It happened to me when I was in iitm for a week. Now, thats what i call a huge campus, which is as beautiful as it is massive. And my navigational skills suck ! ( This is one of the rare things i actually admit , I am bad at , so it can deciphered how bad I must be ).
So I wanted to take a walk to this place called Gurunath stores. I remembered someone had told me to go in the direction opposite to what I take when i go to Computer science block ( Or was it the sharavati hostel ? ) and walk until i see a small ICICI placard, and walk left from that. So I start walking left from Building Science block and kept walking for a long distance, waiting to spot that ICICI placard. It was a long time before i realised that the turns didnt seem familiar, hence i should ask someone for directions. A gentleman gave me a very warm ( sympathetic) smile and told me wait at a spot for the bus which would take me there. I bravely assured him that i wanted to walk and hence be kind enough to give the directions. So I walk beside the hockey-football grounds, electrical engineering dept, and take a right, when i suddenly spot that damn ICICI placard !
I "globally localized " and shifted the whole map in my mind according to my new position. And i did it as an impulse. That is when it struck me ! So this was what MK ( my robotics prof ) kept drawling on in the Mobile Robotics classes !
I have drawn analogies before, but it was never this striking. And the fact that i did it almost as an impulse, made me started thinking how someone would have bumped across the concept of "localization" and decided to use it for robotics !
After learning robotics for 2 years, "localization" is definitely a concept/term would take a permanent place in my dictionary/vocabulary.
With my perfect knowledge about the world, I proudly made my way back towards the sharavati hostel.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
The two pillars.
This post is an ode to those two people who literally shaped my professional career, sometimes knowingly and mostly unknowingly.
Yoda: I call him 'sir', but found an apt name after I watched star wars. He is probably the only person I have met till now, whose rationality actively strives to equal his brilliance. Inspite of being 50-something, He still has a well-nested child-like curosity in him, which makes him so approachable and an extremely interesting person to have around. He is a self-made genius, who didnt even start as a CompSci engineer, but today sustains single handedly various projects in my ex-workplace. On why and how did he shape my career, i woudl exactly quote a mail i wrote to him long time ago. -
"Now when i look back to those 2 years in eI, i can only think how lucky i was. When students enter industry, they witness petty politics and manipulation, but i got a chance to work with u and what i witnessed was sheer techincal excellence, humility and fairness, which helped me to be myself."
I regret I couldnt get to know him better, one because I felt shy, and second because he was a bigshot in the workplace and I felt a little hesistant in doing so, though I am sure he would have never minded.
A.G - This guy, fortunately was a close friend, and at a time, i was having serious exsistential crisis. A child prodigy, who has impressive academic records is also a self-made genius. There is nothing that this guy hasnt tried his hands on, electronics, mechanics, every damn field of computer science etc etc. In that way, AG and Yoda draw many parallels. They both are brilliant, humble, curious and fair, I used to always wonder what is that they are talking about in the office parking lot . There have been million times I felt like dropping by, craving to just listen to those intelligent exchanges, and maybe express an opinion or two. Well, there was no else i could talk about stuff like Computing and Intelligence, Science fiction, philosophy and metaphysics. But just knowing that they were there, who were interested in something more than APR's , QPR's and office politics was a consolation enough, that I would survive too. Inspite of all insanity around, these people stood as my pillars , mostly unknowingly, that there is still a lot of good and fairness in the world.
P.S : I wish i could write well, I feel i havent done justice to the ode.
Yoda: I call him 'sir', but found an apt name after I watched star wars. He is probably the only person I have met till now, whose rationality actively strives to equal his brilliance. Inspite of being 50-something, He still has a well-nested child-like curosity in him, which makes him so approachable and an extremely interesting person to have around. He is a self-made genius, who didnt even start as a CompSci engineer, but today sustains single handedly various projects in my ex-workplace. On why and how did he shape my career, i woudl exactly quote a mail i wrote to him long time ago. -
"Now when i look back to those 2 years in eI, i can only think how lucky i was. When students enter industry, they witness petty politics and manipulation, but i got a chance to work with u and what i witnessed was sheer techincal excellence, humility and fairness, which helped me to be myself."
I regret I couldnt get to know him better, one because I felt shy, and second because he was a bigshot in the workplace and I felt a little hesistant in doing so, though I am sure he would have never minded.
A.G - This guy, fortunately was a close friend, and at a time, i was having serious exsistential crisis. A child prodigy, who has impressive academic records is also a self-made genius. There is nothing that this guy hasnt tried his hands on, electronics, mechanics, every damn field of computer science etc etc. In that way, AG and Yoda draw many parallels. They both are brilliant, humble, curious and fair, I used to always wonder what is that they are talking about in the office parking lot . There have been million times I felt like dropping by, craving to just listen to those intelligent exchanges, and maybe express an opinion or two. Well, there was no else i could talk about stuff like Computing and Intelligence, Science fiction, philosophy and metaphysics. But just knowing that they were there, who were interested in something more than APR's , QPR's and office politics was a consolation enough, that I would survive too. Inspite of all insanity around, these people stood as my pillars , mostly unknowingly, that there is still a lot of good and fairness in the world.
P.S : I wish i could write well, I feel i havent done justice to the ode.
7 things that research taught me.
1) Happiness is rare, cherish it while you can.
- Sounds dramatic ? Try living through the ups and downs ( usually downs) of missing deadlines, paper rejections, getting your ego crushed, watch your peers pass out etc etc.
2) 'Guide'liness is next to Godliness.
- For those of us who are atheists, as if the world fights back in revealing a new power in the form of a middle aged man/woman, who has the power to affect your life on everyday basis. For others who already believe in almighty find themselves showing intense partiality in devotion to this new source of power.
3) Money is rare too, cherish it, while it lasts.
- Living on meagre Research Assistantships ( as if calling it an RA is supposed to make it sound honourable ), rarely lasts when the month is coming to an end. Hence the sheer desperation of living within the means turns out to be a pattern in extravagances in the former days of the month and penurious in later half.
4) All thesis topics are either too aimbitious or taken.
5) You are an insignificant drop in the ocean.
- And you thought, you didnt want to be just one among the thousands of IT engineers, clunking away the keyboards in their cubicles ? Well here you find, there is another kind of ocean, reseachers in almost completely saturated domains, where you still end up being an insignificant researcher , with the exception of course, some of the brightest or luckiest kinds.
6) Almost all research end up at the blind alleys of open problems.
- From wherever you start, you have to given in to an outstanding open problem in that domain. It would be either intractable or NP-hard. Hence you end up using patchy solutions that have been already in use, indicating to the fact, that till these open problems are tackled, there is not much one can do.
7) I cannot be an island.
- One never really realises the importance of friends (in some rare cases, family), when one is facing the frustuation of research. I remember one faculty say once - " Research is a very lonely experience", and i cant agree more.
P.S : Usually i am not this pessimistic, and i hate this side of me. I still like research.
- Sounds dramatic ? Try living through the ups and downs ( usually downs) of missing deadlines, paper rejections, getting your ego crushed, watch your peers pass out etc etc.
2) 'Guide'liness is next to Godliness.
- For those of us who are atheists, as if the world fights back in revealing a new power in the form of a middle aged man/woman, who has the power to affect your life on everyday basis. For others who already believe in almighty find themselves showing intense partiality in devotion to this new source of power.
3) Money is rare too, cherish it, while it lasts.
- Living on meagre Research Assistantships ( as if calling it an RA is supposed to make it sound honourable ), rarely lasts when the month is coming to an end. Hence the sheer desperation of living within the means turns out to be a pattern in extravagances in the former days of the month and penurious in later half.
4) All thesis topics are either too aimbitious or taken.
5) You are an insignificant drop in the ocean.
- And you thought, you didnt want to be just one among the thousands of IT engineers, clunking away the keyboards in their cubicles ? Well here you find, there is another kind of ocean, reseachers in almost completely saturated domains, where you still end up being an insignificant researcher , with the exception of course, some of the brightest or luckiest kinds.
6) Almost all research end up at the blind alleys of open problems.
- From wherever you start, you have to given in to an outstanding open problem in that domain. It would be either intractable or NP-hard. Hence you end up using patchy solutions that have been already in use, indicating to the fact, that till these open problems are tackled, there is not much one can do.
7) I cannot be an island.
- One never really realises the importance of friends (in some rare cases, family), when one is facing the frustuation of research. I remember one faculty say once - " Research is a very lonely experience", and i cant agree more.
P.S : Usually i am not this pessimistic, and i hate this side of me. I still like research.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)