An Introspection

For the past few days i have been thinking about my career plan. It almost struck on my face that i dont have one till now. Hopefully my PhD should be completed in a year or so. What next?  The answer is bleak. I don't know if i would love to do a post-doctoral fellowship. If at all i do will i be interested in doing it in the field of study that i am involved in presently. I am not sure. This is a worrying issue but i seem to have decided mentally to move out of the field i am working in. What field i would be interested in working? That is yet to be decided and might take some more time for me to come to a firm conclusion. Pure AI, data mining or clustering techniques....let me leave it for the fate to decide it. 

Paper writing is one of the most difficult things in PhD. Even after having all the results needed to establish a theory or the application of theory to a real-time application, it is always difficult to write a paper that is specific to the audience of the journal. It is also amazing to find that human mind is capable of putting together all the thoughts within few hours when pushed to limits in the name of deadlines. Recently i face one....wasn't able to write two pages for 10 days and managed to write 14 pages within 28hrs...Literally continuous 28 hrs when given a deadline by my Prof. And by chance the paper has come out decently well.. Have submitted it to IEEE Transactions on intelligent Transportation Systems. Hopefully it will get accepted :-)

Lately i have been watching few movies on Figure skating. I happened to watch Ice Princess, The cutting Edge 3 and a few more. The amazing level of skill, discipline required really made me to look at thia sport with particular awe. I wonder how these people are able to make their body to be in sync with their mind. The balance and elegance resembles the "gamakam"(Used mostly when referring to carnatic music) given to enhance the musical notes. Hope one day i would have the opportunity of trying out some ice skating!!! :)

I wonder how people are able to update their blog on a daily basis. Even though i sit in front of the computer for almost 18 hours in a day, i rarely do the update. Probably this has to do something with the level of interest each person has in writing. I particularly feel bored of writing things. I prefer to jot down things on a small piece of paper and go through them whenever time permits. However some might question the use of the same in posterity. Anyways, i have somehow managed to write a blog today. probably it would be more interesting when i read this blog after a year or two. I happened to give a flute performance recently at Temple of Fine arts. It was more like showering praise on the lord for having given us the opportunities in life on 5th day of navrathri. The photos have come out quiet well. I hope to get the video of the same from Pravitha and Soma soon. The piece performed was an alankaram - Thisra Jathi Thiruputa Thalam in Chalanaattai Raagam. Sa Ga1 Ga2 Ma1 Pa Ni1

I managed to find out that Chrome browser supports JAVA platform. It is essential however to install the JRE6 for this to work. The browser doesn't seem to recognize other JRE versions. Anyways for now the JAVA support problem seems to be non-existent. If the API-extension is also introduced into Chrome then this can really give a tough competition to Firefox and IE.

I was one of the people who were eagerly waiting for the much talked about browser from Google - Chrome. The chrome web browser was a huge let down. This was not the browser that i was expecting from Google. Though it is a beta version, it is far from anything close to Firefox or Opera. The only good thing is the incognito operation which allows not to maintain the history and block cookie entries. The overall look of the browser was average. Probably it would improve once people start developing the skins for this browser. Very decent plugins for media players. The file downloads are much similar to Firefox, except for the graphical version attached to indicate the beginning of the download. out of the box flash player support is a good feature. This said the browser doesn't support shockwave files yet.The major letdown is the non-inclusion of JAVA support. Most of the sites with JAVA won't work properly. Before the introduction of the browser, the main advantage that was high

An Introspection: Chrome - The new web browser http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

Finally i managed to find something interesting to write about. It would be unacceptable for me to say that i had no time to blog... it was just that i was getting lethargic day after day. Hope to become active at the earliest possible time. Coming back to today's topic - chrome : The new web browser to be launched by Google. It is announced that Google would be releasing on Tuesday (Which happens to be today - but in US timings) the beta version of their browser for Windows. Linux and MAC users need to wait a bit longer before they can lay their hands on this. The features of the browser is not known fully. But they have made it open source thereby introducing the possibility of creating custom codes to suit the needs of the person. personally, i have never attempted to create a custom tool for browser even though Firefox is an open source tool. Hope this time around i would try to make some contributions to the Google's new browser. It is always great to create something new

Finally, i gave my oral QE presentation today. It lasted for almost two hours with both prof Xu and Mohan asking questions by relating traffic to network theory. It was difficult at certain places but they made me feel much comfortable. My supervisor was kind enough to intervene in some places where i was getting into a bit of fix. My presentation was way too long. it was almost 2 hours and i could barely cover half of my slide show. Anyways, they had read my entire seventy pages report and so they suggested me to get on with the future research part. There is a long way to go now. Now that i have some idea of the type of questions, will have to prepare and direct my research in those directions.

I have always had an inclination towards using Linux. But there used to be lots of frustrations, when something doesn't seem to work the way it is supposed to. The major problem was running the remote desktop application. I had to remotely control my desktop which has Windows Xp using Linux. I somehow figured out after lots of trial and error and had it run using the RDPV5 protocol. The problem was it would work inside the campus and wont allow to connect from outside because of extra layer of security added by NUS VPN. The webvpn application crashes whenever tried on UBUNTU Linux. The problem was, it tries to use the command SU and install the application. UBUNTU does not allow SU command to be used and the activex control would crash. I tried too many options like correcting the install configuration file but nothing worked. Finally i decided to try and use openvpn, which is supported by SOC. There was a problem with logon. It would not allow me to logon with NUSNET ID. I was tot

Qualifying exam oral defense is the one that has been running in the background of my mind for the past few months. This has taken way too long for me. The usual limitation for QE is 24 months from the start of the PhD. I lost around six months researching on Microelectronics before shifting to computational intelligence. So with 1.5 years i had to complete the necessary research work to give a QE. My prof seems to be a bit skeptical about this part still. Even after having 2 IEEE conferences and one submitted with one journal submitted, the QE defense still seems to take a longer time. Hopefully i would give it by this February middle. Hope everything goes fine here.

After a long time, i felt it would be better to start writing again. The past two months have been really hectic with lots to complete in terms of paper. I got some good results which are comparable with the work done by others in this field earlier. First came the journal paper which took almost 5 weeks to complete. The paper was written for audience of Transportation research but profs changed it to IEEE Systems, man and cybernetics. I had to include a lot of supporting materials and change my entire style of writing focusing more on type-2 fuzzy logic. WCCI conference paper was the next attempt. According to me this paper has come out better than the journal. Here i had put forward the multiagent system architecture in a generalized manner making it suitable for any application. I found that using mean speed to describe about the delay experienced in the vehicles in a traffic optimization problem was giving me an additional edge. Now i have to concentrate and complete my