Moved my blog

I’ve moved my blog to http://www.thinkprobabilistic/blog.

Sparkles in the Brownian Motion

It feels like waking up after a long, deep dream. Chronologically short, but memories that stretch afar and run incisively baritone. Rich and sparkling, full of wonderment and magic. A flurry of challenges and maladies that come with them. Anesthetic at times to even sharp pain, becoming a frequent habitat of the bleeding edge. I cannot grasp how they could all fit into just two short years. How such compression is possible I would never know. One would be otherwise incredulous except that it all feels true. The fact that I have finally begun to write again after such a long hiatus suggests that I am well rested. That my decompression is complete. It is so welcome!

When I arrived at MIT almost two years back, l expected to be challenged. But I did not expect to be changed. I can vouch very safely that the past two years have been by far the most breathtaking in the twenty six years that I’ve existed. I’ve learned more in these two years than ever before. Not just about bleeding edge computational science, but of the nature of human beings and of life itself. Glimpses of the magical and the possible. I’ve found that I have more resilience and tolerance in me than I had ever imagined. Most of all, it has come to dawn on me that the friends I’ve made in these two years are going to stay with me for life.

Sparkles in the Brownian movement

The more you learn about the mysterious way the human brain functions, the deeper you probe attributes of aspergers and autism, the richer and more pervasive your insights will be into the world of statistical learning. The world is a well-oiled mixture of distributions. You learn quickly that shallow representations of a phenomenon is not of much use; there is no such thing as a whole. Most phenomena are a complex set of distributions, each talking to one another, each functioning in part on their own and in part because of other parts. Hierarchical by nature. There cannot be a one-size-fits-all mindset that still plagues almost all of the machine learning world. There are lots of lessons to derive from human physiology and from biological systems in general.

Viewed from afar, it might look like uncontrolled Brownian motion. A world of statistical learning that focuses on stable patterns, generalization and abstraction, but the real world which focuses on specificity and uniqueness. How can these two vastly different worlds be bridged? It would seem like finding order in an Brownian motion, a futile and hopeless exercise. But observing how nature has crafted our many functions is a start. Deep learning is the direction to go in. Enough of one-size-fits-all approaches like singular vector machines and conditional random fields. More probabilistic graphical models and deep learning. Careful examination of phenomena. Identifying sub-distributions and tackling them appropriately. A cascading set of processes where sub-distributions talk to each other. A well-oiled machine. There is meaning in the Brownian motion. It sparkles with simplicity.

An assault on cancer

Not too long ago, I came across this fascinating work by Marty Tanenbaum of Stanford. When he was diagnosed with a form of melanoma, he was struck by the different prognoses given by different oncologists. Marty mined the Stanford Cancer Research database which combines knowledge sources from drug trails and a complete medical and treatment histories of thousands of cancer patients visiting Stanford Medical Hospital. Marty was able to give himself a set of treatment options and drug prescriptions by mining this database. He is cancer free today. He speaks of classes of drugs for classes of people for classes of ailments. A probabilistic approach.

One cannot but think of what we can do if every hospital and research medical institutes in the world begin to log the entire medical and treatment histories of their patients. If details of every drug trial conducted anywhere were all logged. If we aggregated research from cancer gene therapy and translational medicine. We may have already discovered a set of cures for certain types and forms of cancer, but they might all be buried in disparate data, strewn away from each other. We have gigantic human endeavors like the Google and Bing search engines, which are essentially mammoth supervised learning agents acting on gargantuan amounts of data. One can only imagine of what we can do if we design something of a similar scale to connect every single resource connected to cancer research from all over the world.

Increment true counters

I have learned many a thing during the last two years. Opportunities have swung by almost thrice as fast as the challenges, as real and painful the challenges can be. Many a time, it is easy to find yourself unable to choose. A paralysis of sorts, the frustrating state of being rendered immobile. I have come to realize that the only things that matter are my friends and my family. In the end, those are the only things that matter. There are people in MIT that have done so much for me. They will do anything for me and I for them. I am very fiercely fond of my friends. I will gladly take the summer heat and the snow monster because it feels so completely right in Boston.

Life is not a never-ending Markov chain. During their journey in the dark, when they pass through the mines of Moria, Frodo laments that he wishes the ring had never come to him, and that he wishes for a lot of things to have never happened to him. So do all who see such times replies Gandalf, that it is not for us to decide; all we can do is to decide what to do in the time that is given to us.

When looked at and listened to carefully, there are sparkles in the Brownian motion.

 

 

 

A harbinger of hope

Three close friends of mine and I caught up with each other this week after what seemed to be ages. There is something inherently priceless about old school friends, a kind of camaraderie that is almost irreplaceable. We talked about many things, from our lofty high school misadventures to how scattered we were from each other in geography and in what we opted to study after high school. I felt nostalgic, finding it almost impossible to stomach the fact that I was in high school ten years ago. The year 2001 seems, by no stretch of imagination, not too far removed from now. We talked about our beloved Bangalore and how drastically it has changed since the time we were in school. Blessed by a strategic geographic location and gorgeous weather, it has become a thriving, expanding metropolis and the high-tech nerve center of the country’s rapidly burgeoning foray into technology. But with the almost gargantuan increase in universities and start-ups, the city has also faced demographics and infrastructural challenges. We talked about how the city was not built for the current size of its population, and what a golden opportunity that was for urban planners to choreograph a ecologically sustainable city. The fault, we discussed was something more fundamental than the hapless politicians who run the state of Karnataka, a sense that the first bottleneck that is more serious than the useless politicians is that of apathy of the general public. We then talked about the Anna Hazare movement, and how galvanized the techies in the city seem to have become because of it. How could these arm-chair, slightly asperger afflicted techies, whose penchant for skepticism and disdain for politics so suddenly have found their voices in favor of the Anna Hazare movement that has captured the imagination of so many across the country? This is an important reference point during our lives.

An abomination

I’ve always had nothing but absolute contempt and disdain for politics as a whole. Yes, there are good politicians and those that are in it to genuinely serve a higher cause, but taken as a whole, it is hard not feel a sense of rigid disenchantment towards it. The Congress party, which dominated Indian politics with successive federal government for almost fifty years after Independence, has always used a clever two-pronged strategy to stay in power. First, it has always curried favors with the super-rich and the super privileged, building a license-raj monster that has created a black economy of biblical proportions. It is shocking that more Indians have stashed black money in secretive Swiss Banks than any other nation, with a whopping $1.4 trillion dollars that is almost the size of the Indian GDP. Because this could not have only happened during the last fifteen years, and because the Congress party has been in power for most of independent India, I am inclined to believe that the Congress party is waist-deep in this almost surreal sham of our times. Second, the Congress party has been successful in finding ploys and gimmicks to pander to the India’s most vulnerable and poor near the vicinity of elections, making lofty promises and spending a vast chest of campaign money to return to power, often presenting the Gandhi dynasty as its face for this purpose. It is the educated middle and upper class that has always been neglected by the party, sending them into political wildness with backpacks filled with overwhelming apathy and disdain.

But as has been said, you cannot fool all the people all the time. A rapidly expanding and maturing middle and upper class in India seems to be shaking off it’s apathetic stupor and demanding that they be recognized. Anna Hazare, the 74 year-old man who is leading what I think is one of the most significant mass movements in all of human history since the time of Gandhi, seems to have awoken the 400 odd million middle and upper middle class to flex their political muscles. My father told me recently of how even people in the rural areas of Mysore seemed to joining in the Anna movement. This tells me that there is hope. When you have people on the higher end of the asperger, so-called genius genetics, namely influential techies in Bangalore and farmers in Mandya join hands for a single movement, you recognize that it is legitimately a movement.

When Anna Hazare announced his intentions to go on a hunger-strike-till death, the Congress government at the center unleashed the Delhi police on him due to so called ‘public order’ concerns, sending him to Tihar jail. What is ironic is that a former minister of under the Manmohan Singh government and at least a dozen other bigwigs from other parties to company executives, are in the same notorious prison because of their alleged looting of the national exchequer of almost $44 billion, a scandal of almost monumental proportions. This act of the Congress should tell anyone with a right mind that the Congress has many shocking skeletons in the closet which risks getting outed if Anna Hazare’s demands are met and an independent corruption watchdog with a constitutional mandate is set up. After arresting and imprisoning him. the  spontaneous mass protests that erupted from Kashmir to Kanyakumari scared the Manmohan Singh government, releasing him on the same day and pleading with him to call off his agitation. India is not Egypt, neither is it a Syria. The right to protest is a constitutional right, and the government was cornered to the wall and spoke in a cacophony of  absurd voices (from calling Anna Hazare corrupt, to putting the blame on Delhi police, to then calling him a hero). The present government at the center is not only steeped in corruption, it also suffers from arrogance and the complete lack of any signs of intelligence.

A harbinger of things to come

Today’s unanimous resolution of Parliament to take up the three demands made by the Anna movement augurs well for our democracy. One man has inspired a mass movement that has forced Parliament to bend over backwards and accept his calls for a strong and effective corruption watchdog. The Congress led government at the center is wobbling on its last legs, waiting for the next scandal to send it packing. When and if that happens, one hopes that the work of establishing the Lokpal (corruption watchdog) is completed. One hopes that the new government would be under a different party, with a single-minded focus on boosting the economy for 10% GDP growth a year. with a rapt attention on infrastructure and next-generation technology investments. One also hopes that any inkling towards stupid and mindless communal politics does not make a comeback, for those days are gone in India. Communal politics has been repudiated by the Indian people and it always should be. Electing a non-Congress government at the center would mean an end to the Gandhi family control of politics in India. They ruled India for almost 50 years, and we didn’t develop in inch when we were under them. They had their time.

Of the many uprisings in the world, starting from the Middle East, to riots in Greece, Spain, France and England, the middle classes and the neglected are standing up against the culture of organized corruption at the behest of the super-super-rich, a culture of corruption that has brought the world economy to its knees. But as a very famous Indian political scientist recently said, a fear and anxiety about the future almost always comes with hope, and it is this ray of light that is so encouraging. From the the Ramlia grounds in Delhi, a feeble, 74 year old man, through his peaceful hunger protest, has captured the hearts of millions and brought a corrupt, sinful government to its knees and awoken the apathetic and the neglected for action.

There is always hope.

Evenstar

Come close, but no closer said a wise man. One step at a time. One tiny step forward. Each with it’s own set of predicaments, it’s own challenges. A long trail of steps, in hindsight, stretches as far as the eye can see. None exist in foresight though, for that path cannot be foreseen. I can give you no advice, said the wise man, except to make you understand that there is no distinction between your steps and who you really are. You, like every mortal, cannot escape the vicissitudes of that journey, but know that the laws that govern the elements are universal and will never change. This then, is your wherewithal said the wise man, go now and find your own trail.

Each step seems to be a product of nerves, of perspiration and intrepidity, drawing from the raw wherewithal. Hope is sometimes the only companion, a lamp in a path filled with many shadows. Whether this is a test of faith, or a challenge or a preordained passage is unknown. The mind delves into the past and  yearns for the Evenstar in the north sky. Both challenges and opportunities galore, but wither shall you choose that which is fleeting, which is ephemeral and glitters on the surface. Courage and perseverance must continue unabated, for they are never unrewarded. Even the shadows will soon pass for there is no power like that of a resolute and a determined faith. Solder on, whispers the wise man, for great and sterling things lie on the anvil.

The past semester has been quite the spectrum. I’ve probably learned and performed more this semester than at any time in the past twenty four years. I’ve met CEO’s of companies, interacted with some of the most extraordinary minds of our times and even visited the home of the most powerful man on the planet. I’ve also faced personal challenges and tribulations. Many a time, it feels like traversing in circles, with the deep recesses of the mind fixated on those variables that I cannot alter. I am determined to march on in complete gusto, with resolve and single-mindedness, for there is no boundary that is beyond the reach of perseverance.

Autism theory and human behavior

Taught Rosalind Picard and Matthew Goodwin here at MIT, this is arguably the most magnificent and well-rounded introductory course to autism on the planet. It would be completely true to say that I have never taken a course that has had such a profound impact on my thinking. Studying the inner bearings of autism has offered me an unusually powerful frame of reference to view statistical learning and probabilistic modeling of language. I learned more about human behavior in this course than all of the previous twenty four years of my life put together.

Being born into a family of doctors, I have seen countless stories of sadness. Yet I have also seen stories of inspiration and hope that can vouch with every fiber of my being that the work done to help children is the best work there can ever be. When I was seven, my grandmother saw a couple with a son who was almost my age who had a congenital heart defect in his left atrial valves. I still remember my grandmother trying frantically to arrange a surgery for that young boy. When I asked her once about why her eyes would tear up every time she’d see her young patients, she told me that young children and pregnant women were direct manifestations of God.

All four of my grandparents are no more, but on those occasions when I’d finish writing an assignment for this class and go jogging around the Charles river, the sparkling beauty of the river next to me along with fresh ideas about autism and children made me so nostalgic about all those years that I spent with my grandparents.  No words in the English lexicon are enough to describe how I felt during those moments. If not for anything else, I am so grateful that taking this class reminded me that my grandparents’ visions of the world could still be alive because I carry their genes.

A penchant for pattern thinking

One of the most illuminating and inspiring stories I’ve heard about in the recent past is that of Temple Grandin. Not only are her insights into human thinking and behavior make more sense than any piece of cognitive psychology I’ve ever read, her personal journey is one that cuts through layers and layers of ignorance and bigotry. Her idea is essentially this – that there is a distribution of different types of minds, and that the world needs different kinds of minds to work together. While she identifies herself as a visual thinker, as evidenced by tensor images of her brain showing a gigantic visual cortex, she also identifies other kinds of minds such as the pattern thinker and the verbal.

Here at MIT, which has a disproportionately high distribution of people with high functioning ASD, I see a lot of pattern thinking minds. When I was in the tenth grade, I was shocked to see the shocked faces of my peers who winced when I  told them what kind questions could be expected in the next exam, and that I didn’t prepare for certain subjects like world history and biology. What gives some of us the ability to process huge amounts of information, deduce patterns and transform that into meaningful data? What gives some of us the uncanny ability to fit a statistical model to seemingly disconnected and meaningless big data? While those questions are best answered by neuro-anatomists I’ve met at HMS and MGH, the larger point to be noted is that those of us who have sought refuge under the large beacon of hope called MIT, there are millions of other similar visual, pattern and verbal thinkers who don’t get the same chance. Are we doing a good enough job of identifying these brilliant minds (while acknowledging the social difficulties that these minds typically have) and putting them where they belong?

Thanks to the work of this one remarkable human being, there is a movement towards recognizing this fact. If you’ve never watched the Temple Grandin movie, I’d be hard pressed to recommend to you one less than any book on human behavior when it comes to explaining how unique each and every mind is.

Modeling the next generation transportation ecosystem

This semester, I connected the extraordinary Robert Hampshire to the Smart Cities group here at the lab. As a leader in modeling bikes sharing systems he spoke about his stochastic models for bike re-balancing and capacity prediction. The transportation ecosystem of the future is one that will involve bike sharing systems, electric bikes and foldable cars for solving the first-mile, last-mile problem, as well as an optimal interaction with public transportation. The idea is to optimize the ecosystem for every user based on their preference.

Building on the modeling of existing programs across many cities around the world, there is a need to tap into behavioral economics and tap into sensor-based parameters for moving into a meta-continuous real-time modeling of transportation systems. There is a chance to build the first ever such model into practice right here in Boston, home to the first ever underground transit system in the US, stretching back to the 1890s. A successful model in Boston would be so powerful that it promises to change the dynamics of transportation systems as we know of them in the entire country.

I’ve had so many experiences this semester, a spectrum of all of sorts of things. Fortunately for me, I have some of the most beautiful friends that anyone can ever hope for. What I’d be without them, or just how much of a value I can assign to them, I’ll never know, but in the midst of a scattering array of the scintillating, the challenging and the inspiring, there is one constancy that is comforting, and that is the the simple love of my friends and of my family.

It is perhaps in this glue that hold so much together that emerges a quiet yearning of the Evenstar that lies on the horizon.

Adventure and the bullies

There is probably no one who has not come across it. Either as a target or as a bystander, or even worse, as a perpetrator. What ruminations and lamentations could have taken place in the deep recesses of one’s thoughts at that time are unlikely to be forgotten easily. For some, such memories are nothing more than a mere bump. For others, such memories feel like feeble guilt. Yet for many, they are nothing less than a time fraught with anguish and pain. Whatever side of the equation one may fall under, there is no denying of the scarring nature of the problem and the detrimental repercussions that it has on society.

Last week, as a part of a three member team from MIT, I was invited to a White House conference on addressing bullying hosted by President Obama and the First Lady. The conference was attended by families and individuals who have been victims of bullying, as well as experts trying to tackle this scourge. I applaud the President and the First Lady for having the temerity and empathy in organizing this event and casting a spotlight on this social menace. Several key members from the President’s cabinet were in attendance, underscoring the seriousness with which the White House views this problem.

My focus is on modeling the detection of textual cyber-bullying using computational linguistics., a project which I started last semester, but has since grown by leaps and bounds into a venture of its own. I had many meaningful interactions with some key people in this equation from the administration, the industry, as well academia. A powerful alliance to tackling bullying is in the making, one that would hasten the day when no child or young adult has to ever contemplate taking their own lives.

Listening to heart-wrenching stories by victims and families permanently scarred because of bullying has bought back memories of my own. I can say with  impunity that these memories are not a tad bit pleasant. I have come across numerous bullies both during school and during college. I was never overwhelmed by them during either of those periods, but I can’t say that they were just mere irritants. They certainly affected me, sometimes to the point of making me brood over their behavior for days, and I can certainly imagine the unspeakable pain that victims can endure.

I was an obese child till I turned twelve. I was mocked for having to get my school sweaters custom made for me. I was also routinely mocked for having a darker shade of skin. I was very much a precocious child from as long as I can remember, and was very often the teacher’s favorite in class. This invited some insults too. I was accused of being a brand ambassador for butter that would do anything to be loved my teachers, when in reality, my teachers liked me for academics and for my handwriting.  🙂 Some of these things continued even during college. I could sense an almost stark difference between people who were nice to me and those that were full of the same qualities as the bullies I encountered during school. I remember very clearly, in great detail, almost every blatant and subtle bully that I have met since I was in middle school.

Fortunately, I never let them get to me or influence me. And I never tried to fit in either, because beyond a point, I just couldn’t care. I had my own small circle of close friends  – my trust circle – and they were all that mattered to me. I was often too engrossed in things that I was passionate about. But I understand and empathize with victims who’s context and scenarios might be very different than mine, and who feel pain and suffer on a scale or severity that I never really did. Everyone is different, with different coping mechanisms. But in the oddly low probablity that this blog post is read by a victim, I will make these points based on my observations and my experiences:

1. If you are different, you are likely to become someone special and interesting – If you are different from peers and often get mocked for not ascribing to peer pressure, then there is a high likelihood that you will become a very interesting person in the future. The people who were markedly different from everybody else in my school have turned out to be some of the most interesting and outstanding people that I know of today. Your unique talents and traits are your strength – don’t try too hard to change who you are to fit into a group.

2. Stay away from the blatant and the subtle – Don’t spend too much time in the company of those that are blatant and subtle bullies, even if they are very popular. Better still, don’t spend time worrying about them. There are a zillion interesting and magical things to explore in the world, and wasting your precious memory cycles on such people is exactly what is is – a wastage of resources.

3. People like and love you – Your real friends stick with you through thick and thin. They genuinely celebrate your successes and help you when you are feeling down. You would do the same for them. They don’t judge you, nor do they impose their views on you – you are in your own skin around them, and they give you your space. Memory cycles and man-hours spent with them are truly worth it. Try to spend time with such people. It is good for health and a lot of fun.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for help – There is nothing wrong in asking for help if you feel overwhelmed. Everybody goes through rough patches, and that is the truth. If you ask for help, it means you are being kind to yourself, and that is very important. What’s more, you will find that there are people who you know will be able to help you. You will learn to deal the same kind of problem in a better way if you ever encounter it again.

5. It gets better with time – I often do time-series analysis in a lot of my research. I can tell you both from my own experiences and my research that it really does get better with time. So try to imagine yourself a year, two years or even five years down the line and think of how you’d feel then. You will get busy and do interesting things in the future and your painful experiences will ebb and fade.

During his speech at the conference, President Obama rejected the naive notion that somehow bullying was ‘a rite of passage’ that everybody has to go through. He talked of how he was bullied in school for having big ears and a funny name. But today his journey to the White House is by itself such a profoundly inspiring story – that a boy ridiculed for having big ears and a funny name and of African-American heritage can become the most powerful man on the planet. Examples of people overcoming such obstacles are everywhere – from the extraordinary singer Susan Boyles to the record-smashing swimmer Michael Phelps.

My own advisor here at MIT, Henry Lieberman, somewhat of a polymath in computer science – from inventing garbage collection in programming languages to fill functions in computer graphics to natural language understanding and cross-modal interfaces, told me of his experience with bullies when he was a  child, and how clearly he remembers them. There are inspiring stories everywhere. You only have to open your mind to them. According to Ralph Emerson, ‘When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.’

Sparkling things are yet to come.

Expectation Maximization

A chilly mass of air breezes against the face. Withered leaves, in colors of red, brown and yellow gather near the feet. The skies take the hue of teal blue, with a sparse scattering of clouds. Something musters in the air. A change. A transition. The coming of a new season, the making of a quiet, quantum jump. The magical phenomenon of metamorphosis – the development of that which is intricate from that which is next to nothing. The nurture of something organic, the crystallization of a set of ideas. Each day takes it a step further, and by so doing breathing into it new life. Inspiring traction, leading a steady and irreversible gain in momentum.

Much has been done, but much more remains to be done. There are many to thank, without whose raw love and sturdy support nothing could come to pass. It is a moral imperative to preserve the perspective and sharpen the focus. The entropy of strong, concerted action must be maintained and balanced with great care. Steadfast discipline and renewed devotion should and must be the forte, for nothing can be done without them.

The past semester has been exhilarating, thought-provoking and inspiring. In this place called MIT which I have come to love, I have seen some remarkable things. I’ve witnessed first-hand the power and beauty of the human mind. I’ve seen brilliance, and felt an ambiance of  possibility. It is an inexcusable blunder to let oneself be carried away by this magnificent atmosphere at the cost of one’s own health, as I have done this past semester. Yes, I’ve stumbled. But I am glad to have stumbled, for I have learned to appreciate the power of balance and proportion even better.

The magic of Hidden Markov Models

My current research involves a lot of  hidden markov modeling. Sometimes, I look at hidden markov models and think about what a gift to humanity they really are. Used in seemingly disparate areas from protein modeling to gesture & speech recognition to natural language processing, HMMs are a most fascinating set of methods. The art of observing output as dependent on a set of hidden states, and for those hidden states to emerge and to be harnessed, is simply breathtaking.

I’ve always thought of fundamental particle physics to be the most beautiful pieces of mathematical work, and have always resented not having pursued it. Hidden markov models, while paling in comparison, are still stunningly pretty. I’ve felt a strong fondness for it. There are probably even more gorgeous things out there – I can only hope that stumble upon them as a function of my research.

It’s particularly thrilling to see those hidden states to be harnessed for something that actually helps people, as I hope the case with my current work will turn out to be. For now though, I am going to be treating myself to watch and enjoy it. 🙂

Iterations and malleability

If everything could be mustered in a single pass, that would certainly be wonderful. The fact remains though, that most things are not achievable in a single pass, sometimes not even in a few passes. No matter what one’s goals are or how tough one’s predicaments may be, one has an obligation to press on with resolve and to keep trying. Repeatedly and consistently. There is no power like that of a strong will, and there are few things that cannot be done with perseverance. Concerted action renders things malleable, affording you the power to bend them at your will.

Granted, not all the variables are under your control. But certain variables are, perhaps the most important being the ability to control how they shape one’s thinking. And that is all that matters for most things.

Expectation Maximization

Just they are used to solve certain kinds of hidden markov model problems, the method of expectation maximization is a profound metaphor for all that is yet to come and how we should be leading our lives. Iterative by its very nature, it works consistently and repeatedly to unravel the hidden states that lie within.

As goals are laid and dreams created, there are many beautiful hidden things that are yet to come.

 

 

The Infinite Corridor

The Charles river, majestic and glistening, separates Boston from Cambridge. A magnificent and historic city that is the heart of New England on one side. A set of enigmatic and noble centers of learning on the other. Any lackadaisical soul who unwittingly takes a walk along this river is certain to be wonder-struck at the sparkling image that lies before him. A sight that conveys great character and elegance. Even the air has an inexplicable mix of intelligence and purpose,. And so rises a deep and cherubic belief in all that is possible, that is noble and in everything beautiful that looms on the horizon.

I cannot express in words how singularly blessed I feel to be where I am and to be doing what I am doing. A worthy supposition is that of living a childhood dream. Even in these troubled times, when so many have so few, where hope seems to be the only pillar standing, there are those to whom much is given.

To be given a chance to live a childhood dream is not only a gift, but a responsibility and a calling. A calling to unleash every atom of creativity, with eyes rapt in attention and a mind determined to push and persevere. Even the vicissitudes of life – those uncontrollable contrivances borne out of pessimism and doubt will soon vanish. Things will fall into place. That is the design of nature. Such is the power of will.

Advanced Natural Language Processing

Taught by the extraordinary Regina Barzilay, this is the heart of computational linguistics at MIT. Learning the latest statecraft of algorithms for performing magical tasks with text is not only mesmerizing, but also a privilege. Statistical approaches to language processing is a discipline that is young and nascent.

That MIT has or has had several of the best minds in the field, such as the profoundly influential Shannon and the very smart Michael Collins is like learning how to make pizza from the finest chefs in Italy. Even if much of the work in the field is incremental, this has taught me how to mine text for sentiment, discourse analysis, and how to translate one language to another. There are great things that are yet to come using natural language processing and machine learning. I can hardly stop thinking about it.

Metaphors from the Infinite Corridor

At MIT, to walk through the infinite corridor is to pass through the power of science and ingenuity. It cannot be described as anything other than inspiring. Every walk through this corridor is a surge in determination – of watching people with boundless enthusiasm and dedication. The metaphor then, is a simple, yet powerful one – in this world of such plenty and such scarcity, there are limitless possibilities to make a difference.

As I look outside my window to a gorgeous view of the Charles, I believe in the goodness of this magnificent place.

I love MIT.

The Primordial Slime and the new Adventure

In the midst of a crowded array of desires lies a most herculean task. Of assigning each of them with the right precedence. The undeniable fact that the world is quite to eager to readily rank these desires for you makes the task more difficult than it already is. The world is quite eager to frame the narrative. It is also more than willing to define the boundaries of what constitutes success and what is construed as failure – a form of totalitarianism that is easy to succumb to. Only by understanding that your choices should and must be a function of your upbringing, your values and your contributions to life can this task be met. It is only then that the nebulous predicament will dissipate, ushering in a wave of clarity that is the root of all happiness and progress.

Perhaps the most peculiar oddities of the world is its premium on ascription – the direct correlation of success and wealth with one’s upbringing and familial support. As hackneyed and browbeaten as it may sound, the fact is that talent is universal but opportunities are severely limited. It is perhaps the most glaring moral vexation of our times, one that continues to haunt and besmirch all humanity. We still live in a world that produces a twenty two year old billionaire and countless abhorrent stories of hunger, deprivation and suffering.

A clarion call to action

Growing up as a child in a family of doctors has given me a chance to see life from many perspectives. I have seen my grandparents see hundreds of thousands of patients, young and old, rich and poor. I have seen people experiencing heart attacks. I’ve seen people who were told that their loved one would probably not live for long. I have seen kids who were my age, but born with major congenital heart defects, only that their anguished parents could not afford the surgery that could save their child’s life.

The pulse of life  is often taken for granted and forgotten in the hectic parley of our daily chores and our materialistic craving. The pulse of life is precious. It is fragile and is limited in time.  Only two things matter – the people who you love and your responsibility to realize your God-given capacities to do what you can to further life for those that need it. There are many ways to achieve this, and to each his own.

Fight for what you love

One of the most extraordinary and magical gifts in my life is that I continue to meet remarkable human beings everywhere I go. At every stage in my twenty-four years of existence, I have met with gracious and kind human beings that are as noble as the pristine sun. I am deeply inspired by them. Their unbounded enthusiasm and their goodwill towards me and my well-being reminds me everyday of who I really am and what I must do in my life.

Even in the quandary of many choices, limitations and circumstances, you have to do what you really love. As my wonderful manager told me very recently, you are called upon to fight for what you love. Secure in the knowledge that I have the complete and unrestrained support of an army of well-wishers, loved ones and that of  the overwhelming force of providence itself, I am about set forth on an adventure filled with purpose.

The return of my Jean Louise

From the time I read the book ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and I couldn’t but draw some very nice comparisons between the chief character in the book and someone who means a lot to me. That thought has come back to me again. This week, I will get to meet my dear, dear sister, who is about to embark on an adventure of her own. From the countless discussions that we had about Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings to the often funny fights which required the intervention of my mother, I can hardly say how excited I am to be seeing her again.

To borrow an apt conjecture from Tolkien himself, the coming of my sister is like the ‘the falling of stones that starts an avalanche in the mountains, an event that hasn’t happened since the Elder days’. My Jean Louise is coming back to me.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I am electrified and galvanized to be starting as a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab. That we have continue to suffer in an human-computer interaction model that is stuck in the 1970s is an affront to science itself. Instead of humanizing technology, we continue to gallop in  path carved in the 1970’s enslaving ourselves to bending over to technology rather than making technology bend over to let us be humans.

My adventure at MIT will take me through the intelligence of the artificial, through the understanding of natural language cognition, perception and speech interfaces. From the place that housed polymaths such as Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, I am now going to into the land of Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert and Noam Chomsky. I am determined to be the best that I can humanly be at MIT.

Lessons from the primordial slime

President Bill Clinton, in his commencement speech to Yale graduates, talks about the CP-symmetry violation that was discovered by researchers at the large hadron collider at CERN, telling us that subatomic particles of matter, previously thought of being in equal proportion of positive and negative charges, would cancel each other out. It so happens that the positive forces are slightly more than the negative ones. This is such a powerful metaphor to how we should be thinking about our lives too and a telling story from our primordial slime.

There are many great and beautiful things that are yet to come.

Constructionism and the guiding compass

Throughout school, I remember being told repeatedly of the importance of reading newspapers and magazines. General knowledge , an awareness of the latest major world and national events and the ability to cultivate a curious mind that kept pace with all things novel and new were qualities whose importance was drilled deep into our heads. I was blessed to have a set of remarkable human beings who taught me at school. It is hard for me to even begin to contemplate where or what I would have been without my teachers. My dear, dear teachers, several of whom are in touch with me even today, remain everlasting symbols of everything that is pristine in my world.

Ten years after high school, times have changed. Quietly and noisly, the ground beneath our feet has shifted in gargatuan proportions. Today is a very different time from how things were a decade ago. I shudder to imagine what my impressions of the world would have been if I was in my formative years today. It is chilling to imagine a child reading the newspaper everyday these days – reading about bloodshed and conflict, an economic depression borne out of greed, of corruption and of man-made ecological catastrophes of biblical magnitudes.  The fact the  1990’s was a decade that ushered in steady economic expansion and saw relatively little conflict was indeed a silent blessing for those of us who grew up during that period. This contrasts almost repugnantly with the last decade, which surely ranks as one of worst decades in human history, equaling the dark ages of the world wars.  One would be hard pressed to find a single day devoid of some news of gloom and doom these days. What effects this might have on children is almost completely ignored, and it is heart-wrenching that not many people are taking about it.

Constructionism

When I first read Mindstorms:Children, Computers  and Powerful Ideas, it introduced me to the beautiful learning theory of constructionism and I was struck by how much I could relate my own childhood experiences with what I was reading. Espoused first by  MIT’s Seymour Papert, widely known as the greatest living mathematics educator, this theory seeks to explain a child’s learning process. It explains that children learn by constructing tangible objects, that they learn most effectively when they make or build things, and that their learning is directly related to what they experience. It says that experiential learning is superior to instructional-ism. It is highly relevant to learning of science,  mathematics and art. But what is even more important that it how it can be extended to explain other kinds of learning that happens in a child, and what that means for adults.

If experiential episodes create a ‘situation’ that enables assimilation of learning material, then it also means that children relate and learn by what they they experience in other areas too. Constantly bombarded with stories of gloom and doom, it is logical to assume that this creates an environment that is detrimental. Children grow by relating things to what is happening around them. I am hard pressed to find to many good things for children to relate to these days. Are we  surrounding children with a good number of things that they can relate to? I think not. I find it disturbing.

A guiding compass

The importance of context in learning cannot be wished away and one cannot be oblivious to the context that exists for far to many children in the world today. I have found that every noble intention, every good deed, and everything that sparkles with marvel and beauty, ultimately serves a single purpose. Of creating a better place for children. To each his own. I am, as a function of my faith and my upbringing, obliged to do everything I can to creating such an environment. The probability of eliciting the best and brightest out of children during their formative years is high. It can be great societal leveler in more ways than one. Every major decision should be tempered with this thought.

A thought, a guiding compass.

http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746

Proportion and the city

That persistence yields results that are strong and permanent is well known, and yet proven a thousand times over. Yet again. Three magnificent human beings that are my close friends will start the next phase of their lives in magical New York. Not only have they maneuvered through what seemed like a quagmire of diffidence, they have done it with uncommon grace. I cannot but be in admiration of their quiet sense of resolve and their unhindered capacity for hard work. Being a witness of this almost empirical proof has brought with it lessons of its own for me, and as fortunate as I feel to count them as my friends, I also feel a sense of gratitude. These personal triumphs are more than just personal stories – they set an example and help others muster through challenges of their own.

Clarity: a sense of proportion

The past couple of weeks have been quite nice. Buoyed by the the sheer magic that is New York city, a resurgence of aerobic exercise and new aquaintances, the past couple of days have given me a chance to pause and connect the two hemispheres of my brain. The tyranny of the left hemisphere over the right, as explained so powerfully by Jill Bolte Taylor, is a difficult reality to deal with.  Allowing the left hemisphere to dominate would mean focusing on ‘yourself’, as a distinct entity from the rest of the world, aloof and not bothered about anybody or anything other than yourself. Those uncommon souls who are right-dominated are those that are likely to think about others before thinking about themselves – for whom ‘me’ and ‘I’ take second place to ‘us’ and ‘we’. There seems to be little doubt that not only are these people the better angels of society, but lead happier lives and are more content than the rest.

Those that tilt towards the left hemisphere are those are that choose to focus on themselves more often than not. While it can be argued that the extremely left-hemisphered can be grossly self-centered, focusing on the self with a view towards betterment is not a bad trait in itself. In fact, it is healthy and sometimes quite essential. One cannot hope to usher in better things for the world at large without first changing themselves – of paramount importance in a world where time seems to fly at the speed of light. I suspect that most New Yorkers would agree with this assertion.

I have thought and long hard about choosing one of these paradigms over the other, and have come to some fairly simple and obvious conclusions. It is a unique trait of all forms of life to focus on the self – an essential tool for survival and sustenance. One has to muster the temerity and wherewithal to swim through the the challenges of an increasingly complex world. Yet, to be so full of yourself so as to not see the world as anything other than you and you alone is a sign of mental illness. Caring and empathizing for those around you magically produces happiness and contentment on a very generous scale. Indeed, it appears that for a more peaceful world, there needs to more of this to happen. The right and left hemispheres then, are abstractions of interdependence and independence. And it is worth noting that one cannot choose one over another, for they are both indispensable.

This then, is the answer. A balance between independence and interdependence – a sense of proportion, a conscious and sustained effort to allow both hemispheres of your brain to hold equal sway over your thoughts and actions. I will never forget how beautifully JK Rowling articulated this in her Harvard commencement speech – extolling the benefits of dealing with failure and the underlining the crucial role to empathasize and to imagine oneself in the shoes of others.

The magic of New York city

When I first arrived in New York last summer, little did I imagine of what it had in store for me. If truth be told,  I  was  intimidated by its size  and anxious about how I would manage my summer without knowing a single soul in the city. My apprehensions were confirmed by the end of my first two weeks here, for I did not like the city at all, and was rather taken aback by the attitude people – they seemed to have neither patience nor courtesy. People looked like they were in a great hurry for everything and seemed to be reluctant to dispense with any need for niceties. I couldn’t wait for the summer to end – my only solace was my best friend from school who was also in the city for the summer.

But as with all things that endure, New York started to grow on me. As I began to meet more new Yorkers and making a lot of friends, I started to understand the attitude of New Yorkers better. Living in a mammoth city, with its lightning pace of life and its many challenges, had forced people to wear a tough mask. Beneath the masks however, people were as nice and decent as you’d ever meet in any other city. As I started to go out almost every evening and meeting many wonderful people, my opinion of the city was radically transformed.

There has been no looking back ever since. I have come to  deeply admire and love New York. It has brought me great luck and also introduced to me several extraordinary human beings. I stand in awe at its culture, its intellectual vibrancy and its remarkable ability to teach you the virtues of tenacity and resilience. I have every reason to believe that it holds many more remarkable things for me.

Downtown New York is beaming in all its radiance, as if to herald a most sparkling and brilliant summer.