Wonder implies the desire to learn

"Hello, I'm Quasi"

2006-08-20T05:21:00.000+02:00

Quasi mimics the mood personality of a 12-year old boy. Quasi's five "moods" are conveyed by the color of it's LED eyes and antennae. Red signifies anger, yellow means confusion, purple-pink signals embarrassment, and green is happy. (Photos: Tom Altany)

Quasi's creators: Graduate Students @ Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.

Quasi's "moods" depend on what's been happening in his environment, but rather than being driven by prepubescent biology, they are architected by an elaborately scripted software-based behavioral model that triggers his responses. Quasi lets you know how he's "feeling" through the changing colors of his LED eyes and his body language. If, for example, a passerby ignores Quasi, the robot's mood shifts to a sadder state: its eyes and antennae turn blue, its head hangs down, and it becomes stingy with its offers of candy.

Each mood, in turn, has a range of intensities. So if Quasi plays a game of tic-tac-toe with a visitor and the visitor keeps winning, the robot's state shifts to anger: the antennae lie back, the eyes glow red. Continued losses will trigger additional anger states and finally an ignore state, in which Quasi refuses to play or even acknowledge the visitor. But, as with most 12-year-old boys, the mood doesn't last long: after a few minutes, the state reverts to a less angry one, and Quasi begins interacting again.

Source:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/4116
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/4102

QWERTY

2006-07-20T01:10:00.000+02:00

Check your keypad. See how the letters are arranged. Do you see any logic or any pattern the alphabets are arranged in the keyboard. Just wonder a while and figure out if you can.

The keyboards on the laptop/desktop are copied from the typewriter keyboards. The first type writer was invented in 1860's.

Remember how a type writer looks. Each key on the type writer is associated with a bar. When you hit the letter on the type writer, the bar connected to that key will go and hit the paper, thus producing a print on the paper.

I still remember taking typing classes, but cudn't quite finish them. You got to hit the keys real hard, as the every time you hit the key the bars goes and hit the paper.

Now, the inventor C. L. Sholes, had a problem. There are some very common words in English like "the", "and". If he put those letters "T", "H" side by side and when you type fast you happen to press two keys simultaneously and the bars associated with those keys get jammed.

So, he put letters which commonly occur together far away from each other. Check your key pad for letters ("A", "N") ; ("F", "O", "R") etc. They are away frm each other.

check out the study on:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

Also, given reason for the introducing the "shift" key;

Later on ppl tried to build keyboards which were more logical. But, in those days the type writers were very common and ppl who knew typing had gud jobs. So they didn't want to change it for the fear of losing jobs and thus it slowly got widely accepted.

Magic Number 7 +/- 2

2006-07-20T01:03:00.000+02:00

There's a paper published around 1956 by George Miller (http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~geo). He observed that a human, at a time can hold maximum 7 different, totally unrelated things (that's 2.5 bits of information, each bit corresponding to 2 alternatives).

Imagine some one has given u two choices to choose from (let's say an icecream, a shoe)..two unrelated choices..it's easy to choose. Now say, u r given 4 such choices completely unrelated, u can still manage to recall and give a choice. But 7 +/- 2 is the max no of choices tht u can put into ur memory at any instant.
(Assuming normal intelligence level)

His paper:
http://www.well.com/~smalin/miller.html

It has inspired the way bill boards are written, the number of bullets to put in a single slide of ppt, the way the advertisements are shown (max number of unrelated things tht can be shown in an ad)....and many other things.

It's fascinating...that people studied almost every little aspect of human life.

First Message sent on Internet

2006-06-28T20:26:00.000+02:00

The first message that was sent on the internet was from UCLA to Stanford. The proud owner of the first node on internet was Leonard Kleinrock. Kleinrock visited University of Trento and delivered a speech on the Internet History, Development and Future (pdf).

First an 'L' was sent; Then an 'O'; Then system crashed when trying to send 'G'. So, the message sent was 'LO'.

More on the history of internet is available on Kleinrock's wepage (url).

The conclusion of the talk was that, internet has now become a complex system which is going out of everyone's control. There is an urgent need to understand its behavior, its future.

Our Future:

Grasshopper

2006-04-03T19:01:00.000+02:00

There's lot to discover and wonder about nature. Every little thing in nature teaches us something if we carefully look into. So, what's grosshopper's specialty...

Have you ever been amazed and astounded at how well a grasshopper can jump?
Have you ever wondered how they do it?

Well, someone did wondered and carried research about it. The grasshoppers use a CATAPULT to jump. [..following are excerpts of the wonderful webpage maintained by a Prof. W. J. Heitler, University of St. Andrews, UK..]

When a grasshopper jumps, it first crouches down, there is then a short delay, and then off it goes! A grasshopper jumps by extending its back legs from a folded position, so that they thrust against the ground. A good jump means that the legs must push against the ground with high force, and high speed.

We humans have a limitation of muscle power. If you make a muscle contract so as to get maximum force out of it, then it only contracts very slowly. On the other hand, if you make it contract as quickly as possible, then you don't get much force.

For example..snapping your finger. The more force you put, the less quickly you can snap the finger.

A human throwing something is exactly same as grasshopper throwing itself (after all, that's what jumping is - throwing oneself using ones legs). A good throw needs a rapid and forceful arm movement, but as we have just said, muscles can produce high force or high speed, but not both.

Humans have solved this problem by using tools, such as the catapult, or bow-and-arrow. But, the grasshopper has this mechanism built in. It does it routinely without much thought.

Where does the grasshopper keep its catapult?

Enugh of me...Check out the following links for detailed description and cool videos of the grasshoppers motion..

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wjh/jumping/
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wjh/jumping/weird_stuff
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wjh/jumping/lifestyle.htm
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wjh/jumping/info.htm

kosmix

2006-03-27T14:49:00.000+02:00

http://www.kosmix.com/

Yet another search engine..but I think this is different. It's true that we are heading into an information age and unless we organise data properly...we will be lost. Kosmix offers searching for pages related to three categories "Medical", "Travel" and "Politics" as of now.

I haven't tested the precision of the search results, but it's a promising direction for search engines. If I am looking for travel/medical information, I would definitely prefer a search engine which only indexes pages in that category rather than breaking head in google thinking of the right keywords. But I don't think that anyone can beat the top 10 results of google. It's all the magic of eigen vectors.

More Thoughts

Slick touch

2006-03-21T11:16:00.000+01:00

[...Here's a cool demonstration of the potential of touchscreen technology, close to the level of the user interface in the movie Minority Report. The interaction techniques are not new, but taken together and combined with the New York University researchers' high-speed, high-resolution multiple-contact touchscreen the effect is impressive. Be sure to watch the video, and be sure to watch past the initial hyper-paint-program eye candy..]

Source: http://www.trnmag.com/researchwatch.html

More for Indians

2006-03-15T11:45:00.000+01:00

Well...Everyone wants a piece of Indian Talent. And, Italy seems to have recognised it too. Italy is offering a number of postgraduate programs in technology, management for Indian students. Scholarships are also available for all the programs. There will be a roadshow in Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai this april, 2006.

For more details check the following links..
http://www.postgradinitaly.org/

The universities participating are:
http://www.postgradinitaly.org/universities.htm

And, the scholarships
http://www.postgradinitaly.org/scholarship.htm

Buon Fortuna..

Masters & PhD in Computer Science

2006-03-08T12:01:00.000+01:00

Call for Applications for Masters and PhD program at Univ. of Trento.
These are some of the links for reference:

http://dit.unitn.it/edu/compsciences/home.xml?lang=en
http://dit.unitn.it/education/mcs/index.xml
http://ict.unitn.it/ict/admissions/calls.xml#1

There a number of scholarships reserved for Indian students in masters program.

Blogopedia

2006-01-19T18:08:00.000+01:00

Knowledge IN = a*(Information OUT) + b

The Million Dollar Homepage

2006-01-04T13:06:00.000+01:00

The Million Dollar Homepage - Own a piece of internet history!

A business student, Alex made million dollars just by selling pixels of his homepage. More details, read this CNN report. I am not really impressed by the idea..nor I really understand why people buying pixels..I agree that the site receives some millions of unique hits per day..making it one of the hottest page. And, hence ads that are hosted by this page also receive enormous number of hits...and thus increasing the business.

Anyway....he made money..; And, interestingly one more guy has started the same thing just couple of days back.."one million dollar page"...claiming that he is not competing with alex, as alex already financed his education and can now buy some stocks....he says that he is just trying his luck.

Now, imagine that everyone hosts a similar page selling pixels...who will buy whose pixels..and what abt the users...they will visit which page....

The idea is interesting...alex has already got tons of job offers and even thinking of quitting his studies...it just proves innovation can never end...there are tons of ideas lying around to make big money....you just have to discover them..:)

Groove Virtual Office

2005-12-28T12:28:00.000+01:00

Smarter ways to work..that is all about the groove virtual office network. It seems to be a very powerful tool. Often people at work places have problems communicating each other, people find it difficult to keep update of each other's work. If more then 2 people are developing software, it's nightmare to get synchronized. Sending large files in e-mails is a headache.

Groove offers all this. It has features of file sharing, project management etc. I haven't tried it out personally as I am not in a software workplace. But, I have gone through all the features. It is recently bought by Microsoft. It offers demo version for 60 days to try it out. Interestingly, the architecture is peer-to-peer. There is no centralized server. Hence, making it more robust and scalable.

Here are some of the useful docs to get a complete picture of its working..
Architecture
Background

And, the main website is
Groove

You have a solution to every problem in this world. Ofcourse, every solution comes with its own problems. And that's why we researchers have a job..:)

Erasmus Mundus Scholarship

2005-12-12T10:28:00.000+01:00

European Master program is jointly offered by three major universities of Europe (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, RWTH Aachen University, Germany and the University of Trento, Italy). It's one of the very unique program, where besides getting degree from two of the above three universities, you can get a scholarship of 21,000 euros per year. The programs offered are Masters in Net-Centrics, Bio-Informatics and Embedded Systems.

I personally know the students studying in this program and they are having great time. Courses from excellent faculy and also get to know different cultures, njoying the beauty of scotland, italy and germany.

Check out the article written by a student who got this scholarship. And for more information check out the website Eumi

And, for the list of all the programs available in Europe under the Erasmus scheme are listed here

Personalised Web Search

2005-12-09T11:28:00.000+01:00

Yahoo recently introduced MyWeb. I just came across this couple of day back and I was sure that google would come up with something similiar in a day or two. And Here it goes..

Now, you don't need to spend hours looking for a webpage that you found yesterday. Google maintains your search history and also provides feature of book mark.

Personalised websearch seems to be the next big thing. But is it really gonna be. Well, it's all about vision. I personally feel it's gonna be the next revolution...the context of social information retrieval. But we should identify the proper direction to explore...otherwise will get lost ..

Let's see how long personalized websearch gonna stay....

Structure of Webpages

2005-11-30T15:30:00.000+01:00

Don't get frightened by it. It's not the shape of any living organsim and I'm not gonna talk about any biological stuff:).

Have you ever wondered how the web looks like. How the webpages are linked to each other. Well, you can see it above. There are 44 million webpages that have just outgoing links..(more like my personal webpage), and there 44 million webpages that have just incoming links..and the middle component are those which have both in degree and out degree. It is the largest connected component of the internet.

There are some tendrils, which are some standalone pages...in and out degree equal to zero.

For more details:
Refer:
Graph structure in web; published in WWW9.

It's quite an interesting study...which helps the crawling algorithms of the web and also determines the evolution of web.

Might be after 5-10 years..the structure may change. Let's see..

Academic Dishonesty : Internet

2005-11-10T15:56:00.000+01:00

My prof today told me about an interesting article, which I would like to share with you all. I have attached the PDF file, it's an article in one of the ACM journal written by a professor from Columbia University.

The professor gave the students a project to code for bulk-loading a B+ tree. He came to know that the project statement had been posted in the forum of an online service http://www.rentacoder.com/ , which provides online bidding for coders.

Read on the article to know how the professor got the culprit. The university of columbia has redefined the academic honesty policy http://www.cs.columbia.edu/education/honesty . The last sentence made by the author is pretty good. "Perhaps students searching for Internet-based subcontractors will find this column among the hits (it includes most of the right keywords) and appreciate the risk they are taking."

PS: The link for the article
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1090000/1089131/p29-ross.pdf
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1090000/1089131/p29-ross.html

Google "Academic Dishonesty and the Internet"

citeULike

2005-10-08T17:53:00.000+02:00

I have come across a free online service to share, store and organise the academic papers that one is reading.

citeULike

Vaasu's Library

One can maintain a library of papers that he has recently read and papers that he likes to read. It automatically extracts citation details and also generates the bibtex file. You can view other users library, what they are currently reading and keep watch on users sharing common research interests.

Check out the site for more details if you are interested... There is one more such service Connotea

There's no end to one's imagination.....this is an example to prove it.

"Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere"