An Introspection

It has been years that i had seen a truly impressive romantic movie. I happened to watch the telugu movie "Oye" Staring Siddarth and Shamili. I did not have much expectation except that i had heard it has a very tragic end. I was sweetly surprised by the freshness of the movie. Shamili was great in her acting - Subdued, yet powerful performance (a parody of a character). The cuteness of the couple was very well brought about by scenes on the ship when Shamili asks how men know whether a girl is married or not? The 12 gift idea was icing on the cake. On the whole it is a movie that can make people laugh, cry and still enjoy :-)

Today happened to see the news that Michael jackson is no more in this world. With this is the end of the great pop musical era. Michael jackson is a legend and will be remembered for ever. No one can write the history of pop music without naming this great musical genius, who inspired great many people. His awesome voice and the slick dance moves are a class apart from ordinary masses. We will miss you MJ....!!! But you will continue living through your music.

Q-learning is an interesting concept developed based on the principles of punishment and reward principle. This can be referred to as an extension of the temporal difference learning to make it more reliable by creating a state-action matrix and update the reward function. The basic objective would be to increase the total reward received over a period of time or based on immediate response. The recency factor similar to that in the temporal difference learning helps in assigning varying levels of importance to the futuristic rewards and past rewards. The problem is with the large state space and action space that exists in reality. Creating a matrix for each possible state and action is a herculean task and might drive the system into sub-optimality if all the possible combination cannot be visited. I am currently trying to make my state space into discrete sets of definable parameters and apply Q-learning to it. Hope i would be able to succeed at least to some extent in this endeavor

This is one of the most beautiful raaga i have heard. There are thousands of tamil songs composed using this particular raaga. The most famous of these is the "pon onru kandaen pen angu illai". The description provided by Charulatha Mani in the Isai Payanam was excellent. I have become a great fan of this singer, even though she makes some songs look more carnatic, but still the program is about the carnatic music applied to film songs so i felt it relevant. The arohanam and avarohanam of this particular raaga is sa ri2 ma1 pa ni3 sa  || sa ni2 pa ma1 ri2 ga2 sa This is called as shudhdha madhyamam raaga since it uses ma1. I am not sure if this is playable in flute since i am not sure about Ni3 which is kakali. Need to ask my guru regarding this. The link to various arohanam and avarohanam for all raagas is  http://www.carnatic.com/carnatic/ragalist.htm The link to the video in youtube is  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTCavDzt9b8&feature=related

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 :-)