Silicon Valley Diary

The road not taken

I shall be saying this with a sigh
Ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in the woods and I
Took the one less travelled by
And that's what has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost

The road not taken is among my favourite poems, and Robert Frost one of my favourite poets. The poem's beauty lies in the fact that you can read it like a half-full/half-empty glass. The optimist could derive a case for not following the herd and how it leads to success. The pessimist could assume that the sigh means that the choice made was wrong and led to an eventual failure. The beautiful co-existence of the yin and yang in the same lines is what increases this poem's appeal in my mind.

Ofcourse it makes me wonder about the next fork in my journey and what decision I will make. I am fairly happy with the way things are. Parents keep telling me that jobs are usually pretty boring and that all jobs tend to be of a repetitive nature. There are days when I am totally happy with everything that is going on in my life and others when I feel like I took a wrong turn in the road at some point and that I should make the next few turns so as to find my way back to that other road I didn't take. To be completely honest I haven't really chosen "a road not taken". My life has been about the beaten track for most parts, and that is a thing that worries me. In the Matrix Neo says when asked why he doesn't believe in fate "Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life". If I were able to predict in class 12 what I would be doing for the rest of my life that seems like a pretty boring life to me.

If life is to be measured by what one does over weekends I am living a full life. I hike regularly, read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies, try a lot of cuisines, travel some, love my music and TV.

Google Pages

Do visit my Google Page to know more about me.
http://saketj.googlepages.com/

Why Shawkeen?

Introducing my new blog called Shawkeen. http://shawkeen.blogspot.com

Indian population around the Bay Area is growing by leaps and bounds. The options for Indian food and others are increasing rapidly. While there are some review sites that rate restaurants around Silicon Valley, most of them aren't useful for Indian food lovers because our palates tend to enjoy higher spice levels more than others. There is also the search for the elusive Holy Grail of Indian cuisine, "The Perfect Butter Chicken" for some and the "The Perfect Dosa" for others.

The aim of this website would be encourage the top performers to achieve higher pinnacles of excellence and popularity. Also we want to help avoid any lunch or dinner disasters and encourage the wrecks to rise above their nadirs. So do come back for some reviews.

This blog supports the Anti-Quota Movement

BBC News Article 1

BBC News Article 2

A little late but I am against the stupid politicians all the same. I don't even think there should be reservations at colleges like COEP. The percentages are a problem... 50% is too much. Add to that reservations for girls and you have a recipe for stupidity. Plaudits to the students at AIIMS!

The IIT flu

A few days back Rahul Dabane, a friend of mine here gave me a digital copy of Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology". G H Hardy ofcourse is the famous Cambridge mathematician who discovered Ramanujan, the even more famous genius. Talking to Rahul and reading the book took me back to my high school days.

One of the major events in my life was M Prakash sir's Math Olympiad and IIT-JEE coaching class at Bhaskaracharya Pratisthana. I still recall the first time I met Prakash sir very distinctly. I was a tad shy of the requisite 90% score in class 10 mathematics but he asked me to solve some puzzle concerning the division of an angle whose vertex you couldn't access. I think I got the answer to that one and he let me into the Math class that summer. The class roster though was like the who's who of brilliant kids from all over Pune. Tejas Iyer, Dilys Thomas, Satyen Kale and many other geniuses I had vaguely known or seen at the Exploratory or from the NTS class and with whom I spent many hours at the class. Ofcourse most of the bright kids from that class ended up at IIT Bombay and then at some of the top American universities doing PhDs.

I hadn't gotten through NTS and hence I made a super-extra effort at the Regional Math Olympiad and managed to get selected for the Indian National Math Olympiad. That was probably one of the few times that I felt I have worked very hard for something. On most other occassions Ive never really been able to give my personal best. Ofcourse come INMO I slackened quite a bit and I think missed out on going to IMOTC as I recall because I didnt write "By Appolonius's Theorem" somewhere. I wasn't half as good as the rest of the kids who did go.

That done we had the JEE Math class by Prakash sir and if I was ever the worst student in any class, that was it. The 11th-12th days were a fairly topsy turvy rollercoaster ride for me for most parts. Crushes from those days used to be pretty debilitating, and I think one of those affected my performance at JEE for most parts. Another deal was that most of the smart kids at that class were soo far ahead and so brilliant, I used to consider the JEE an impossible goal. I was not focussed enough to qualify for JEE for sure but thankfully managed to get a respectable score on the HSCs although again nothing stellar.

Not getting through JEE was one of the biggest turning points in my life and I don't really know if I am a better person because of that. Would I have become a better engineer had I worked hard and somehow gotten in? How would my life have been different? Sometimes I think that going to the Math class there wasn't the best idea. It gave me such low self-esteem for so long that I never really realized that hardwork can make up for things and that some of these kids became smart because they had a huge head-start on all the problem solving approaches. It did bring this regret which I've only recently gotten over now because I think I eventually reached where I would have reached regardless of the intermediate path. I wasn't smart enough to go to EE at IIT without Kota style training, so being able to work on chip design was made possible purely because I went to COEP. The most important lesson I learnt was that, confidence in your abilities is one of the most important qualities one needs to have. Without it possible things become impossible and with it even some of the impossible things can become possible.

Life's battles don't always go
To the stronger or faster man.
But soon or late the man who wins,
Is the man who thinks he can.
- C. W. Longenecker

Thank you for the music!

Pune was a pretty comfortable place to grow up. If there was one thing I was deprived of, it was quality Western music. My father is deeply into Indian Classical music and is a total nerd when it comes to music systems too. We had this fancy state-of-the-art 1980s Sony system with Dolby noise suppression that works fabulously even today. Rafi, Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhonsle were constant companions but not so much the Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel. The only English cassette at home was from ABBA. If we lived in Bombay I'd have access to Times FM atleast but in Pune the only FM station was Akashwani.(BTW my home wireless network here is called Akashwani now. ;))

MTV was good when cable arrived on the scene for a little while and I was into all those latest fleeting wonders. But I'd never really heard or paid attention to any good music, the Floyds, U2s, the Police, Dylan... I used to love the "Retro Hour" on Radio Mirchi every night at 11pm... the one blue oasis in the desert sands of music mediocrity. Rehman ofcourse was great.

I think I've heard a lot of good music now thanks to MP3 technology, LimeWire (read Piracy :D), friends with good tastes, Classic Rock stations that abound in the US. I'd heard some of Alanis before but only recently did I download some and realize how much I like her. (Well I almost worship the ground she walks on!... well maybe not) But I adore her angry young woman style with meaningful lyrics... I love how I relate to her music whether it's the psuedo-ironic poetry in "Ironic", the anger at an ex-boyfriend from "You Oughta Know", her lovely voice from "Crazy"! So much so now that a pirate has turned into a convert. I want some Alanis on a CD now to play in my car. So you see even pirates can get reformed if good music beckons. Rock on!

On Intelligence By Jeff Hawkins

Few people out there are as smart as Jeff Hawkins. So it is quite fitting that he is interested in researching the human mind. The objectives of this research are unique though. His objective is to learn the workings of the brain and apply this knowledge into creating better computers. Being a computer engineer myself, I find such work fascinating.

So why do I think Jeff Hawkins is wicked smart? Well just take a look at his background. He is the father of handheld computing; founded Palm Computing, where he invented the PalmPilot and Handspring, where he invented the Treo. Ofcourse after making a few hundred million dollars, he can afford to research brains on a full-time basis.

The book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins is a good read. My knowledge of biology is pretty sketchy for most parts and of neurobiology was as good as non-existent. So just learning the basics of brain physiology and anatomy was educational for most parts. The book also talks about the failures of the field of Artificial Intelligence and why the approach is wrong. Neural Networks, he says kind of started in the right direction but suffer from drawbacks such as not giving enough importance to feedback connections in the networks.

The neo-cortex is the top layer of the brain that developed most recently on the evolutionary scale. It consists of 5 layers with the large-scale analysis being done in the topmost layer and fine-grain analysis in the lowermost. This is where the signals from all our senses, get sensed. The basic function of this region is basically to store patterns and then matching new patterns to the stored patterns to identify or extrapolate from them. Based on his research of the neo-cortex, Jeff has founded another company called Numenta, that works on pattern recognition software and hierarchical memories.

I've been trying to find out university research groups that do similar research when I landed upon some excellent work by Kwabena Boahen at Stanford. His work was even featured in the Scientific American last year. The objective of his group being to produce silicon versions of parts of the brain, albeit very rough approximations. The power efficiency and coding efficiency of the human mind is almost impossible to mimic in today's technology.