Let me reaffirm that this isn’t a case of dementia, or of amnesia, or a scenario where my hippocampus has been surgically removed! If my identity were purely defined by my name, my gender, personality – I definitely know who I am, but all these metrics are subject to change – but there is definitely “something” that I perceive to remain unchanged throughout. What is it?!

It’s been 8 long “quarantined” months since my last post! Looking back, it seems like it was just yesterday. Well, my last blog-post was titled “Time: the great serpent” – it definitely captures the nature of time and its “cruel” nature to march in one direction!

Coming to today’s post : The title might be awkward to some but it might be perfectly natural to others. However, I think both sections of people should take the opportunity to introspect! I chose this title specifically because my blog has 2 “pages” that I had created ~10 years ago. One, “home” that hosts all my blog-posts and two, “Who am I” that houses a brief description of my upbringing, academic affiliations and my interests/hobbies. (If you haven’t guessed already, I have had to edit that page quite a few times!)

So, who am I?

This might seem like an unassuming, naive, almost trivial question. But let me remind you, this very question has bewildered philosophers, scientists over the last 2-3 millenia. A wide variety of theories have been proposed on this note, some mildly accepted while others vehemently refuted. One could ask, why even bother? Personally, I’m amused by the fact that we have such a gaping hole in our understanding of who we really are. This is fascinating to me, that we (human society) have made considerable progress in building macro-scale structures (like artificial islands off the coast, extremely tall sky-scrapers) and fabricating nano-scale instruments (e.g. DNA tweezers, engineering proteins to behave according to our desires) but haven’t yet gotten a grip of who “we” are.

A pure physicalist (materialist) reading this post would jump and exclaim – “We are nothing but matter. Our cells, atoms, molecules make “us” and there’s nothing more to it.” I think that’s reasonable because matter is all we get to perceive (either by our naked senses or through expert instruments). However, we know that the “matter” that makes “us” is constantly changing. Medical science reveals that we get a brand new “body” every 8-10 years, because the same cells that we had as a child are switched for newer cells as we grow older. For instance, our red-blood-cells (RBC’s) have a half-life of 27.8 days and we also know that new neurons are born during our lifetime and get incorporated into our neural circuits! So, it might be reasonable to assert that our identity might not be limited just to matter.

A step up from pure physicalism would be the Descartes fans. Rene Descartes was a phenomenal mathematician as he gave the world “Cartesian” coordinate systems and was a deep thinker, philosopher. “Cogito ergo sum” famously translated to “I think, therefore I am” was a statement made by Descartes introducing dualism to the western audience. Descartes boldly claimed that the mind was different from the physical system and his statement suggests that he can only be certain that he is a “thinking thing” – anything else could be an illusion or a trap set by a malicious evil-demon . I think that’s pretty apt, but let me probe one layer deeper. If Descartes concluded that “he” was a “thinking thing”, who is the “he” that is an observer of his thoughts?

We get back to the same old question: Who are we? We have good reason to believe that we’re not just matter, and that we’re not the mind, for we are the observers of the content of our mind and the actions of our body. So who is that “I” that remains unchanged while everything, from the physical body to the mental states are constantly changing?

My quest led me back to the East (I say, “back”, because “I” began there 26 years ago) and I’ve had the opportunity to study eastern philosophy and take baby steps to implement life-style changes that enable me to better question and understand this truth. The first book on eastern philosophy that I was introduced to was the Bhagavad Gita (BG) which translates to “Song of God”. As I flipped through the pages, I arrived at the second chapter and the answer was staring right at me.

BG 2.13 : देहिनोऽस्मिन्यथा देहे कौमारं यौवनं जरा । तथा देहान्तरप्राप्तिर्धीरस्तत्र न मुह्यति ॥ १३ ॥

dehino ’smin yathā dehe
kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā
tathā dehāntara-prāptir
dhīras tatra na muhyati

Translation: As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.

This answer resonated with my intuition and supported my empirical observation. A task that all of us can try: (i) Count the number of bodies present in the image below and (ii) Count the number people in the image below.

So, my answers are (i) 18 different bodies and (ii) 1 person! This is a very deep point, let it sink!

I am the same person through different phases of life – be it, as a child, as a young boy or as a “new” adult that I currently am, although my body, mind, goals, purpose, interests, intentions, IQ, EQ has changed over the last 26 years. In this verse, Krishna (the speaker of the gita) suggests that we are “re-incarnating” continuously through out our lives and after the body becomes weary, we take up another body.

For many people, reincarnation might seem pretty crazy. Honestly, even I felt the same way when I heard of it for the first time. However, as we see the evidence presented by researchers studying reincarnation and past-life memories, it definitely becomes fascinating (to say the least). Do check out the Netflix show “Surviving Death” – episode 6! It’s mind-blowing! And, when we really think about it : All of us build a model of the world and of how life functions based on our local experiences and our society, but that may be very far from the truth. Let me demonstrate this fact with a classic example: The story of the 6 blind men and the elephant.

Once upon a time there were 6 blind men navigating through a dense forest. As they traversed the forest, they came across a massive stationary object. The 6 blind men spoke to one another and decided that every man should inspect one part of the object – and should put their conclusions together to build a reasonable model of the object (hurdle) in their path. The first man held the tusk and exclaimed “Beware, sharp arrows here”. The second man held the trunk and it reminded him of a snake! The third man tried to push the object and found that it was as rigid as a wall. The fourth man climbed the object and concluded there might be a fan somewhere as the object produced drafts of wind (flapped its ears). The last 2 men, on touching the tail and hugging the legs of the object concluded that it could be a rope and a tree-trunk respectively.

After their brief experiment, they huddled and quickly came up with a model to describe the object. And this is what they concluded: Arrow + Snake + Fan + Tree-trunk + Wall + Rope => ?

Well, isn’t this miles away from the description of an elephant?!

As science progresses, we will find some answers and those answers will lead us to deeper questions. And it is an exciting time to be in Science! Here’s an interesting quote from twitter that captures this fact succinctly.

Please do leave your comments on what you consider to be your identity? Or if you’d be down to building your world-view from the model presented in Eastern philosophy — stay tuned!

The dichotomy between machines and living things is narrowing. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is embedded in all kinds of technology, from robots to social networks. AI has not only had its impact on people from all walks of life, but has also captured the hearts of all age groups.

Kids are introduced to “Internet of Toys” at a very young age, teenagers spend a significant amount of time interacting on social networks, while adults seek comfort by conversing frequently with AI agents like Siri and Alexa to get their music requests fulfilled, shopping wishes granted among other things. We also observe that AI has sneaked into the daily lives of our older generation, as they regularly deploy roomba for cleaning their apartments, and appoint AI personal assistants for managing their health needs.

Although the features of AI that have pervaded our lives help us navigate our complex lives, these applications do not capture the grandeur of artificial intelligence as proposed by AI visionaries of the past. Marvin Minsky, Frank Rosenblatt and Seymour Papert, AI proponents of the 60s, dreamt of a world dominated by “organisms” that would grow, divide and function just like humans, equipped with the added component of super-human intelligence.

The struggle to endow artificial systems with super-human intelligence began in the early 80s, where researchers collaborated with large firms (like IBM) to build computers that could defeat humans in strategy games like Chess or Go. The first instance of AI catching up with human intelligence was in the late 90s when IBM built Deep-Blue, a super computer that defeated Garry Kasparov (world chess champion) in a game of chess. 6 sets of games were played and Deep-blue won 4 of them.

Having defeated world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, AI researchers had every incentive to design smarter AI systems that could play a host of strategic games. However, this endeavor did not culminate in “smarter” AI systems for a very long time. This was partly due to the internet bubble burst and the exponential rise of personal computers in the early 21st century. The technological developments in the early 2000’s gave AI the right opportunity to sneak into the lives of common men, as a smart house assistant.

The next breakthrough in designing AI with super-human intelligence was recorded in 2016 when Alpha-Go, a supercomputer built by DeepMind, defeated Lee Sedol, 18 time world champion, in a game of Go. This was a momentous occasion for AI fans and critics as it convinced everyone that the field of AI still possesses large reserves of untapped potential.

Although AI has made a mark on our society by demonstrating its utility as well as its majestic powers, AI researchers still believe that AI systems have a lot to learn from humans. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist, world renowned for his work on building neural networks and AI systems, mentioned that human babies are far better than present-day AI systems in identifying objects. Object classification and identification are extremely important tasks that need to be performed by systems deployed in self-driving cars. As driver-less cars autonomously move around the city, they need to observe traffic rules, expect reckless fellow drivers and react promptly to jay-walking pedestrians.

His research group developed a simple, yet elegant example to demonstrate how complex AI systems that can beat Go world-champions, cannot identify simple objects in an image, a task that human babies can perform reliably. They trained an AI system to label images that have a car in the foreground as ‘car’. This was done by constructing a large artificial neural network (ANN) and feeding it images that have a car in the foreground. One of the images used for training the AI system is shown below in figure-3a.

The AI system was able to label images that have a car in the foreground as ‘car’ for all images in the training set (set of images that were used to train the AI system), and performed well on a test set (a set of images that the AI system hasn’t encountered before). Following this, the training image was perturbed by altering certain spatial frequencies of the image. This resulted in an image as shown in figure-3b.

Any human would immediately recognize that the perturbed image should be classified as a ‘car’ as the modified image contains a car in the foreground. However, complex AI systems fail miserably at this task! Premature deployment of such AI systems in self-driving cars would cause more chaos than convenience, as the world witnessed in Arizona, where a pedestrian was struck and killed by a self-driving uber in the night.

This brings us to an important set of questions: “Are current day AI-systems really “intelligent” or is their performance just a function of how much they’ve been taught explicitly?”; “Can AI systems ever autonomously grow and learn like humans do?” and “What should AI researchers do differently to build truly intelligent AI systems?”.

Researchers at Caltech believe that in order to develop truly intelligent AI systems, the field needs a total revamp as today’s AI systems are designed and built with the ancient mindset that proponents in the 80s harbored. On speaking to one of the graduate students, Guruprasad Raghavan, we learn that his work focuses on the second question posed above. He endows immature AI systems with a minimal set of rules to grow, connect and build complex architectures that subsequently self-organize their intelligence. He demonstrates that by equipping AI systems with strategies and algorithms adopted by human brains to grow themselves from a single cell, one can autonomously grow functioning ‘brains’ with human intelligence.

His latest work demonstrates that artificial systems can grow their own brains, akin to how a baby’s brain grows from a small set of cells as a fetus to the 8 billion neurons present as an adult. Figure-4 has been borrowed from his paper titled “Neural networks grown and self-organized by noise”, where he shows a single cell seeded on a scaffold, divides, migrates and locally communicates with other cells to form complex architectures.

The functionality of artificial systems growing their own `brains’ and self-organizing their intelligence holds the key to fulfilling the vision laid down by the founding fathers of AI in the early 60’s. We have observed a gradual evolution of AI systems over the past 50 years, as we have moved away from human-designed artificial systems, towards systems that can autonomously grow and function like humans do!

William Gibson’s statement “The future is already here” is no exaggeration for AI as our era is one in which AI systems seamlessly interact with humans on a daily basis providing some people comfort, while others distress. The ability to function at human intelligence levels might mitigate the distress it currently causes, and this would be made possible by allowing artificial systems to have dynamic brains like ours.

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparov
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol
3. Jo, Jason, and Yoshua Bengio. “Measuring the tendency of CNNs to learn surface statistical regularities.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.11561(2017).
4. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/perceptrons
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html
6. https://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ai/a-brief-history-of-neural-nets-and-deep-learning/
7. Guruprasad R, M. Thomson, “Neural networks grown and self-organized by noise”, under review

I’ve always wanted to write about the Indian “Education” system. I’ve deliberately put “Education” within quotes, because Education is a very heavy word, unfortunately taken lightly by most I know in the business of “educating”.

Let’s start by defining Education. The Oxford dictionary has a couple of definitions and I’m going to cherry-pick the one that resonates best with what I believe, which is, it being referred to as an “Enlightening experience”. Another definition states that it is a process of giving/receiving systematic instructions.

In my opinion, the Indian system definitely excels in fulfilling the latter, but do students going through the system feel “enlightened”? Is the emphasis on helping students learn/understand concepts simply because it’s fundamental for their development OR is the ultimate goal to ensure that students ace their exams?

Now, you would ask me – Doesn’t ensuring that students ace their exams imply that they’ve got to master their concepts? In most cases, students do end-up learning fundamentals in order to ace their exams (which is good news!). However, there is a problem.  The problem I refer to is very subtle, but it grows on the student for as long as he’s trapped in the same system. So, the longer he is in the system, the more damaging it could be.

What is lacking?

Now, coming to the problem. Although most students end-up learning the fundamentals, but are they doing so in the right-spirit? If the sole goal for mentors, teachers is to improve their score in an exam, I claim that students are being denied the opportunity to learn concepts in the right-spirit. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe it is essential to have exams as they are one-among-many positive-feedback techniques. Here, the emphasis is on, one-among-many. Every “education” system should recognize this before as they define their teaching pedagogy.

What do I mean by learning in the right-spirit? I believe every student should have fun while learning a subject, experience the intricate beauty of the subject while studying it AND  learn fundamentals (concepts) such that they stick forever. This metric implies that *blind* rote-learning goes out of the window. And, it is trivial to see, goal-driven learning remains useful as long as the goal exists. As soon as the goal is taken out of the picture, students have no incentive to retain any of that information. (Solution: change your goal, folks. Board exams/entrance exams aren’t goals, they are means to an end, not the end in itself!).

*If someone lectured me on this^ philosophy before my board exams, it wouldn’t have stuck, but if the education system truly believed in this and incorporated it in their teaching methodology from day-1, I would need no convincing.*

When I look back at my school days, my memory is clogged with instances where I am incessantly preparing for exams, striving really hard to get the best score and feeling *relieved* when I topped my class or disappointed when I didn’t. But, what I feel as a PhD student is sheer excitement while uncovering the beauty of the subject, motivating me to learn more and discover more.

What can we do?!

I honestly believe, every student in school can experience this *pure* excitement if the lectures/classes were put forward with this goal. If you were to sit in an English class, and read a prose together, you would instantly teleport to a virtual world where each one of us becomes a character in that story. This makes an English class enjoyable and is one of the reasons why we remember these stories for life. My question is, can we do the same for the sciences or math?

I think we can – but we NEED a drastic change in approach, mentality, learning outcomes and methodology. Apart from teachers tweaking their techniques, the system (school/affiliated boards) should hand-over autonomy to teachers to ensure that they don’t keep worrying about covering syllabus within the stipulated time (and do a half-baked job in the process) AND schools should stop rating their faculty (especially their success) by how well their students score in the board examinations. Productivity can be measured via many other metrics and in my opinion, board exams seem most unreliable.

To make this suggestion more concrete, I have started writing a science blog aimed at a mixed audience. The topics I will write about are going to be predominantly focused on advanced math and its application in the study of biological systems. I will be tweeting about it as soon as it’s up! -Stay tuned 🙂

I should have ended my last post with the phrase “Phir Milenge chalte chalte”. For my non-hindi readers, it literally translates to “We’ll meet again, walking”. (P.S: The phrase refers to a metaphorical walk)

^Why do I say so, you ask?

Simply because, the only thing that excites me to blog more than ever is the successful completion of my second half-marathon, or my first half-marathon outside India! The other exciting element of this run was that I successfully set my best PR (personal record) of 2 hrs and 9 min beating my earlier record by ~20 minutes! All about my first half is documented here – Auroville half marathon.

It’s all about training. Maybe.

I’d like to start by describing the days that led to this eventful day. I’ve been training to run at a reasonable pace with the major goal of being injury free after the run. Every third day, I ran  5-6 miles (~8-9 km) and the weekends just a bit more (~7 miles = 11 km). Apart from running on concrete, I attempted to cross train as well by incorporating swimming sessions whenever I could. Every swimming session, I set a goal of clocking 45 min or 1 km (whichever happened earlier).

This definitely sounds good. But, the fault in my training regime was that I never pushed more than 15 km while I trained. This was one of the major reasons I was super anxious and (nervous) while starting the race.

Before I get to race-day specifics, every race I’ve taken part in has been made possible by my fantastic running buddies. I think they play multiple roles – all the way from motivating you to pacing you and making the run very enjoyable. While in IIT, it was Atul, Balaji, Srikiran and Aritra who were my constant running companions. Here at Caltech, Jing has been my running buddy. Apart from having fun running along with her, the thing I appreciate the most is, how she’d drive down to my place at 6:15 AM, drive me to Rose-bowl every Sunday, train on the 6.2 mile loop and drop me back at my place. I really owe my finishing the HM to her! 🙂

And, finally moving on to some pictures from the race-day!

 

My life has been so eventful – that I haven’t taken the time out to share it with people who’ve expressed interest in reading my blog. Not the best excuse, I realize.

CMU, my lucky charm 😉

First things first, I have graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with an MS (Research) in Biomedical Engineering (BME) a semester early with 1 published paper, 2 papers in the pipeline, 2 conference posters and a 4.0/4.0 GPA! Am I relieved to be done with CMU?! Nay! I’d love to stay on and continue to research here. However, I should admit the ad-hoc future plans that have materialized in the past few months are equally exciting to me!

Caltech, here I come!

Yes, as the title suggests, I am heading to California Institute of Technology (Caltech) {Fall’17} to pursue my PhD in BioE with my research interests focused towards building mathematical/physical models to understand biological processes.

Caltech has been my dream for close to seven years now! I learnt of Caltech for the first time when I was in grade 11. As I was preparing for the IIT-JEE then, I came across Feynman’s lecture series (books) and his recorded lectures at Caltech from the 1960’s. They were fascinating and this got me excited about possibly applying to Caltech for my under-graduation. Things didn’t work out and I ended up joining IITM instead. While at IITM, I applied for SURF (Summer undergraduate Research Fellowship) at Caltech during my sophomore and junior years. I did get to the phone-call interview stage both times, but I didn’t make the final cut. Disappointing? Yes. However, I did get to work with other stellar research groups which I believe played a crucial role towards nurturing my interest for research. I tried again, but this time it was trying to secure a a PhD position at Caltech straight after my 4 years at IITM. I knew exactly who I wanted to work with, followed their work closely for more than two years and was brimming with research ideas that I wanted to implement. And, the result was – Reject! Well, the brighter side of the story was – I got accepted at CMU & UC Berkeley (to name a few). After spending 1.5 years as a Masters student at CMU, I applied again (to Caltech) with no hopes whatsoever.

As you’d know by now, the result has been positive. I’m going to share a few more tidbits about my anxiety and excitement after submitting my PhD application.

I submitted my application on 13th December’16 and didn’t hear back until Jan 24th’ 17. Usually, if a student is accepted or called for an interview, the result is declared before Jan 15th. Having heard nothing about my application until Jan 15th, I gave up every hope of getting in. But, receiving the call for an interview on 24th Jan was shocking (the good kind)! I attended the interview scheduled during the first week of February on campus and realized that I was not only excited about the possibility of working with stellar faculty on interesting problems, but also was in love with the place (perfect combo as I need to spend ~5 years)! Having completed my interviews, there was another long wait for decisions. They promised to get back to us by March 1st or 2nd. But, I didn’t hear anything from them until March 12th, and this got me super-anxious. I successfully distributed this anxiety among my friends and family (sorry about that, folks). However, a few days later I received good news and realized that off the 35-40 students they called for an interview, ~14-15 were given an admit. I consider myself very lucky and blessed to have been given this opportunity to pursue my PhD at Caltech.

My transition to Caltech has been made more easier by a recent fellowship that I was awarded — “Jacobs Translational Medicine Fellowship” given to *outstanding* students with a broad interest in translational medicine research being pursued at Caltech.

All work no play makes Jack a Dull boy

Apart from my academic pursuit, I can proudly claim that I’ve spent every semester at CMU dancing for Diwali/Holi nights and have spent every single evening (barring the weekends, of course) working out. I would be found playing squash, swimming in the pool, running on the track or gymming at CMU’s exotic fitness center.

Dance – my cup of tea?!

Specifically talking about dance, I was in double-minds about performing on stage for this Holi night. Although the short-listed songs were phenomenal and the choreo was fabulous – the crew was new! Most members of my past dance team(s) were no more in Pittsburgh – this reduced my enthusiasm to perform as I strongly believe group dynamics plays a crucial role in making any experience fun-filled. The ice-breaker days were patience-intensive, but a few dance practices later, I enjoyed interacting with the new crew as their nuances grew on me. I ended up dancing in both — Bollywood and Kuthu (Tamil ghaati songs) dance groups! Having viewed the pictures clicked on/off stage and the videos for both my dances, I’m glad I went ahead and performed on the final day.

Classy Events – Wine Tasting night!

As I graduated last semester, this term has been a lot more relaxed as I’m focusing all my energy on an interesting research problem tackled by Dr. Jana’s group {as a Research Associate)}; instead of immersing myself in a mix of courses and research work. This “laid-back” lifestyle has prompted me to spend my weekends hanging out with friends at bars, clubbing, pursuing adventure sports and attending social events. The most classy event I attended this semester was that of wine-tasting; It was organized by the Graduate school Assembly (GSA) at CMU for its *tired, frustrated, in desperate need of a break* graduate student.  Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the event! I suited up, posed for many pictures with a classy wine-glass and realized I’m not the wine-kind!

With this, I shall end my reporting spree! I have a lot more to document and will do so over the next few days.

Until then, Adios Amigos!

Having come to Pittsburgh on 10th August 15′, I haven’t left the city for close to a year. In other words, I’ve been shuttling between home and campus (to be specific, lab) all this while. Well, my December break (2015) was uneventful on the entertainment front, but, on the brighter side, I got my spatial-state simulation building blocks (for mitochondria) in place.

My initial interest in studying the spatio-temporal states of organelles gradually evolved to an interest in being able to selectively control these, if possible. This got me reading articles on tools and techniques to “engineer” biology, that eventually led me to the vast field of Synthetic biology. As an undergraduate, I got an exposure of this field by actively participating in the Synbio journal club at IITM. This got me well-versed with very exciting work in the field as well as the big names in the field.

An opportunity to meet some of these people, and speak to them about their work, in a RNA for synthetic biology conference at Boston College was enticing! I instantly enrolled for the event and booked my tickets to Boston. I had the good fortune of having friends studying at Boston, who let me crash their couch for a week 😀 I stayed with Rohit, Rohan and Karthik at their dorm, close to MIT campus.

Needless to say, I had a great time at the conference; Interacting with speakers, exploring the city (mostly MIT & Harvard Campus 😉 and conversing with friends of the same wavelength, after ages! It was like re-living my IITM days 😀 Along with that, the food-joints I was taken to, were amazing! The chocolate house, the ice-cream place, the vegan restaurant, and many more.

As always, no blog-post ends without pictures.

 

The past few months, I’ve had so much content to share, and I could have easily devoted some time to write, but never took the time to “pull” that content from my head and “push” it to my blog.

Before I get to what kept me busy, let me begin by posting some Holi-Night pictures 😀 I’ve successfully completed two stage performances! The credit goes to Sahil and Neha, for pushing me to do so, during Diwali, last year 🙂

 

Having taken that short detour, if you’ve not noticed already, I’ve spent the last few months writing a lot of code; “pulling” it and “pushing” it to Git repositories. Code required for my courses, my research and my startup.

Yes, I’ve started up! We are “Whisker“, a startup that crowd-sources dog-sitting/boarding and walking services. For those who need more context, let me elaborate this. In the US, most dog-owners face the menace of finding an appropriate dog-sitter in their neighborhood, while they’re out-of-town. We solve this problem, by building a community of dog-owners that help each other when sitting services are requested. TL;DR, we are => “Airbnb for dogs”.  We’ve recently been recognized by CMU as a budding-startup, and got to be a part of the CMU NSF-I-Corps Spring-2016 cohort.

Apart from my startup, I’ve been working in parallel on my research at Dr. Ge Yang’s Lab. Currently, I’m working on a very fascinating problem. For completeness, I’m going to provide some background as well.

We know, as a matter of fact, that cells communicate. They could “speak” to each other via contact (exchange of elements), or could pursue long-range talk(s) by using chemical messenger molecules. This piece of information is well known in most cells, with the neurons being extremely well studied for this phenomena. We (@Ge’s Lab) hypothesize that there could be a network (communication) of organelles within a cell. To prove/disprove this hypothesis, I’ve designed a set of experiments for the summer. Apart from performing experiments, my work involves a lot of exciting math and statistics to model the existence of this network.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

No-play is a No-No for me. I swim almost every day, and play squash whenever I don’t get to the pool. Apart from working out, the last 2 weekends have been eventful, ie party-intensive. I’ve been on a cruise, danced on diwali & holi nights, and chilled out with friends in disco-bars more than once! 😉

Cruise Pictures

The “Holy” Holi Pictures

With this, I end this post.

I shall write more, this summer! Stay tuned 😀

 

It has been months since I last posted. Months, since I last got a hair-cut. Months, since I ate 3 meals in a single day!

Yes, this is my life as a graduate student in Carnegie Mellon University. I keep wondering if this description mirrors all students here, but the truth is, if lifestyles can be modeled as a real-valued function, it can be considered to mimic a poisson distribution, with my lifestyle score occurring at a point much deviated from the sample mean.

Having said this, I should say, I enjoy the lifestyle I’ve chosen for myself. I’d like to describe a typical day in my grad-life. And, here it goes:

Time	Daily Activity
5:30 – 6:30 AM	Wake Up
6:30 – 7:30 AM	Menial Activities (essential for most social-beings)
7:30 – 8:30/9:00 AM	Cook for the entire day (Lunch + Dinner) + Breakfast (CornFlakes)
9:00 AM	Leave for Lab with packed lunch
9:00 AM – 7:30 PM	Stay in Lab + Classes + Intermittent Lunch break
8:00 PM – 9:00 PM	Swim-Swim-Swim.
9:00 PM – 11:00PM	Back to Lab
11:00PM – 12:00AM	Play the Piano (Yes, I’ve started tinkering with the Piano!)
By 1:00 AM	Get back home/ Rest at lab (whichever is comfortable)

Having followed this schedule for the last few months, I have been successful in improving my swimming prowess. I swim the breast-stroke, and have been able to reduce my time from 1min and 30 sec to 57 seconds (for 50 m – Breast-stroke). The exercise has helped me trim down a lot of fat too! From the 74 kg back in IITM, I’ve reduced to 66-67 kg, and a trim-stomach (~0 belly fat)! A win-win scenario, I’d claim.

I enjoy the courses I’ve taken. The course on biophotonics helps me relive my JEE days (the time I loved learning physics and math, in a lot of depth), Neural data analysis has given me the opportunity of learning probability distributions and a lot of exciting decoding algorithms as well, while, the nanoscience course is providing me a platform to interface with my colorful past!

My research is quite exciting as well. I’m currently modelling molecular motors and studying transport of cargo along microtubules. I keep getting stalled, but my prof has been very kind to repeatedly advice me that, a researcher requires a lot of patience and perseverance, and stalling-troubleshooting and finally finding a solution is the perfect way to a successful innovation.

Oh, and I forget to add, I’m dancing on the CMU-Diwali night (on November 7th). If it does go well, I shall upload a video of the same, here 🙂

None of my posts go without pictures. Instead of spending time on perfect alignment on wordpress, I’ve discovered a fabulous online-collage tool (www.fotor.com).

In my earlier posts, I’ve explicitly stated how “awesome” the last four years have been, as well as described how nostalgic I get when I reflect on those memories (some good and some not so). Yes, I wouldn’t deny any of the earlier stated facts. But, let me throw some light on what I “felt” while entering IIT and how that changed over the last 4 years.

Time: Late June (2011).

Having cleared the IIT-JEE from Dubai, I was the only student from [India’]* to enter IIT-Madras (Class of 2015). As a result, I featured in the local newspaper, in quite a few advertisements (circulated in UAE) and got my name engraved for the third time in a Board dedicated for academic achievers in my school (DPS, Sharjah). [The first two times were for winning the Sheikh Hamdan Award and for being the School Headboy.] The praise that I received on the family front was quite encouraging as well as I was the first IITian (B.Tech) in the family.

Time: Late July (2011)

Reality dawned upon me once I set foot in IITM during the orientation. I was just one among 800 students (most with much better AIRs** than me). I loved being in the lime-light, and here, I was one among so many equals. The first few days, during our interaction sessions (with seniors), we had to state our name, branch, AIR and a few other details. Being in BT (known best for its worst placement stats), I was ridiculed thoroughly. There were some points during my first year when I felt I should have accepted my offer from NUS/NTU instead of coming to IITM.

While approching the end of my first year, a couple of seniors came to my room and gave me, what I call “pearls of wisdom”. It was a 5-hour session, intertwined with advice and some interaction. In short, they mentioned how it is absolutely USELESS to just be an IITian, simply because there are just too many. We sub-conciously do know this, but only once a friend/senior explicitly states this, does it have some impact on our working techniques.

I worked smart from then. Again, they taught me how to do so. I’ll take credit for implementation, though.

Time: 24-July-2015

Now, fast-forward to 24-July-2015. The title states it. The Grand End or being optimistic, I’d rephrase it as the Grand Beginning. The 3 years of semi-serious-fun work got me an award during my convocation. Being one among 15 award winners this year (out of 1800 graduating students), I received my degree from Dr. Manjul Bhargava (Fields Medalist) and IITM Director.

Yes, I can finally call myself a “Medalist”^@ from IIT Madras!

*Some simple set theory, here. ‘ indicates complement. [India’] implies all countries excluding India.

** AIRs expand to All-India-Ranks.

@ Calling myself a “Medalist” excites me for this reason. Early 2008, I recall my mom telling me how Dr. RD Sharma (famous Math textbook author) was a medalist from an IIT and she stated how that is one of the highest honors, one can get. And, the possibility of being classified in that league, is thrilling. And, a more current example, Sundar Pitchai, CEO of google, is a silver medalist from IIT Kharagpur!