Carthik Sharma

PicBreeder is an ongoing effort at UCF (where I study/work) to create images using Genetic Algorithms. It is a community-based website where you can create an account and breed your pictures. I saw Mutating Pictures doing the rounds, and thought of how PicBreeder deserves some attention too. For one, you have more options for fun at PicBreeder, and you can turn a Butterfly into a Bat!

Filed by Carthik at 4:49 pm under Science, Research No Comments

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Knuth, Up Close - it is so hard to find anything resembling a closer look into the lives of the great. Knuth is one of the greats still alive. I enjoyed the article immensely.

Filed by Carthik at 2:55 pm under Science, Research 1 Comment

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So someone has written a paper on how to listen to someone typing on a keyboard and convert that to the text that was typed. I read about at freedom to tinker, via Podz. The concept being that if you have a recording of the sound of someone typing for a longish period of time (15 - 20 minutes) then you can use machine learning techniques to figure out the text that was typed - taking into account the fact that different words, and letter-sequences have different frequencies in English. It’s not scary or anything — just interesting.

I have a friend who could, with some accuracy figure out the phone number that was “dialled” by listening to the key-press tones - all this reminds me of him.

Filed by Carthik at 7:15 pm under Research No Comments

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I defended my candidacy proposal today, and I guess I did it in an agreeable fashion, since there were not too many questions at the end. I have passed the candidacy exam, its time to move on, and get the rest of the Ph.D. done.

Filed by Carthik at 5:10 pm under Yours Truly, Research 9 Comments

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The UCF Groupwise server seems to be down. I need to login and retrieve a file, but can’t. I have also had several other problems accessing mail using Thunderbird, my email client. Old emails mysteriously get downloaded again, and get tagged as new, and then I have to delete them.

UCF has a really weak and sorry IT infrastructure. It is almost entirely built upon Windows technologies.

What other university website do you know of, where the “www” subdomain returns a different page from the example.edu page. ucf.edu and www.ucf.edu are not the same.

I tried setting up my website at http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ca851813 before I outgrew it, since it just didn’t work, most of the time. The default index page on that server is “home.html” and not “index.html” which is kind of arcane.

I wonder why unlike some other universities, UCF is not so welcoming to open source technologies and products. Someone at the GOLUG said that when they tried to generate some interest for the LUG among the university engineering professors, the response they got was, “No, we really don’t want to be associated with evil hackers, now, do we?”.

The university-wide online management system, based on PeopleSoft even returns a”You are not using Internet Explorer, and you can expect to die, or rot in hell” error if you try to login using anything but IE.

The other day I called the writing center for some LaTeX related help. They were confused at first, and I guess they thought I was some crazy Indian screwing up the English language, and so I spelt it out for them. They said they will get back to me after they find someone who is an expert at using LaTeX. A half hour later I got a call saying no one in the writing center had heard of LaTeX before.

There are so many instances, that occur almost on a daily basis, that makes it more difficult for me to work efficiently (not that I am really industrious), like for example WebCT, which I have to fight with as a part of my job as a T.A. Setting up a website for a course is hell, if you don’t have your own private server/hosting account.

Oh well - I just had to let go of a little steam. UCF would make a perfect case-study of how open source technology can make life easier and simpler, and more economical, too.

Filed by Carthik at 1:09 am under Research 6 Comments

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I had a long meeting with my adviser yesterday. Long as in almost 4 hours. Most of the problems I have are those that I created. I prefer working for long stretches of time, rather than work at things for short periods of time, with many interruptions. I also tend to get started on things late, or get serious about things late, and my efficiency goes up as the deadline nears. But now, with the candidacy proposal, I am faced with a different problem, or different problems. Problems of a nature I haven’t dealt with before. I have to define problems, and then solve them if possible. I have to link quite a few ideas, concepts, or solutions, and compare and contrast them. I have to always remember that quantifying effects, or methods, and measuring improvements is important, even when it is hard to find a common baseline to compare things.

Now the problem is, when I sit to write something, I start with exploring a possibility, and trace it to its possible ‘end’. I see inconsistencies, and can see how I will have a problem if I go down that route, so I drop it and start thinking again, from scratch, with a scratchpad and pencil. So, after a few hours at worst, or two hours at least, I am still where I started with respect to writing the proposal. When I have a meeting with the adviser the next day, I sit down to frame my thoughts, and then I have little or nothing to actually write, that will make coherent sense! This will not do, and now I have the daunting task of using the next 2-3 days to write a coherent proposal, with some conclusions and a plan for future work. There are times when I admire my adviser for his patience and level-headedness. I would have shouted at Carthik quite a few times by now! I don’t want to think of the worst that could happen. Those thoughts are shut out, for now.

After the meeting, I went home, and did not have any energy, so I fell asleep in front of the TV, before actually going to sleep a little later, and for the first time in a year or more, I did not turn on my laptop after getting home.

I miss having a lot of fun, I miss my daily dose of browsing, chatting, and the WordPress work, but I will be able to get back to normal, and spare some time for my interests beyond the Ph.D. in a week at best, and after three weeks at worst. I miss life, but that’s only normal, or so I hear from others who have been here, where I am right now.

Filed by Carthik at 4:32 pm under Yours Truly, Research 4 Comments

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I cannot make up my mind whether I am having fun, or getting screwed, nor can I decide for once if I am lazy, or it’s the writer’s block.

In any case, there are a lot of thoughts floating in my head, with regard to the candidacy proposal I am working on. Today is the big day, when I hope to make sense of the bits ‘n pieces I have jotted, or typed down as notes, some strands floating in my mind, what I have written before, the few graphs I have of results of simulations and a few fresh ideas.

My advisor insists that I deliver a motivating example to convey the meaning behind some of the mathematical stuff I am doing. The Byzantine generals problem and the counterfeit coin problem probably come closest to what I will be trying to describe. Describing a mathematical framework, and then trying to derive relations between the mathematical entities is what I will attempt to do tonight. There are so many disparate things, that are all bound together - so many elements that need to go into that one document in an organized fashion, that I get lost, and lose the big picture, if I work in fits and starts, so a marathon session tonight should get everything in reasonable shape. Another significant problem is trying to relate my work to the work that has already been done, in different fields, and making myself look smart. Like, “see this guy was good, but he’s not smart enough to have seen this“, or something to that effect. It is amazing how innovative some technical authors and researchers get when it comes to digging up references and quoting previous work. I have a list of links I have to convert into a threaded conversation.

About the lazy Vs. Writer’s Block thing — it feels great to think of small problems, one at time, and to do nothing but that - just mull over specifics. When it comes to writing it down, half the ideas break down. The other half seem incomplete, and more often than not, I wonder what happened to all the things I thought I’d be writing about!

In any case, this is the most challenging and stimulating thing I have been engaged in, for a while. Solving problems from Irodov’s Problems in General Physics, which was in vogue among the IIT aspirants, and which one of the cool books that MIR published. MIR is now almost defunct, and a lot of the books, including Problems in General Physics are now out of print. I guess this is one of the undesirable side-effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I look forward to the night. Time to go home, now.

Filed by Carthik at 5:34 pm under Yours Truly, Research 2 Comments

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Dr. Thomas Butler was a medical researcher working on finding a cure for Plague, who is famous for pioneering oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea in the ’70s. One day in January 2003, his life changed drastically as a result of his honesty, and it will never be the same again, ever. He is now “Dr.Plague” and the latest victim of a witchhunt and the political game called “The War on Terror.”

Nobel Prize winners, microbiologists and scientist and even the National Academy of Sciences have thrown their weight behind this man, who has dedicated his entire life to the service of the United States, it’s citizens, and in a sense, the whole world.

Read the entire article at the Independent News : A poisonous kind of justice

This sent a chill up my spine. I am shocked and distressed. I am amazed at just how important a part politics plays in the life of individuals who have had nothing to do with it, and how persecution can happen, even in the Land of the Free. The government is not setting a good example here, and as noted by some in the article, it sure looks like a lot of scientists will prefer not to report what’s missing from their labs, than to lose their credibility, license, job, money, and freedom.

Does the government, or whoever is behind this even think of what the implications of their actions are? Who would want to alienate scientists and do things that, in my mind are connected with oppresive regimes and dictatorships, like sacrificing innocent people to “set an example”!!

Sad.

Filed by Carthik at 3:42 am under Science, Research 2 Comments

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The research proposal our research group had submitted to NASA has been accepted! So I will now be working on a NASA research project, and hopefully, the results of my work will go to the far reaches of the Universe, though it may only be an unnoticed circuit, or chip.

Our project proposal got accepted against steep odds - only about 1-2% of the proposals submitted nationwide got accepted, and the acceptance process itself had two phases. So now there is the oppurtunity for us to do some nationally recognized work, as my kind adviser put it in his mail.

Now I can take this link off my list of bookmarks, after almost a year!

I would so love to party, but we are moving to a different apartment this weekend, and I have a research report due.

I cannot express how happy I am, this is something I have waited for too long, and I was past the stages of excitement and anxiety, I was numb, out of waiting.

Filed by Carthik at 5:19 pm under Research 13 Comments

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I thought it must be pretty obvious to have a website/page that lists
1. All the conferences that are to take place in Electrical/ Computer Engineering in the near future.
2. All the “call for papers” in the different fields of Engineering
3. All the “solicitations” for proposals in the different fields of Engineering.

You can extend that you other fields of research, such as the humanities.

After a relatively extensive search, I find that there is no such page, at least for electrical/computer engineering.

Say I have an interesting idea I want to write a paper about. How do I find the conference to publish it in? And also, if the paper is not that great, you know, to merit being published in a leading conference paper (IEEE/ACM in my case), how do I find the other conferences/journals I can send it to.

Basically, if I want to use conferences/seminars as an excuse to visit some city/country, and get reimbursed by my university, how do I go about it?

Need to ask the advisor, but he might just laugh at me, ’cause I dont have any papers worth publishing right now, but hell, this is a good source of motivation. If there was a conference in Crete I could attend if I had a paper, then the paper shall be written, for sure

Filed by Carthik at 5:40 pm under Research, Livejournal 2 Comments

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