ago I posted about karma as a possible anthropic analog of evolution and hinted how hope can be argued from karma. Well analyses using theory of karma take "deterministic hidden variables route" for explaining things but even without that hidden variable (karma) we can still argue for hope just from inherent uncertainties that can be exploited to protect ourselves from being hopelessly attacked by adversaries.

Health: Genes

2008-05-02T23:15:00.004-04:00

In one of my previous health posts I talked about continually focussing on new challenges in the journey of better health. After being driven by external indicators on our body (like dresses), then we are driven by indicators a layer below those (naked body), then we are driven by those a layer further below (organs like heart, kidneys, pancreas, brain etc.). Now it's time to dig deeper!

The whole point of seeking knowledge is trying to increase the odds of survival in odd times. The more variables we uncover the more we discover that we have lot more to uncover! But we can atleast try to make sure we can rationally handle the ones we uncover. Health science progressed a lot. The role of genes in health is quite an integral part of our intellectual heritage now. There's a lot to discovered about genes but one thing is sure about them: they are programmable, that is they are Turing tapes of a non-deterministic Turing machine. Their states can sometimes be non-deterministically changed (mutations) but they are pretty much "rule oriented". The rest of the body is like the console system (input/output device set) for the basic computations happening on those tapes. The important point is that we can write input onto those tapes. In fact without this ability the concept of evolution is infeasible! Let's try to see what we can do try to write good stuff (stuff that helps us survive) onto those.

First we should not write bad stuff! It is known that carcinogens can seriously screw up the tapes that screws up cell dynamics which can lead to cancer. So obviously don't smoke and in a bigger picture be friendly to the environment both in terms of recycling and using Nature friendly energy sources like hybrid cars, electric trains or in the worst case if you have to rely on gas use mass transportation or pool up. Don't stick to your cell phones all the time! Use them reasonably. Use hands-free devices and keep them a bit far when you work. Do not consume "diet stuff" in excess. It's good to take safe sides on such issues.

Now about writing good stuff. It is well known that writing bug free programs is very hard. So it's not a good idea drying to actually manipulate the genes using some kind of external agents (excluding the cases where it's treatmental for immediate survival). The best programmer of genes so far is Nature itself. What we can do is "ask" Nature to do the job for us. Let's say if we want to write a certain piece of code with which we can be naturally smart, we just constantly try to do smart things consciously and then it will be embedded into your genes by Nature over a period of time. If we want to be naturally peaceful practicing medidation would have the same effect. Beware that period of time might be a really long! But good thing is we at least don't make them worse in such a way. To see the effects of such really long-term plans we have to try to make sure humanity survives!

Streaks of thought: Streak 17

2008-04-01T12:41:00.000-04:00

Some results are superficial, some are deep. Some interests are superficial, some are deep. Some wounds are superficial, some are deep. Superficial versus deep in all cases has to with the average case complexity of the resources consumed in respective cases. The key phrase is "average case complexity". So gather enough data to check if you have proper perception of superficiality and depth in a particular case.

Streaks of thought: Streak 16

2008-03-31T23:16:00.000-04:00

It's important to experience extremes to truly have stakes and hence understand the importance of balance.

Scott's research advice as a grad student was: "to understand something we need to have stakes in it". Also independently I came up with a thesis about learning being triggered from "losing something". Of course doesn't having stakes mean having something to lose!

Faith in truth

2008-03-23T23:26:00.001-04:00

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind... Underlying the effort of science is the religious belief in truth and understanding. These were kind of responses from Einstein when he was repeatedly asked about his religious beliefs.

Having a religious belief is like having faith. There's no objective reason for chosing a faith in something except for interest in survival in a group. Life seems to be liking regularities, patterns which constitute provable truths. The apparent reason for this liking is efficiency because of finiteness. Imagine, if were no regularities then the "program of evolution" has no chance of exploiting structures in the problems of life. This would mean the evolution would be very slow, unimaginably slow! Even the central question in computer science is about limits of efficient computation in the physical world! Scott's thesis and other major theoretical works in CS show lot of evidence that it is very hard to compute efficiently without exploiting structures of problems. Hence provable truths which are about regularites and repeatability atleast in statistical sense is a proper thing to have faith in, in the interest of efficient survival.

Learning and changing

2008-03-20T00:09:00.001-04:00

About two years ago, I had a post on learning from losing. There I mentioned about one situation that triggers learning. It's almost always true that learning is triggered from losing something or to avoid losing something. That something can be anything like say starting from survival to satisfaction gained by understanding Nature.

Life can be viewed as a function of several parameters. There are two aspects in optimizing the function. First identifying the parameters then adjusting the values of the parameters. The more parameters one identifies or in other words the higher ones' awareness is, the better he can adjust or try to adjust the parameters to optimize the value of the function. Everyone is typically endowed with certain level of awareness by default as part of intellectual heritage. Then there are some noble ones who add to our intellectual heritage.

Adjusting the parameters is also called learning. Now based on general observations in the population different people find it hard to learn different parameters. Why is that? Let's try to see. Typically to learn a parameter, we need to compute gradients in the parameter space. The gradients are the places of change. The harder it is to compute gradient along a certain parameter (detect changes) the harder it is to adjust that parameter in the direction of convergence. See we know that not everyone can perceive all relevant parameters let alone gradients along those. Again even if one does perceive gradients the function might not be convex along that parameter and it might require more sophistication of zig-zagging (most people adapt this approach) or trying to convexify (some spiritually inclined adapt this approach) to avoid local minima. This is why change could be hard sometimes.

Hardness of learning a parameter depends on the VC dimension of the training examples for that parameter. The complexity of the learning algorithm required is inversely proportional to the VC dimension. The higher the VC-dimension the easier the algorithm can be. Being aware of this helps us in admitting that some parameters can be easier to learn while some may not. VC-dimension can also be viewed as the number of training examples that the algorithm can shatter that is give zero training error. So what can we psychologically do to keep our learning in life simple or optimal? We have to try to adjust the labels for our training data (experiences) so that we don't unnecessarily increase the requirements on learning algorithms. We rather are better off spending our resources on some parameters which genuinely need hard algorithms. Here genuinely meaning for independent samples in successful and noble population.

Health: Portions

2008-03-17T01:04:00.000-04:00

Almost as if I am compensating for having such a long gap in my health posts: here's a quick sequel to my last one.

Disproportionate amounts of food intake in terms of quality and quantity can be detected with the following litmus test. The ideal reaction from eating should be turning active not turning sleepy. Sleepiness is a sign of drop in metabolism. Eating ideally should increase metabolism not decrease. Both, over eating and under eating (like being anorexic) trigger this and such repeated training of drop in metabolism will have serious short term and long term consequences. In the short term ones productivity goes down because of various reasons like lacking attention span etc. Serious health issues can show up in the long run, like organs getting damaged because of constant "under performance".

Not giving into the "call for sleep" by consciously doing something active is not a solution as that will result in negative consequences again both in the short and long run. Fighting sleep is not encouraged. What needs to be consciously adjusted is the portions of intake: both in quality and quantity. Quantity is easier to control but what is important is taking care of the portions of quality nutrition intakes. Eating labeled food is a very good practice in this regard.

Health: Food and feelings

2008-03-12T00:25:00.000-04:00

After a real long gap in the series of my posts on health since my last one, I intend to discuss some connections I experienced between food and feelings.

The connections between eating patterns and emotional states are well studied in society. Usually the results that are most popularly known are the ones that say how having emotional instability instigates eating disorders. To mitigate eating disorders psychological advice is usually used to reduce the perception of insecurities and induce the perception of one's purpose. Leaving aside serious medical conditions the most common eating disorders are usually because of bad habits.

Alright now comes my main thesis on the connection between food and feelings. Actually this kind of correlation is preached by many spiritual communities, but I wanted to write this because I thought I experienced this especially because of long enough exposure to good American food after eating in India for 20 years. See, I see a chicken-egg relationship between the two. Feelings are produced because of various chemical reactions inside our bodies. Food is one of the biggest modes of injecting new chemicals and triggering chemical reactions inside our bodies. So if ones feelings are bad it might actually be because of the food intakes he is having. The short term effects are pretty clear, for e.g. taking sugar shots drives you a bit crazy, consuming alcohol makes you drowzy. What goes undercover are the long term effects (besides clogging your physical infrastructure like plumbing).

Food is supposed not just to provide nutrition but to provide it in an efficient way. The more efficient way the food fuels us the better our emotional and physical state will be. Signs of inefficient fueling is too much stubborness in adapting tastes to less spicier and "less tasty" foods. Taste is too abstract and subjective that it has to be controlled by us, not control us. So for better health, both physical and emotional, we need good and efficient food and of course with better health the good food habits get reinforced in turn.

A general note: Cultures that control abstract and subjective issues typically produce leaders. Cultures that are controlled by abstract and subjective issues typically end up as followers as they can be "controlled by leaders". Think about it, isn't it obvious from history and differences between western and eastern cultures.

Conferences and corporations

2008-03-09T16:02:00.002-04:00

In academia productivity is measured in terms of quality and quantity of publications one generates. In industry productivity is measured in terms of money one generates. I intend to analyse in this post the chief characteristic difference between academic and industrial efforts and how this characterisation demands for balance between the two type of efforts. Similar demands for balance in different walks of life arise from different characterizations as well. Almost always it's the variety of perspectives that automatically demands for balance if we are to survive "long enough".

The main characterization is that the motivation underlying the effort in academia is "first assimilate and then deploy" while that in industry is "first deploy and then assimilate". Now which strategy is optimal? Human progress is gradual and continuous and for us to actually survive and measure the progress we need to switch between both strategies: one cannot wait until we answer all the questions about an idea to be deployed. Think about it, science would not exist otherwise! Similarly one cannot just jump into conclusions without understanding the soundness and limitations of an idea. Think about it, science would not be science as we see today otherwise. So we naturally need a balance between both kinds of motivations similar to that in my means and ends post.

Now for maintaining such a balance the conferences and corporations which are main arenas for both the efforts need to be designed carefully to fuel both types of motivations. Conferences should primarily be motivated to support the academic effort which means they have to provide for ideas which need time to be studied, analysed, assessed, assimilated and then deployed. Similarly corporations, to take on deploying the ideas so that they can be disseminated and become "accepted as a norm". Lately conferences (in many areas of CS) seem to be driven overly by motivations underlying industrial effort. This is partly because of increased short-sightedness of public funding agencies and increased reliance on corporations. This makes papers on "industrially hot topics" get more accepted in the conferences. This year's CVPR results kind of ascertain that as well. This kind of change is also becoming an increasing concern even in theory community.

Usually such crisis points occur in cycles and these are the points to check for the balance. I once presented a paper by Christos Papadimitriou addressing such crisis in databases theory. Since conferences are usually run as peer-reviewed and mostly non-profit, issues like conflicts of interests etc. play more important role than in corporations. Checks on corruption in academic community are more important because it is typically "assumed" not to exist the machinery for such checks is not given so much weight. It is important to remember that investigations in academia are mainly curiosity driven excercise not frustration driven. This should be supported but not exploited to make it go otherway around.

Streaks of thought: Streak 15

2008-03-05T23:49:00.002-04:00

Neils Bohr once said: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."
The founding father of Computer Science, Alan Turing also came up with a test for artificial intelligence based on observations alone. Scott's post about Turing's philosophy about machines and morals is worth a read. Also (after reminded by Scott's post) according to Aumman's theorem we have to behave based on observable priors to be considered "rational".

Einstein effectively was unproductive after generalizing his theory of relativity "for invariance results among accelerating frames" because of his trouble accepting the uncertainities underlying Nature's laws. I intend to add a full post about uncertainties but for this post I would like to say that all these statements suggest us to use concrete evidence in all walks of life instead getting drained by intangible correlations woven by emotions.

Streaks of thought: Streak 14

2008-02-15T12:37:00.001-04:00

With increasing internationalization it's better to eagerly adapt the feeling of "outsider" that can fuel ones objectivity and hence productivity and hence satisfaction and hence happiness. If an immigrant in USA complains, then it's most likely because of the lack of the above mentioned adaptation.

Causes of importance

2008-01-25T22:00:00.000-04:00

Couple of weeks ago as part of our regular discussions Suzan and I were discussing about ones importance in society and service to humanity. She was saying that all kinds of work are equally important and that it's unfair to down weigh a particular type of work as easy and boring. Just recently Scott posted trying to show how it's meaningless to argue about one field of science being more fundamental (and hence superior). Whether something is important is not, makes only sense in the context of time and majority as per our current understanding of Nature. For eg. we need large number of particles acting at a micro-scale for the second law of thermodynamics to hold on the macro-scale and usually a theorem has to be checked over and over again independently for its correctness.

Monte Carlo methods are usually used for simulations of complex probability distributions without closed forms. Using such methods random samples are drawn from probability distributions to represent the distributions. Drawing random samples implies that all samples are equally likely according to the distribution. But the main problem is that it is seldom possible to draw samples from the complex distributions (partly because they don't have closed forms). Hence the samples are drawn from a heuristic approximation and then given importance weights according to a likelihood function. Metropolis-Hastings is a very famous algorithm for such simulations. If the distribution is dynamic then the simulation is called filtering and particle filtering is a very common tool. Essentially all such techniques depend on the Bayes rule. But that's not my point. For successful simulation of a distribution the crucial design aspects are the proposal and the likelihood functions. These functions can be chosen arbitrarily and usually domain specific knowledge is heavily needed. If they are designed properly then over a period of time the samples start behaving random with equal importance weights, meaning representing the true distribution.

If humans are supposed to represent uniformly drawn particles of the distribution of life energy then all humans will have equal chance of survival. But because of complex correlations and interdependences such uniform sampling is not possible and hence we have to design proper proposal and likelihood functions to give appropriate importance weights so that over time the chances of survival become uniform. We can already start seeing some of such changes based on today's ages of expectancy through out the world. Hence it is important to have such importances to different types of work like giving more importance to let's say medical work compared to the work that can be automated effectively. Thus it is not only not unfair to undermine some kind of work but in fact recommended for greater good. Once the humans reach certain peaks in the distribution then they would have similar weights as is the case for physicists vs. mathematicians vs. computer scientists vs. biologists and so on.

Streaks of thought: Streak 12+1

2008-01-25T20:17:00.001-04:00

Working on what already matters in a creative way is much easier compared to using creativity to convince what you do matters. To survive doing the latter takes causal heroes. That's why I get fascinated by scientists who work on the edge or roof-tops.

2008 wishes

2008-01-01T15:44:00.000-04:00

New year 2008

Hopefully will open up opportunities-infinite
Which we can actually exploit
By focusing on issues that are finite
Using tools of superior intellect
Whose imagination can better abstract

Hopefully will open up opportunities-infinite
To use capitalism with creative delight
For we have resources that are finite
And thwart the threat to our environment
To protect the civilization from going extinct

Hopefully will open up opportunities-infinite
For better harmony among humans colored or white
By realizing that materialism in its true spirit
Can provide better basis for distinguishing wrong from right
And reduce the plight to better tolerate

Streaks of thought: Streak 12

2007-12-24T16:27:00.001-04:00

Being aware that we can't understand everything is a sign of true scientist. Not doing anything because of that awareness is a sign of true idiot.

Exploiting structures

2007-12-16T22:27:00.000-04:00

In one of my previous posts I mentioned that "abstraction" or "pure" is relative and is a continuous spectrum based on ones imagination capabilities. People like balance between surprises and predictability. This is because it gives non-triviality more value that lets our most basic ego survive in a modern way. The more the balance is off the more frustrating one becomes. Too many surprises or too much predictability can be frustrating in different ways. Working on "real-world" problems can be frustrating because of too messy structure and less predictability. Theorists tend to be easily frustrated by this and choose to work where things are more predictable. They work by putting a "nicer structure" (e.g. black-box model for query complexity) onto the real-world and exploit that structure in a non-trivial way. Typically since these are essentially imaginary structures one needs higher mental abilities to be able to produce. Engineers on the other hand tend to work on real-world structures directly as they can withstand more frustrations with less predictability (usually because of monetary rewards). Of course monetary rewards are proportional to the amount of work on the real-world structures. An important point to note is that both use "principled tools" for exploiting the structures. It's just that engineering tends to be more lazy (demand driven) than theory. Both are "supposed to be" scientific enterprises and essentially all human beings like exploiting structures which leads to my following paragraph.

Through out my blog you can notice hidden and explicit inclination towards capitalistic philosophy with materialism. Capitalism is based on simple premises and sophisticated creativity while communism is based on sophisticated assumptions and minimal creativity. Here I mean creativity that can be objectively verified. According to me objective verifiability is one of the major steps in human progress. This is what that led to modern standards which clearly can support unprecedented human population. A simple example is that in ancient days "killing and conquering" was an honor which can not be justified except for lack of objective materialistic understanding. Materialistic modern way can be very useful in reducing domination by race, killing etc. Since people like exploiting structures people tend to build structures of their own to work on them. Materialism can be a very useful guide to focus on real structures (including the "nicer structures" I mentioned in my last paragraph) instead of intangible unverifiable imaginary structures. Since verifiabilty is inherent in capitalism and materialism things can not go unchecked while this is not the case with communism.

Streaks of thought: Streak 11

2007-11-28T19:05:00.001-04:00

Some jobs are boring because they are not creative and are repetitive. Well, every job is repetitive. Boredom of a job is proportional to the degrees of freedom given to take responsibilities. If we have more number of degrees and more freedom the space of possible ways of handling responsibilities just becomes larger so that we can "forget" the repetitions because of limited memory or knowledge. That's why having proportionally limited knowledge can reduce boredom!

Means and ends

2007-11-16T20:26:00.000-04:00

About a year ago I had a post on balance motivated by self-characterization using souls and bodies. As one grows older one masters that part but new challenges come up like dealing with balance among other souls and bodies since our progress is defined inherently based on efficient interdependence. Typically the differences among souls part is very less and very trivial to handle except for the fact of bodies interfering which actually makes the whole life non-trivial and interesting (assuming there's no trivial impossibility either).

One essential difference between bodies is the gender. Like struggle between soul and body demands for balance, struggle between the gender characteristics also calls for balance. As I discussed in my earlier post we need awareness of the characteristics to realize the balance in a pure capitalistic way. The reason I like capitalism is it builds on simple premises but complicated (non-trivial) and creative proving abilities while communism builds on complex premises and simple proving abilities.

The main characteristic difference between females and males is that estrone drives the means while testosterone drives the ends. Now which is important, means or ends? Every kid probably grows up listening to the anecdote of "the wood-cutter sharpening his saw for better productivity". Without means we cannot get to ends and without ends there's no point in having means. So both have equal importance in a cycle of progress.

Once Richard Beigel told me "A good theorist does not focus on too many problems at one time." Divide and conquer is a very good strategy. Evolution also took this strategy in dividing the fuel that can focus on two equally important issues for progress and hence we have the two genders and in any divide and conquer a very important part is to put the conquered parts together and that's why both females and males have estrone and testosterone to allow for some level of empathy that can lead to actual full results.

Learning from United States of America

2007-10-31T00:15:00.000-04:00

When I was in my undergrad in India sometime in 2001-2002, our college Principal Narasimha Reddy said "Go to America and learn the work culture". Recently in 2007 at a workshop on "Computer Vision applications for developing countries" that was in conjunction with ICCV in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, Ramesh Jain gave a talk in which he mentioned how the research in developing countries like India is aimed at working for USA since most researchers focus on publishing in conferences, journals run by USA which address problems pertinent to socio-economic situations of typical developed countries.

OK. The longer I stay in America the deeper my appreciation of America grows. What can we (developing countries) do to really learn from it? Ideally we want to learn the underlying process that generates the American success. We typically use observed data to learn the process: an inverse problem. We need data that can truly characterize American success. If we use wrong data no matter how strong our learning algorithms are, we are bound to learn wrong concepts. Typical problems that we run into in learning are that the data acquired is too noisy and even corrupted by unwanted signficant processes. So to be efficient in learning from USA we need data as little corrupted as possible. To acquire such data:

One needs to have a first hand experience of life in USA.

One needs to be open and courageous so that he actually collects the data.

Should interact with atleast a few elite Americans not necessarily personally but through different media like reading articles, blogs and working etc.

I say elite because they minimally corrupt the data. And if you encouter a few of them it's good enough to learn the ground truths and you can peel off layers when interacting with average or below average Americans.

Check objectively if you are able to learn. A good test is to check if you like America more than just for money and comforts. Understand that I am not preaching money is not important I am just saying it is not the causal variable for deep dynamics. It's how we use money that matters.

Periodically "smooth" your data by re-interpreting past experiences.

Just a side-note. Nobody is perfect. America has its faults but it is actually a worthy leader in doing what matters, that is struggling for ensuring longterm human survival. Doing nothing is trivial and doing things by being all powerful is also trivial. What is non-trivial is understanding the dynamics with constraints.

My expressions in last paragraph are influenced by my regular reading of Scott's blog. Especially the "trivial/non-trivial part" and "the doing what matters thing"s.

Note: I edited this post so many more times than any other posts after publishing.

Survival using science

2007-10-28T22:09:00.000-04:00

Pure math is not very useful. Pure mathematicians publish results among themselves and never really get used. Applied mathematicians and engineers make the world.

We hear such statements from time to time in academia. Typically one perceives something to be useful if one can ensure survival through it. It's true that not many can survive in pure mathematics because it is so damn tough. Here I should mention that typically abstractions higher than one's level of imagination are considered "pure" by him. Pure is rather a spectrum of higher abstractions. In fact the higher the abstraction the higher are the chances that the results can survive through odds or in other words stand the test of time. I encourage to read this article and this one to get a nice perspective on math.

Conferences are a good way to measure the progress and importance of a field. For e.g. conferences on aritificial intelligence kind of died but several of them are budding again. Hence participating in conferences is a big treasure to learn the dynamics of a field. If you can actively participate in conferences of a particular field it means you possibly can be fit in the survival sense in that field. You can always learn not only from active participation but also from passive participation. By passive participation I mean being mostly a spectator. Conferences' radiance can be measured in different dimensions like by rigor (typical pure math conferences), immediate impact (engineering conferences), deeper impact (theoretical conferences), commercial impact (industrial conferences). Even though you survive using one class of conferences it always helps to gain edge benefits by being aware of the dynamics of other classes.

After all people in academia struggle to survive primarily using science. It's important for one to have broader awareness if he wants to survive the real significant dynamics. The deeper or steeper one's understanding is the higher are the chances of his survival in times of crisis. Rationality is sufficient when things are smooth, rationality with rigor is necessary when sailing through rough waters.

Streaks of thought: Streak 10

2007-09-22T12:23:00.001-04:00

Those religions which are designed primarily to aid people live happily are not very useful in realizing GOD and hence they seem silly some times. Religions which are designed primarily to realize GOD and use happiness and success as tools, are bound to lead. Such religions only demand to be successful so that there is enough fuel (life) to pursue realization of GOD. This way we are at a much higher abstraction and lot of sayings like "don't take success to your head", "don't hurt others" etc. are automatically explainable.

My only favorite is Judaism! For e.g. it talks about sex much differently than other religions since sex should not distract us away from our path to GOD. If a religion is not designed to keep people on track happily it's going to be face trouble.

Thank GOD!

2007-08-09T19:39:00.000-04:00

Why do we thank GOD for good things and cannot blame HIM for the suffering and bad things happening?

This is a common question posed by atheists. GOD is all-powerful but makes the "game of life" interesting by playing the role of honest prover. If good things happen (convinced of a new theorem) we thank HIM for being an honest player. If bad things happen (unconvinced of a theorem) then we cannot blame HIM as the fault lies on the side of the verification though several times not obvious. Blaming is a sign of tiredness of playing the game and lack of sportive spirit. And do you like players who lose temper in games?

A related post.

Responsibility and credit

2007-07-25T01:16:00.000-04:00

Events in life result because of deterministic and non-deterministic sequence of actions. Taking credit for deterministic actions is an easy thing and hence not really interesting. Here I am talking about personal credit, not credit given by society because of being the medium for events. According to karma we can take credit for non-deterministic actions but it is usually hard for most to be good accountants. It takes experience, courage and many more hard qualities which grow by practice to be good accountant.

A subtle but important point to realize is that we are only playing a role of verifier in the system (Nature if you may think so) where some sequence of actions result in events. Since we do not explicitly know who plays the role of prover we cannot take "complete" credit (personal) for events even if we believe in karma. Believing in G-d (I am not talking about belief in after-life or being religious etc., which are only some efficient tools) is probably the optimal choice for the role of prover, who plays a key role in the events.

One important point is that we need to assume the prover and verifier are both honest for the completeness requirement of the system. It is necessary that the verifier is honest for the system to be sound. One can imagine that if there were an all-powerful bad-guy then honest verifier will not allow him win!

Principle of abundance

2007-07-15T00:52:00.000-04:00

Modern science laid the universal foundation for rational materialism. Though materialism might be incompatible with several religious beliefs true materialistic rationality can not mislead us in our search for understanding the universe. It is important that it should be true and rational materialism. In fact given the complex structure of the society our survival is currently based on, it is probably the optimal choice to take on. This is because we can then work on complexity of the universe since we can concretely measure (and hence share) our understanding of the universe in terms of "material". To efficiently study the complexity the asymptotic view of amount of resources needed and several "on average" analyses like amortized analysis have shown to be very useful for e.g. in understanding nature of computation which has contributed to understanding universe.

The key to be effective in studying complexity is to be smart enough to care about details and mature enough to have a macroscopic perspective. If a complexity theorist gets too involved in non-asymptotic details he might not be able to make any real contribution. If he is not careful enough with the details of his proofs and assumptions he will be wasteful of resources. Working on non-asymptotic details like creative engineering is an evolving profession like that of practicing law, medicine, programming where as more and more complexity is revealed it becomes more and more important. To work based on asymptotic behaviors it's important to have an abundance perception of the universe in terms of time, life, opportunities, possibilities etc. along with finiteness. If we do not work in finitistic set of assumptions things might turn out to be too abstract to be useful some times.

It is important to understand that the abundance is finitely measurable and is not free which makes the process interesting and safe.

Streaks of thought: Streak 9

2007-07-10T13:03:00.001-04:00

Proving lower bounds for complexity (defined in terms of resources needed) of problems is known to be hard. Lower bound on a resource is the minimum amount needed to solve the worst of the instances of a problem. Hence usually worst case analysis is needed to prove lower bounds. The intention of such worst case analyses is mainly to install signs to control traffic of exploration for saving energy and being effective.

Such effort should not be confused with immature and dumb "but what ifs". Immaturity is usually flagged by non-productiveness of thought process. Dumbness is hard to be flagged especially because it's not as penalizing as immaturity for surviving.

MEXperience

2007-07-08T02:26:00.000-04:00

I had learnt somethings from my experience building mex files for C-MATLAB interaction. Below I list some helpful points to keep in mind in cases of frustration:

"mexing" in Linux/Unix requires a new setup of compilers.

Make sure you have compatible gcc with the MATLAB version installed.

Sometimes commenting lines of code using '//' might produce errors. Using '/*....*/' is safe.

mexing on 32-bit Linux produces .mexglx executables and those are not executable on 64-bit Linux machines which need .mexa64 executables.

mexPrintf statements can make your program really slow.

Having too many "mx.." statements in the C-code might make the code run slower possibly because you are just repeating what MATLAB might already be doing without your C-code. Remember MATLAB does use some of its built-in C-code for speeding up certain operations. As an example if you have to handle structures in your C-code use "mx.." statements to pass parameters but use the "struct" variables in the C-code not mxArrays.

Initially try to balance of how much of your code you want in C-style and how much in MATLAB. After you get familiarized with "mex" code try to code most of it in C and then use MATLAB as an "interace" for experimenting with your code.

If building huge systems which you will probably do only after getting familiarized with "mex" forget MATLAB and use development tools like Visual Studio etc. for building and debugging then just add the interface. Debuggin on smaller projects can be handled effectively using mexPrintf which later have to be minimal.

Spiritual materialism

2007-07-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

Recently I attended a spiritual retreat organized by Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Organization at Peace Village in upstate NY. The retreat I attended was titled "My Self, My Work and My Life". This one was special because the theme was to discuss how to optimize your gains from life. The speakers and audience bounced around the ideas of how to "align" universal values (like to be peacful, loved, happy), thoughts and actions to maximize subjective gains and hence optimize overall gains.

Such exercises can provide us with insights that can help us to be creatively materialistic. It is not completely impossible to be creatively materiaslistic without spirituality but it can certainly help and make things lot easier. An analogical post that actually motivated the theme of this post is this.

Update: Added a picture I took at Peace Village to support my ending sentence of the post. 3:56 PM

Pasticide

2007-06-13T11:40:00.000-04:00

Attachment to past (any kind, even good) is the biggest reason for procrastination. Procrastination is the biggest killer of opportunities. Opportunities are the biggest gifts of a societal system. Society is the biggest asset the humans have ever consciously created.

So try to use pasticides like detachment by focussing on productivity to optimize your contributions.

Beware of the fact that pesticides help in increasing the chances of reap but overusing might ruin the crop. So use pasticides carefully and maturely as you can be inspired from this post itself:)

JUNE 27, 2007. Corrected some stupid sentence constructs.

Streaks of thought: Streak 8

2007-06-03T14:14:00.001-04:00

Thank you for shopping at our place! Thanks for your help buddy. Thank you very much for dropping me off here. Two or more parties involve in an act if and only if all of them have stakes in the act. Then why thanking? Reason for such thanking is not for the act itself but for sticking only to the act and hence helping in performing the act pleasantly to optimize everyones resources (energy, time, money). By the way all the resources that we really worry about in the current world are manifested in the form of money. Basic resources like food, clothing, shelter are not a serious concern in the age of abundance.

Tales off of tension

2007-05-31T14:43:00.000-04:00

I came accross on the web something like this: Humans by definition have "spirit" and "body" and there is constant "tension" between the two parts. I think these tensions are the main cause for all the history of the humans. This tension is probably the hidden variable manifesting itself in the form of complex tales of human life. A "good" amount of tension is needed to hold the structure (otherwise there would be no history). If there are surges we see breaks in the structure. In fact how well the tension is balanced influences how stable the system is. According to Robin Hanson as mentioned in Scott's post academia is the least of the broken systems.

I think the reason that it's least broken is that this business is most exclusively handled by powerful elite and they usually tend to inherit "being more moral" spirit along with "being elite" genes and hence the breaks caused by fraudulent tensions are not a serious problem at all for this enterprise. There are those little breaks in the system because there are surges in tension between worrying about deductions and struggle to understand the assumptions.

Sprechen C MATLAB

2007-05-06T17:53:00.000-04:00

Sprechen Sie MATLAB? This was on an ad-poster by Mathworks that I saw posted on Longin Jan Latecki's office door. No literate can deny how much Computer Science has influenced thinking styles and the pace of research in human quest for knowledge (genomics, bioinformatics, software simulations etc.). MATLAB is one product that has such outstanding influence on many many applied scientific areas (I call applied because I am not sure if MATLAB has led to any purely theoretical insights. By theoretical insights I mean ability to see non-trivial proofs.)

I have used MATLAB for several of my projects. MATLAB is an interpreted language and is known to be slower for 'C-style' programs. But in many cases you need to write blocks of code in 'C-style'. Since MATLAB allows you to interface with C-programs it's worth to know how to write C-programs that you can call in MATLAB without using files as communication (using files again slows down things doesn't it?)

In learning any thing new just don't let "But what if" trouble bother you that much. What if I want to pass pointers, what if I want to pass cell arrays, what if I want to return more than one variable from C etc. Well, you can do all these things but don't worry about all those at once before even getting started, deal one thing at a time. I borrowed this But what if idea from Scott's post about such problem in theoretical perspective which is much more serious! Now let's C how to start building the interface.

The key problem in building any interface is passing around parameters without confusion. The basic anatomy of a typical C-MATLAB file can be seen here. I have simple and clear demonstrations for passing scalars, arrays and structures. The README shows how to use the demos. I recently fixed a memory leak in "kdnn" function of Kd-tree software package for MATLAB written in C by Guy Shecther. You can download the "kdnn" function from here after downloading the original package. kdnn finds k nearest neighbors for a given d dimensional point.

Health: New challenges

2007-05-01T13:20:00.000-04:00

After you push your health conscience to be at subsconscious level, what's next? You know we always need some thing in conscious mind to keep us busy. Infact the central assumption for the entire progress of mankind is that we consciously keep focusing on something new. Well let's stay focused on what's new to focus on, in the journey towards better health. Here are two reeaal challenging tasks you might want to focus on.

Rock hard abs absolutely rock and are hard:
In my opinion both huge and tiny people are trying to do the same end thing (it's just their pathways are different). Both of them try to look proportional and look the best they can. Initially when they start working out the sizes of the dresses are good inidicators for their progress. But after they start looking fine in dresses some start being content. But the naked truth is that they should aim for looking good naked. What are the challenges you have to face? The main challenge is toning muscles and especially the hardest part is toning abdominal muscles and even harder is to handle the lower abs. The main thing ofcourse is to get rid of the fat and build core muscles so that the abs look firm and in shape. My point is not to give advice on how to get that done as you can find lot of information thanks to Google and those who put the information up (Sample link that my friend and health guru Reagan gave me). My main point is to wake up those who are content just because they think they look good enough now when dressed.
Look good underskin:
Now what about those who already look good naked. Here's a pill that will wake them up too:) If you have fabulous abs and defined chest, biceps etc. you might still not look your best if you have troubles inside. Make sure you look sharp by solving puzzles and keeping your brain warm. Take time to meditate so you can give a peaceful presence whereever you are. Do YOGA type exercises to keep your deep-internal glands work properly. What I mean for e.g. is, you can keep your heart pump blood well by cardio-workouts but what can you do for pancreas and thyroid glands work properly. YOGA has some workouts for such subtle benefits which are very notorious for not motivating people until they get hit.

These two are new challenges that you have to focus on for progress in your journey.
Link to previous health post.

Streaks of thought: Streak 7

2007-04-26T17:30:00.001-04:00

Based on several incidents like reading this and brain storming with other researchers trying to piggy back on results from theoreticians, statisticians and mathematicians I had the following streak:

Do not get held back just because you don't understand a result intuitively. Definitely continue to look at it closely until your intuition levels evolve to the required standard but not at the cost of not-using the result. Math has been much more powerful reasoning tool than intuition since intuition evolves much slower than objective reasoning. Another famous saying that goes along with this streak is "One century's wisdom is common sense of the next."

Updated: April 26, 2007. 9:54 PM

Universal language

2007-04-02T19:44:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I watched CONTACT, a movie about a scientist obsessed about Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and contacting some alien in the form of her dead dad on VEGA. The story also has a theologian who is not against Science but questions the privilege that Science gets. There is one line that is very nice. "...Universe is vastly huge...if we are the only ones in this universe..then it's awful waste of space..."

One thing that got my interest is the assumption that our Math is the universal language. Math is certainly standard language of Science on Earth. But why should we assume that it is universal. Even the purest of Mathematics on Earth depends on a set of assumptions like ZFC. What if ZFC is not valid in other parts of the universe? What if axioms of deduction are not valid? Perhaps this might be very important question that people already think about in that field. What might be important for CS on Earth is this. We often believe (for some reason) that aliens must be super intelligent than we are. And if so can they solve NP-Complete problems? Let's say that if they are able to solve then is communicating with them NP-hard? Is this the reason we are not able to communicate with them (if at all they are) in the first place. My conjecture is that the communication is NP-hard since the search space of mapping between their assumptions and our assumptions is close to be unstructured and exponential in size.

BTW it's a good long movie to watch.

Streaks of thought: Streak 6

2007-03-08T17:35:00.001-04:00

Gifted people are not just gifted, they are gifts for human society as they have highest odds in steering human civilization (evolution?). I am especially fascinated by mathematically gifted ones.

RDP through tunneling

2007-03-07T19:41:00.000-04:00

Many use Remote Desktop Protocol for working remotely. This is pretty straightforward if the IP address of the remote computer is accessible on the Internet. Some times the computer is within a subnet and it can only be accessed from within the network.

Now the trick is to get into the network and then access the computer you want to. Usually there is at least one gateway computer in a network. By logging into the network using some special options you can command your target computer by commanding the gateway. Port forwarding (tunneling) is the main idea. The other requirements being that your target computer willing to take the commands (port 3389 being open) and the gateway willing to forward your commands. Any client programs capable of ssh tunneling and remote desktop connection can help you do the job. I will explain the process from client perspective because it does not matter if the target computer runs Windows or Linux.

Using Windows clients:
SSH tunneling client is putty (usually pronounced with 'u' as in umberella not as in put). Remote desktop client is Mstsc.

Setting up port forwarding:
Configure your session to the gateway computer as shown in the screen shots below:

Select "SSH" on the left panel and check the "Enable Compression" option and make sure SSH protocol version 2 is preferred.

Select "Tunnels" under "SSH" on the left panel and in the "Add new port forward" section add a source port (it could be 1 or any port on the local computer which is not used for other purposes) and then add the destination address and port as shown. The host_address should be either the IP address or host name of the target computer you want to connect to then click "Add".

Then login to the gateway computer using "Session" on the left panel. And once you log in just leave the session window minimized.

Connecting to your target computer:
Connect to your computer using Windows standard remote desktop client by just using localhost:1 as the Computer name as shown below:

Using Linux clients:
SSH tunnenling client is "ssh". Remote desktop client is "rdesktop".

Setting up portforwarding:
ssh -C -L local_port_number:host_address:3389 username@gatewaycomputer
More options about ssh can be found using man ssh command.

Connecting to your target computer:
rdesktop -f localhost:local_port_number
More options about rdesktop can be found using man rdesktop command.

Acknowledgment:
This technique was introduced to me by Thomas Stauffer, CIS systems manager at Temple University.

Latex 000

2007-02-19T14:16:00.000-04:00

Pronunciation:
Popularity decides pronunciation. It is popularly pronounced as how you would pronounce latec.

Background:
I have got several requests for giving quick and short tutorials on using latex for writing reports, papers etc. I intend to add several posts that might help those who have basic knowledge about HTML to start being able to typeset beautiful documents.

Latex is similar to HTML. It's just more powerful. It helps in producing beautiful mathematical formulas nicely aligned. Now take for granted that this is the best typesetting software used for printing articles in journals, books and producing pdf files.

Installation:
You need 3 basic components to be able to use latex.

Compiler(Most Linux boxes come with a compiler already installed. MikTex is a popular compiler for Latex on Windows.)
Editor (any standard text editor would do but I recommend WinEdt)
Viewer (either YAP or any pdf/ps reader)

Hello World:
Once you have the above basic components it's time to say "Hello World!". As the html files have .html as extensions the tex files have .tex in their extensions (too trivial but mentioned just in case).

Download the sample package and just open a command prompt, go to the folder and enter pdflatex Sample command twice. You have to do it twice to generate references. This will generate Sample.pdf in the same folder with bunch of other files. Open the pdf file to see the output.

End of class 000. I will add more stuff slowly or on demand. For those of you who have more urgent needs you can download the package and compile the tex file using following sequence of commands to generate the output pdf file.

latex jfrExample
bibtex jfrExample
latex jfrExample
texify jfrExample.tex
dvipdft jfrExample

Reading:
A very good reference can be downloaded here.

Questions:
Once you start using latex you can take off on your own by "googling" but if you have any specific questions I might either help you directly or help you better google.

Errata: I fixed instructions on how to compile sample package. Please read the Hello World section carefully!

Karma - anthropic anlogue of evolution?

2007-02-11T15:50:00.000-04:00

Science is all about hypothesizing and verifying hypotheses systematically and in repeatable way. Evolution is taught in science classes and it’s used for scientific explanations for many questions about our assumptions in life sciences. The problem with evolution is that it is not really verifiable. Nevertheless it is a conditioning that has proven to be useful heuristic for many practical applications for life. A similar kind of conditioning which is more anthropic in flavor is the theory of Karma. While the evolution does not center the humans it does center our perception. Karma unlike evolution is anthropic but like evolution does provides us with very satisfying explanations for many though not all events happening in life. Evolution also has it's cracks! Like evolution suggests survival of the fittest, karma also suggests to work hard to be fit and survive and motivates us to put efforts in the right direction. In fact the law of karma is one of the essential seeds of hope, which unquestionably is biggest strength of human mind. Karma can be called science if the anthropic principle is prevalent in science.

Now karma seems to be anthropic analogue of the theory of evolution. Do other theories or concepts have anthropic analogues or use anthropicism? Yes. For example we have anthropic computation, anthropicism in cosmology, in physics etc. As Scott uses anthropic computing to give a very strong argument against suicide, the anthropic principle used in life sciences (karma) can be used as a strong argument for hope! Do most theories or concepts benefit from looking for anthropic analogues? I don’t know but it would not be truly surprising if the answer is yes. What would be surprising is the process of it’s discovery and conceptualization.

Health: Working Whenever Wherever

2007-01-28T11:30:00.000-04:00

After you reach your desired goal in terms of look, feel and numbers. It's time to keep the achievement tuned and take yourselves to even higher levels but not so consciously. By continuing working out regularly we definitely keep on training body but not just for change but to embed the changes to deeper levels of consciousness like may be subconscious level. For example when we workout for a while (about 2 years) and eat properly our body automatically signals us of any kind of atrophy or over indulgence. We need not push ourselves to go to gym. Think about it. Do you push yourself to brush your teeth, take shower etc? You might skip may be once in a while, but not to the extent that you start hurting your teeth or skin right.

The point is that the workout should slowly become part of your daily activities and then become part of your nature call system. The theory of evolution hints about hardwiring good traits in us to survive. It has been benefiting us: think about vision, while a baby can see right from the moment he is born, we don't have computer vision close to vision of even an ant. Today's state-of-the-art learning machines cannot even be compared to a human baby. It's hard to compete with evolution but if we work hard (and survive long) we can synergize with it and benefit from it.

Here's the conclusion of this health post. Workout so regularly that you imprint the mechanisms into your DNA and hence contribute towards better evolution of future generations in terms maintaining better health. You don't have to complain of not having facilities to workout. Workout with whatever you got, just a simple skipping rope, or stairs, or walking roads should be able to serve the purpose of keeping you fit. Don't you sleep whenever wherever if you need to, automatically. Don't you find something to eat whenever wherever if you are hungry. Don't you clean your mouth (brush) whenever wherever if your breath smells bad. The point is push the act of workout to those basic levels of conscious that you keep yourself fit even without much concern and stand as an inspiration for many to change. So as popular advise goes, move from being inconscious-incompetent, to conscious-incompetent, to conscious-competent and finally to inconscious-competent.

Link to previous health post.

Streaks of thought: Streak 5

2007-01-14T11:28:00.001-04:00

Assuming existence of one-way functions we need a system in which nothing is "absolutely" free, to protect ourselves from fraud. This can be used as one of the strong and deep reasons to propone capitalism.