I’ve stumbled upon to this nice article (titled Principles of Effective Research) (I saw it through Mahdi’s  blog) by Michael Nielson (yes, the same Nielson who is known for his work on Quantum computation: the author of the popular (technical) book Quantum computation and quantum information). Even though, the title states “effective research”, I thought the underlying methods are applicable to any work, not merely research work. If you trust my word, then many of the points jotted down by Nielson applies well to life and work in general. It appears that he is writing a book on “The future of science“. I am looking forward to that too!

Wireless gigabit alliance (WiGig) has a new(updated) website. For a first up, there is a link How WiGig Works which nicely explain what  WiGig is all about, in a clear layman’s terms. If you ever wondered whether we saw the finale of the wireless rate surge, just re-think. We are still a lot far from drafting even a proposal, but there is surely plenty of light seen in the wireless horizon. As an example, HDTV would require about 3Gbps rate. WiGig is addressing applications such as this which demand rates beyond 3 giga bits per second. The brief tutorial is a compelling read.

Martin Gardner’s 95-th Birth day today. I dont think any other soul can claim to own the legacy of aspiring enthusiasm, among children and adults alike, on the subject of mathematics, in the most interesting and playful mode; Recreational mathematics transcended to newer heights thanks to Gardner’s amazing production of puzzles and games. A philosopher by education and a Navy man by profession, Gardner’s transition post World War II is something worth a story telling! I was (still remain so) a huge fan of Gardner ever since romping on to his old articles in the Scientific American volumes, which I greedily grabbed from NIT Calicut library. There was a time (in the pre internet and digital era) when I used to maintain a notebook of Martin Gardner puzzles, where I had handwritten the riddles and games. It is incredible to know that he is still active and steaming. Thank you Martin Gardner for spurring enthusiasm to many a generations. His “Colossal book of mathematics” is one of the worthy possessions in my library!

Many many happy returns of the day Martin. NY times has a nice page published on his birthday!

As someone who has seen a good part of the great Australian dominance in world cricket, I found it a little anti-climatic when England drubbed Aussies in the fifth test at Oval to regain the Ashes trophy. England bowling has been good and occasionally brilliant, but I would rather put my weights on the lack of batsmanship from Australia for this defeat. Australia has been a touch unlucky in the first test as well, but will be a mean thing to hold as an excuse for not not giving credits to the English victory. For Australia, the absence of Langer, Hayden and Gilchrist made a mountainous difference. Ponting is not the old score machine anymore. Hussey is not the reincarnation of Bradman as he used to be in the initial few tests in terms of scoring, Clark has been brilliant, but his failure in few crucial innings didn’t help. And, England got the luxury of facing an Aussie attack without Warne and Mcgrath. If only Shane Warne had played this series (even at this age, post retirement) the Ashes owner would have been different. Looking at the way, the Oval pitch turned, I hasten to think that Warne would have ran over the 11 chaps in the England team. It is not realistic, I agree, but such is the nostalgia associated with the domianant Australia in the 1990s with Warne,Mcgrath,Waughs, Hayden, Ponting,Gilchirst, Langer etc.

To be fair, England under the low profile Andy Flower simply capitalized the Aussie weakness in bowling and to some extend on their batting. The over hyped Peterson didn’t make any significant contribution and considering that, it is an incredible achievement to the team coached by Flower. The English press must be over the moon with encomium showered on the cricketers and system around it.

The other big event came down with the Ashes 2009 curtain was the retirement of Andrew Flintoff from test cricket. A fascinating cricketer, an enthralling breed at times will be missed in tests. His gesture as a gentleman when his team is in the loosing side has been something worth recalling. I would like to think that he under achieved, but his commitment as a cricketer (in the playing arena) is largely unquestionable. He is not the best all rounder, as many calls, especially in the English press, but in my book he was a fine cricketing all rounder that England had over the last 10 years or so.

A pretty cool handwritten tex symbol identifier software is unleased and it is known as Detexify. I thought this is such a handy piece of online suit for the TeX community. One can try to write  symbol and it simply display a list of nearest matching symbols.  There is no absolute guarantee that it display the intended latex symbol immediately, but it does the job pretty well on most occasions.

Usain Bolt got it bettered. The man who had a difficult preparation after a minor car accident in Jamaica a few months ago, now came up with another thriller. He is unstoppable now. A mere 9.58 seconds to cross 100 meters! Phew! Tyson Gay did his best to better his own best, but Bolt had pinned other ideas for Berlin. Amazing Bolt. Taking a bow Mr fastest! The cricket lover and a fan of Tendulkar, this lighning champion is a darling. I love his typical West Indian style celebration! I am sure Tendulkar will be cherishing his fast paced fan having a dream run!

After a long gap (over six months or so),  I finally played some tennis again. Much to my surprise, I wasn’t all that rusty in spite of the long layoff from any major sporting (barring some recent treks and once in a while cricket) activities during this period. After a few hits, my serves started holding and I slowly felt the rhythm. I started enjoying this beautiful game once again! In the Swiss heat, it was almost unbearable at times to absorb the hot air from the synthetic surface. On Friday and Saturday’s I played for two hours each until late evening. Yesterday, after the game we took dip in the Lake Geneva near the UNIL sports center arena at St.Sulpice. I never felt a better swim than this before. Such was the feeling of taking a clean water swimming after a good game of sports. It was getting darker and a swim between 2100 to 2200 on the fading summer light in the foothills of the Alps was simply amazing. I just cant compare a place to this amazing Lake Geneva region. Quite a place this is. After the swimming I seemed to have regained all vigour to play a few more games. Had there been floodlights, we were on for a few more perhaps! They say winning is an elixir for eternal youthfulness, but did I feel that swimming in lake Geneva comes close to that?

While, standing in the lake  with chest level water and overlooking the Alps mountains,  it reminded me of the photos of saints in olden days taking a morning yama’s in the Ganges overlooking the Himalayas. I’ve never been to Ganges, but for once I could perhaps feel a sense of their state of mind. I felt like singing one of those Yesudas classical songs, standing with half immersed body. I don’t quite remember whether I did one. I was in a state of fulfilment sort to say!

Have you ever imagined, a helicopter lifting a big catamaran? I for sure didn’t harness such hopes.  Hence, it came as a jerk when I received some Emails from EPFL colleagues showing photos of the Alinghi-5 being lifted from Lake Geneva to the Mediterranean cost Genoa (Italy). The photographs are stunning and it undermines the power of these modern warfare choppers. The helicopter used is apparently a Russian Super Puma breed.

I just finished listening/watching a very nice conversation between Harry Kreisler and Kenzaburo Oe.  I remember how much I had enjoyed his very touching style of story telling and how soon I had become a fan of Oe after reading his remarkable book  ”A personal matter”. Oe’s “A personal matter”  depicted an amazing journey of a father through the cultutal walls, creativity, honesty and responsibility. Since then, I have almost forgotten about him (and my reading has come down drastically, after I started working in industry). I  think he is one of the finest writers of this century, perhaps not known outside Japan as much as he should be. I really enjoyed this conversation. It is quite touching, the way, he and his wife learned to react to his brain damaged child converse with them, for the firstime when their son was five years old or something. Incredibly human!

It has been raining since evening here in Lausanne.  It was about 19.50 when I came back home for dinner. The light was getting dimmer and the sign of rain was there very much looming. Almost when I romped home, the rain started. My windows shutter seems to love this rain drops falling tirelessly onto them. They make a pretty nice chitter chatter sound which I just cant stop cherishing. Tired to do anything else today, but the rain is still there and the aluminium shutter still make that rhythmic reaction to the rain drops. It is only a moderate rain, but the sound of the water droplets when it embrace the tree leaves and this window is a lovely one. I have been an avid rain fan since childhood. The tiled house of my parents in Kerala in monsoon come close to this. I am ecstatic and now just want to wait longer to enjoy this beauty. Sleep can wait for a while, cant it? Let me stop everything now and just embrace this rain music. How beautiful this Suisse rain?

After a long thought and a near decision call against it,  I eventually succumbed to the temptation of going to the best firework show in Europe. The finale of Fêtes de Genève 2009 was today! We took the 20.45 train from Lausanne and reached just in time for the festive event. It was a bit of struggle initially to find a place, when folks were moving and parading across the streets in all possible directions. We walked and walked and finally stopped when the fireworks started.  A good way to decide when to stop moving, huh!

The musical fireworks show was awesome.  That is an understatement.  It was a not to miss event.  A touch overcrowded Geneva was, but that was to be expected off an event of this magnitude.  I didn’t take any photos.  It wouldn’t have come nicer anyway with my outdated camera. Not to be disappointed nevertheless.  Here is a link (Note: This is not my photo. The copyrights stays with the owner of the link and its sources).  I hope to post some more, depending on the photo availability from friends who may have taken a few snaps.

The fire show was coupled with traditional music (and hence it was more of a musical fireworks) and rhythmic tunes. It simply drew admiration from everyone present there, which in number was anything more than a 10000. Even though it was not that Sth clear, it appeared to me that, music from all over the world were played.  A Hindi (India rather) one from the movie Lagaan too was played (I guess it was  this).  In a way, this presented the crowd a journey around the world of music, a little lip service, but nevertheless highly enjoyable experience. The stupendous thing is the setting of the Lake in a moonlit night, with remarkable display of colourful magic in the air.

As they say, the fireworks outshine the stars, the sky bursts with colour and the lake reflects it all. It was well and truly that. Every year a different theme is chosen for the show. The theme gives meaning and rhythm and grandour to the event. This year, a pyrotechnic vision of one thousand and one nights (Arabian nights as we know in English) was chosen and it simply rocked the Geneva crowd for about 1 hour from 2200 hrs on a rather pleasant day (The afternoon rain infact cleared things a bit). From East to West, through the Tropics, three acts presented amazing visual displays cast by music from the local area and elsewhere selected by the pyrotechnics’s themselves.

The show opened with traditional Arabian music, apparently chosen because the guest of honour presented was the Sultanate of Oman. It was marvellous to say the least. It sounded a little like Punabi to me, but then as you would guess, there are many similarities of music from the east (and partly because of my lack of knowledge in vividly distinguishing musical style). The first scene reflected the thousand and one eastern nights, from Arabia to Asia. The initial act evoked the shimmering splendour of the East with a superb golden rain. Yes, it was a fabulous scene where it appeared as though there was a drizzle of gold in the air. So charming it was.  A superb oriental music tuned to its rhythm made it even more stunning.

The second scene reflected tropics, apparently conceived by some famous Argentine from in Buenos Aires (They mentioned the name during commentary, but I failed to pick the name). With south American (Latin American to be exact) music in the background, it was indeed a magical display of colours depicting the thousand and one tropical nights.

The third and final reflected Western nights. It was a mix of slow and fast notes of western music. I was wondering why such a mix, but I was told later that, it was deliberately chosen to depict the surprise effect. Some people liked it, but it sounded a bit too noisy for me at times. Some french (European!) and north American music were played. The firework was big and loud this time, needless to say it was great, barring the excessive sound. The sound however shook the crowd and made them heavenly alert and cheerful. It was a fabulous scene, to the eyes, but not so soothing to my ears (I would have preferred more to see and lesser burden on ears; But largely people wouldnt have complained!).

The famous fountain of Geneva (Jet d’Eau) was  switched off during the fire show. In the end it appeared to be on, but the smoke around didnt make it so visible from the bridge where I was standing. I had to catch up a train to Lausanne and hence didn’t spend too much time in Geneva after that.
In the end, my last minute decision to take a train to Geneva paid off. It was worth it. I was initially pondering on whether this is better than the firworks in New York during the July 4 independence day. Or for that matter, a Trichur Pooram fireworks in India. Those have their charm, but Fêtes de Genève has a charm of her own. It is definitely a beautiful event.

The one hour pyrotechnic in the air resulted in quite a bit of smithereens of paper and powder floating in the air. A fair share of it came to my body as well. A hot shampoo shower at midnight cleaned up a bit of it. The Geneva river looked more like a polluted river in the end, but the civic authorities will hopefully clean it tomorrow. The river is so beautiful to be dirtied! What is to be a good city if not there a clean river flowing through her heart?

Update [2009, Aug 10]:

Here is a video sample I found in youtube. It spans just over a minute only, but the (video) quality is pretty good.

and another one here (You can check the Youtube follow up links for more).

As the race enters the seventh stage, Armstrong is only fraction of a second behind the leader Swiss Fabian Cancellara. It is already incredible for Armstrong who is on a comeback trial after retiring from the event a few years ago. Mind you this is the game which he ruled unconquered in his hay days. Considering the physical strain this sport imposes, it is commendable that he is keeping up with that sweet sweat. And today is the key day for the racers since they are entering the mountainous terrain stretch. This is where Armstrong once used to thrive at the challenge offered. Can he do it again? It will be amazing if he does it again. Let us wait and watch. My office mate Reda is full time watching this game and I can see the excitement in many such enthusiastic tour de france fans. Apparently,  they will touch Switzerland on 19th and 20th. It is not too far from here. Maya will be coming by then. It will be fun to take atrip to Verbier.  I will be tuned to check the Armstrong progress in anycase!

Oh boy, what did we see this evening at Wimbledon? A grandslam final, filled with nothing short of a breathtaking drama. A near neck to neck battle between king Federer and a fabulously charged up Roddick. Guess who was watching that epic cliffhanger? The emperor of that piece of grass strip in central London! No point in guessing the name: Pistol Pete Sampras. Sampras was visiting Wimbledon after 2002, perhaps just to witness another great champion Federer get past him in the number of grandslam titles. What an occasion! Unbelievable tennis on display when blue sky topped the roof in clean light. I feel for Rodick here. This was ‘the chance’, he had at hand: and truly well he deserved, one must say. I for one had written him off yesterday, even though he had played great tennis in the semi final to beat British hope Andy Murray. From one Andy to another Andy, the other finalist name changed, breaking the great British hope, since Henman (Well, Henman was not really a realistic hope, when Sampras was taking a stroll down the Wimbledon park).  I was expecting Fedex to just roll over him in the title clash. But alas! Didn’t he give Fedex  a run for his crown?

In the end, Federer had that extra epsilon, call it luck or experience.  He was there on that center court final stage on every single year for the last seven summers. Last year he lost it only by a whisker to the Spaniard Nadal. Federer truly deserved to be the grand-slam record holdert. He is the best player on the circuit and he is so very effortless, athletic and passionate.  The great man is a beauty and indeed is a treasure to this great game.   I cant have enough praise on the way he played tennis over the years.  He is so very smooth and graceful. A touch of Lara, Tendulkar or Dravid in cricket. I really was feeling a lot low when Sampras retired in 2002, but the Swiss has indeed made up that void since then.  A humble soul Federer typify the Swiss people I guess. So gentle and an amazing role model to the new generation. I really hope that he gets a few more grand slams titles.

Turning back to the losing finalist, I can imagine how hard it would be to be an Andy Roddick who narrowly missed the crown by perhaps one or two moments of marginal shots.  Sometimes sport can be so cruel! In the end winner takes it all and it is agonizing. It must be hard to be a second at that level. But then, that is what it takes it to be the best in the world. Only thin air make the separation. It is courage and wisdom at times to grab that silver line.  Grabbing is secondary, seeing it in the first place is what separates the best from the next best. After all, it is not easy to get there. Isn’t life beautiful?

Ramani visited me during the weekend. He arrived from London this afternoon. It truly brought memories of undergrad days. We had quite a lot of fun cracking PJs and chilled out with memories of funfilled undergrad days. How time flies? We had a game of cricket as well to spice things up. I leave you with a picture shot at St.Sulpice near the EPFL UNIL sports center.

The memorial service for Ralf Koetter held at UCSD is video archived. Quite many of the stalwarts in Information theory field found it difficult to control their emotions when they spoke about him. Such was the level of closeness many people had with him.  I have never got to directly interact with Ralf , but was aware about his stellar contributions to many areas in and related to coding. The most notable thing other than his well known research contribution is his amazing teaching skills. The two guest lectures given by him during David Forney’s MIT class in 2005 were simply stunning. He then had talked about Reed Solomon codes and that is by far the best lucid presentation of such a difficult topic, that I have ever seen. His sudden and untimely  demise leaves an irreplaceable void on this planet. He was that good. So woefully cut short by cancer.

Alex Vardy knitted down a fitting tribute to his friend and colleague.

Vous l’avez fait Federer! Federer is the French open 2009 champion. Something in me was telling, even before the start of this grandslam tournament, that this is the year for Fedex to win at Roland Garos. Ever since Nadal lost to Soderling earlier, his case was strengthened even further. He has done it finally.  What an year to win this. He is expecting his son to be born in few months and now, he can be at peace with the agony of not winning the French open, in spite of reaching the finals so many times. What a player he has been over the years. Todays match was much like the Federer-Murray US open final last year. Federer was superb. Soderling didn’t do too wrong, but that is the elegance and class of the great man Federer.

He has already moved to the pantheon of greats. Now it is a matter of adding more flavour to his already colourful charisma. All grand-slam championship as well now comes with this win. Incredible. Thank you Fedex for keeping us enthralled by your genius. Seeing it from Switzerland is even more exciting.

Footnote:  Whenever I cross the Ecublens area near Crochy, the tennis courts, I remember  Federer. I was told that he used to train there in early days of his wonderful tennis life. I am yet to figure out where exactly he did that school tennis training. Just out of curiosity! It may be just a few maters of walk from where I stay!

Shocked to hear about Rajiv Motwani’s sudden demise. I couldn’t believe it. So tragic and sudden end to one of the smartest computer science guy we ever had. So sad.  Apparently, he met with an accident in  swimming pool at home.  The world lost such a terrific talent and entrepreneur. May his soul rest in piece.

Three days on and no positive signs of any survival after that sudden disappearance of French commercial plane. These are tragic moments and my heart goes to the relatives and friends of the missing. The Air-France flight AF 447 was heading from Rio de Genero to Paris when it was lost early on Monday. There are reports emerging that some debris found on the Atlantic ocean may have been that of the missing airline. The present inference leads to a possible crash of the airbus into the middle of Atlantic.

I began to wonder the difficulty of carrying out search in the middle of a rather ominous ocean stretch, with difficult weather conditions, compounded with higher depths in the range of several thousand kilometers. If we were to do that in the night, you can imagine that extra difficulty with artificial light too. This clearly is an arduous task.

I was checking the specifications and features of the Airbus 330-200. They are ultra modern and almost disaster free.  They are supposedly very robust engines equipped with superior communication, control and electrical safety devices. Since went into operation in 1993, there was no fatal accidents, until this unfortunate thing happened on Monday. The only deaths reported on this bus was during a test flight in 1994, killing the pilots and two engineers on board. That accident was widely attributed to pilot errors and faulty autopilot systems. The latest disaster by far is the most fatal in terms of casualties and the extend of failure. As often is the case with air accidents, the survival chances are grim.

The A330-200 is a wide bodied two engine carrier. It is one of the dominant carriers for many of the medium/economical airliners operating. They include Air France, KLM and Etihad.

The loss of 228 passengers on board is beyond one could have imagined, especially with the advent of superior technology in modern airbuses. At the same time, this also give us a perspective on how well they function, every time a successful flight is seen through. The engines, the communication control devices, the pilots, the crews, all have to work rather seamlessly to make a trip safe as is the case, most of the time. I have seen people making huge furies over few minutes of delay at airports, reportedly caused by engine maintenance etc. Sometimes, I wonder whether such sudden outbursts by some passengers are reasonable at all. I get annoyed when some weird nuts behave like this. It is understandable that they value time as precious as ever, but we must surely give credit and due respect to the airline staff for making every journey as safe as possible. Sometimes, even the best effort may not lead to guaranteed goals, but then such is life.

Disasters like this latest one, might have occurred due to catastrophic failure of several parts of the system. Unfortunately everything seemed to have gone wrong with this airbus, including weather, location and extend of engine failures. Experts are worried about the chances of recovering the black box too. Just imagine the difficulty of the Brazilian and French air force, navy and military to get into the troubled waters of the vast Atlantic to search for the missing links. Quite a task that is going to be.

The Air France accident feel a touch more dearly to me. I have travelled quite a lot of times with Air France, almost always thanks to the economical advantage over other European carriers (They charge the least airport tax within continental Europe! and they have direct flights to Bangalore, connecting a Geneva-Paris as well).  This unfortunately is the biggest disaster for this Airline. It must be terrible time ahead for them too, to try and find the causes of such a catastrophic failure. The major surprise I noted is the absence of ay radio communication from the cockpit crew to ground. Some says it indicates the almost instant collapse of the system thereby leaving no time for the crew to react. I was wondering whether any of the following could have been done, at least as a futuristic goal!

1) The Satellites take frequent pictures of these airline routes. The rate of sensing, storage and power requirements, perhaps are the obvious limitations here. May be a potential compressed sensing application here? I am curious to know whether Satellites do scan the whole earth and if so, how frequent? I was told that, they do in parts, skipping the ocean for instance.

2) Let Satellites sense communication from all the airlines and report a failure of trajectory instantly. Considering the present day amount of traffic in the air, this may be quite a task. Besides, some form of this may already be in place.

3) Air France flights interestingly have these flight camera operating live. I have seen them beaming the live video of the ground while it is landing and taking off. I am wondering whether they could relay it down to its ground terminal so that they get to know when things go wrong.

None of these perhaps avoid a disaster. They can at the most help to trace the airline wreckage after a disaster. Considering the state we are in at the moment, aftermath of such a tragedy, this might be of some use. Never sure!

Nadal losing at French open: This wasn’t forthcoming! Until yesterday this piece of statement would have created sighs and huh-s. Raefal Nadal losing at Roland Garos was un heard off, even in the tennis folklore. Such was the authority Nadal had on this strip of clay in Paris during summer.  Roger Federer, the invincible champion of this decade, even in his hay days found Nadal a bitter nut to crack. The four time champion Nadal of this very famous clay grand slam was all expected to beat the record held by the famous Swedish player Bjorn Borg who had won the same from 1978-81. Today, incidentally another Swedish player put a stop, a break so to speak, to that charge. Now the question and equations are relatively easier for a Fedex charge, but never know. Given that, a few upsets in the last couple of days, we can still hope for some more uncertainty, but I would expect Federer to sail through from here on. Andy Murray and with a less probability Roddick are the bigger stumbling blocks for Federer now.

Robin Soderling seeded 25 will now be known as the man who entered the record book for being the first and only player to beat Nadal at French open. He was a clay court no big boy so far, but given the form he is in, we can expect some sort of excitement in the coming days.

I get the feeling that Nadal was coming to this match, with almost no rest season. He was playing non stop and it was a bit of overkill, considering that he was in for a big season ahead. I remember Vijay Amritraj mentioned a few years ago on Nadal playing a bit too many matches and thereby risking serious games along with injury scares. I am sure he will get time to ponder over it and arrive at the right decision for him. He is a lively player to watch and I hope to find him rejuvenated before the next grand slam.

Sport is exciting for this reason. Just when we thought the tables are in order, we get to see a surprise from an unexpected corner. Now the room look different. Are we in for more shuffle? Let us wait for the action to continue…

On  a sunny Lausanne morning, I woke up much later than usual. A game of cricket last evening had its due share in settling my body parts and indirectly in this wake up delay as well. I was all excited to re start working on the one sided set constraint problem which I pondered about a little the other day. After a routine coffee, decided to check Indian newspapers on line and the first news said Kamala Suraiyya’s passed away. To most of us, especially the ones associated with Kerala, she is the one and only Madhavikutty known to outside world as Kamala das. A name change and a religion hop didn’t really bother a secular Malayali. However the truth remains that, she was easily one of the most misread, misinterpreted writers of this generation.

I have not read a lot of Madhavikutty’s major works. That is a shame, I must accept. But I remember reading many short stories of hers, published in magazines, newspaper supplements and weeklies. One of the stories I still remember is  Punnayoorkulam where she touchingly depicts the life of a poor servant. Other short stories instantly coming to my mind are chandana marangal (Sandal wood trees, ചന്ദന മരങ്ങള്‍) and Pakshiyude maNam (Smell of a bird, പക്ഷിയുടെ മണം).  Her story telling style was unique; most notably with her precise and careful selection of words. It is incredible that she could write so well in both Malayalam and English. Not many people know that she was nominated for Nobel prize in 1984.  Unfortunately I didn’t get to know much of her English works other than a collection of short stories titled Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories , which I happened to read sitting inside a book store in Trivandrum during the summer of 1996. That was an experience of some sort. I didn’t have money to buy books then. I used to spend a lot of time inside the book store (thankfully they allowed that) and spend nearly the whole day there. In two days of a week I could read quite a lot. I had restricted visits to two days a week to pretend that I was not exploiting that facility. Nevertheless, over a period, I had befriended with some of the shop guys and they politely let me enjoy this habit, realizing that I was a mere student who couldn’t afford to buy anyway.

Her life and works were dragged into so much controversy. I am not sure whether that helped her to increase the readership. I personally think she was an incredible writer who didn’t need these controversies to claim fame and readership. Her autobiography and the frank style of telling stories created public attention. Perhaps it came at a time when it was unusual for an Indian woman to be that open to express her emotions and life. I do not know much into that controversy, other than learning that it had some. I did not read her autobiography either to judge whether it had some explosive presentation of vivid emotions of a woman. Anyhow, such was her life. Some people would remember purely because of such controversies. Sadly many would have failed to realize the pure writing talent of such a bilingual writer, one of the best Kerala produced. Her death will surely create a void, considering that the language writing has become so thin these days.

Many people in Kerala were surprised when she converted her religion in the last stretch of her life. It was not because of the religion she chose to or the one she was born into. It was more because of the fact that she chose to give importance to latching onto a religion for keeping piece with her life. Anyway, that was her personal choice and everyone accepted it, period.

Madhavikutty’s departure is a big loss. May her soul rest in peace. I leave you with this documentary on Kamala das by Ignou:

In the end, Barcelona, quite fittingly became the champions league champions by drubbing Manchester United 2-0.  It is only fair to say that, they outsmarted Man United in the final.The semifinal between Barcelona and Chelsea had its fair share of drama, but the final was pretty much a Barca show, throughout. Andres Iniesta was awesome today.  It was he who stole the show, amidst all the talk of this match as a Ronaldo versus Messi showdown. For ManUnited part, they had their best share of the game in the first few minutes. Barring that, it was nearly one sided to my eyes.

I was watching the game on line sopcast through some Chinese TV. It was awful for two reasons. One, I couldn’t understand the language (my fault that in entirety), but the more funny and annoying thing was their pure dumpness when Barcelona advances or scored. I guess the commentators were hard core ManU fans. Earlier, I was watching the EPFL multicast, which had the french commentary. It was quite exciting and neutral. Once I reached home, the only thing worked for me was this Chinese TV. Anyway, glad that I could watch the final. That is satisfying!

Man United fans will surely find themselves let down by their team. Ronaldo did his best, but that apart, the team had nothing in display. When the Chelsea-Barcelona semifinal was lined up, I had two things to balance. One to support one of my favourite team, Chelsea and the other to seek a possibility to beat Man U in the final. Clearly Barcelona had a better chance to beat the united and they showed us with minimal contest. Well done Barca. You are the champions, truly and squarely.

Shrini Kudekar yet again showcased his creativity and acting skills on the eve of Dinkars public defense. Here is the video.

Yesudas and Mohammed Rafi singing the same melody: How about that for a treat to the ears? I didn’t realize that they have done it already for us. Rafi singing Jis Raat Ke Khwab Aaye (Film Habba Khatoon) and later Yesudas making that beautiful song Anuraga lola gathri (Movie Dwani) to a classic. I’ve learned that this melody is the creation of Naushad Ali. I am not going to make a comparison between these two legends (Well I am too in eligible to do that anyway). Both are so soothing. I find Yesudas has an amazing skill to vary the pitch with ease and that is perhaps quite critical in Malayalam language. Anyway, I have enjoyed both masters at work.

Sadly, these days, truthful, sensible and objective reporting are missing from many mainstream media houses. This is true globally including Europe, USA and without exception in India too. Take for instance Kerala, a tiny piece of land in the south west tip of India. The media over the past many weeks or months are just doing a masala gaga over silly factional arguments within a section of the ruling party. They go wild to picturize every tiny statements given by leaders and then glorify with their on puerile interpretations. It is a mess, the Kerala media at the moment;to say the least. Where are truthful media and journalists? Is any of them sensible enough to do truthful and objective reporting, sans yellowing the news? In an attempt to sell their masala craps, everyone go mad and go after such third rated reporting. The masala and gosspis can be at most a desert, but that cannot be the main course. Unfortunately, in reality the media changed their roles and glorified the wrong one. 

The Hindu, is the only paper I find as an exception. It is indeed commendable that we have one source to reply upon. While the entire Kerala media was behind gossipping, The Hindu published this report (by C. Gouridasan Nair )on the progress of Kerala government over the last three years. This simply opened my eyes. While the sensational media events otherwise created an impression that the current government is not functioning at all, the truth clearly is the opposite. Surely, the common man do not get to read The Hindu and hence is caught in the wrong net of fallacy world spooned with incorrect information. I am sure that reflected in the vote share too.”

Whither goest thou media? Will you please grow up to be much more sensible and judicial? Thank you The Hindu for standing tall as a true piece of hope in the journalistic world. If only, the other media house learned a piece of your ideology!
http://www.thehindu.com/2009/05/18/stories/2009051854680700.htm

I had written a couple of blogs on this long running, rather unfortunate SriLankan civil war. I was terribly annoyed and saddened by the plight of millions of poor people docked in the name of a separate land. While their objectives and goals were reasonable, the method of violence to achieve the same was clearly beyond any common sense. LTTE and the war against the Sri Lankan civil government over the last several decades, not only killed their ethnic rivals, but also a vast majority of their very own people and displaced millions away from their land. Besides, he killed many promising leaders, most notably Rajiv Gandhi, India’s promising youth prime minister in 1991. If you go by the rationale of that assassination, you feel pity about LTTE as an organization, devoid of a genuine social and civil agenda. They just act like terrorists, which clearly  is not the way to solve problems in a modern civil society. If only they did have some sense prevailed, they should have gone to fight for their cause politically within the social rule. That would have in turn saved many innocent lives! Sadly, not to be! 

Now, the news is breaking out that, the ruthless terror guerrilla leader of LTTE Velupillai Prabhakaran is killed along with many of associates. I condemn killing anyone, but this surely is a news, which in the long run will lead to stoppage of mass deaths and disaster to millions of people. This hopefully will end the civil war which ran over 25 years in the name of an ethnic (shame that we have to call it ethnic, since there is hardly any difference you cane make out from the two people involved in this fight) difference.  This end in many ways will pave ways for a better society for all the SriLankans, irrespective of their ethnic and language difference. 

The end of this surely have to be a beginning of some sort for the small island nation to learn and live in harmony. They can learn from their big neighbour India, which has thousands of different societies, with multitude of languages, colour, culture, politics all coexist in harmony. Let all your citizens of SriLanka get to live together; let all kids get to go to the same schools;play together; grow up together; That is when your country look more beautiful. Not when you fights trying to show who owns this and that. Now, is the time to make that great move to future. Best wishes for a better tomorrow to all Sri Lankans. 

Now is the time for international governments to help SriLanka to re build the nation. It is also time for them to force issues to evenly rehabiliate and integrate the minorities into mainstream. I seriously hope they do that. 

Footnote: I was going through some of the photos circulating in the Internet on Prabhakaran. These are pictures released today, probably after raiding some of his hideouts. It appears that, he was living a comfortable life when thousands of people on their name, he played this big war were docked to doldrums. What a pity leader?

The 2009 Indian Parlament election results are out. The Congress lead government is all set to return for the second successive term. I personally think this is the best governmet at the moment available to the people. Manmohan singh is an able man and largely they seem to have a vision. His last five year term has been one with many accolades and a very few dulls. The Congress under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi seem to be freed of large scale problems within the party. Congress even though have a lot of sycophants, the top leadership acts more or less sensibly to larger issues concerning the nation.

Now this being a clear mandate to Congress, it is an opportunity for them to take India forward with a stronger vision and clearer direction. A vision not merely targeted to improve the India shining media tag or sensex alone, but the one which genuinely helps to scale the rural and poorer section of the population. It is important now than ever to improve their lives by providing education, food and employment. While cities have gathered some colour and prospetrity in the recent years, the villages in many part of India still have a different story to say. I really hope this government begin addressing such issues with utmost importance. We need development stemming from rural areas, because immense potential are to be tapped from that often underprivilaged segment of society.

The defeat suffered by many regional parties which lacked any ethical base in some sense is going to be a blessing in disguise. We have seen over the years, the ugly negotiations between major parties and these swinging parties, in order to hang on to power. Some of them still are in there. I hope we don’t get to see such pity party MPs make mockery of people. I really hope that party leaders like Amar Singh, Mayawati and their respective parties don’t get to play that ugly negotiations.

The left parties, who have always stood as one of the rare political parties in India, for certain ideological standing also do not have much strength in this parliament. While many would consider their less than expected performance as an aid for a trouble free governance, I still consider their standing in many social issues has helped the current government to implement many people friendly schemes. This faiure is also a time for them to introspect into the ugly political factions within their party. As they say, you can learn more from failures than victory. I hope they learn to become a better outfit, by raising above pity individual factionism.

In Kerala, I personally, find the result as a mixed bag. I am indeed thrilled to see Shashi Tharoor winning with a handsome margin. He is surely our next foreign minister, largely because of his UN employment credentials. My wishful thinking is to have him taking up a ministerial portfolio involving rural society. Say for instance agriculture or rural development. I know this may not happen, because these are seen more of second class port folios, with no glamour or media hype around it. My argument however is to have someone who can make that policy vision for the future, which can transform a nation forward. One thing for sure. Kerala, which is often overlooked as a non-important state in national scene will get some preference, because some heavy weights including Shashi are going to be housed in parliament as representatives from Kerala. Apart from Shashi Tharoor, the better representatives are the young CPI(M) Mps such as Rajesh and Biju. Kasargod MP Karunakaran of CPI(M) and Vadakara MP Mullapally Ramachandran of Congress are also known to be good vocal representatives of people in the parliament. I hope they all live up to people’s expectations. Some of the winning MPs are less than useful to people and indeed it is sad to learn about this verdict, especially the ones from Kannur, Alappuzha, Kollam,Ernakulam,Trichur,Kottayam etc. End of the day, it is people’s verdict and we should respect it. We can only hope for these elected candidates to be model representatives for their people.

Meanwhile, the much underrated Laloo Prasad Yadav made it from one of the two constituencies he tried. He has been an amazing railway minister, in spite of his ridiculed public view among elite social circle. To me, he is the champion minister who made the Railway from an organization of deep debt to one of the very successful outfit. Considering that Indian Railways is the largest employment providing organization in the world (claimed to have over 1.4 Million employees!), his contribution is nothing less than extra ordinary. Many people, including your truly had once thought of him as a mere laughing stock, but now he has my respect in lump-some. I hope he continue his promising work and stay as Railway minister.

Elsewhere, the most dynamic minister in the current cabinet Chidambaram just survived a scare at Shivaganga. I am glad that he made it, simply because he is too good a minister to miss out. With Rahul Gandhi in, the new Cabinet is going to have some promising members. Together with many others, including many young and vibrant representatives, we have the making of a very dynamic cabinet under Manmohan singh. I am really looking forward to a more stable, cleaner and efficient government which can take our nation forward, eradicating the mark of poverty in many villages to one India of prosperity.

The much expected Wolfram alpha has gone for a soft launch since last night. It had some start up glitches, as Wolfram briefed during the live demo, but nothing major fortunately, prevented  me from getting a first feel of it. Erick Schonfeld  has a nice blog with a detailed first hand feel description of this new computing web search engine.  He also did a one to one comparison with Google for a few specific search queries.

My first impression is in much the same line as what I expected after reading Wolfram’s pre-launch blog. This is not a Google competitor for sure, but instead an incredibly complementing brother.  Wolfram alpha is more of a scientific and quantitative information search engine. For instance, if you want to know the Taylor series expansion of  exponential function , you can do it easily by entering “Taylor series of Exp[x/2]“. As you would imagine, Google does not give this precise answer, but instead give you a list of documents matching this query, for instance a set of PDF links where this is already calculated. Clearly, Wolfram gives a more accurate and clever presentation of this query result. Wolfram alpha seem to use quite a lot of Mathematica capabilities too, like plot etc. Any mathematical query, will lead to pretty good result, sometimes including plots, histograms, Taylor expansions, approximations, derivatives, continuity etc. It is a nice feature to have for students and engineers.

wolfram1

This is the sort of query it likes the most and not something like “proof of Sanov’s theorem”. Google will incredibly list a set of documents which has the proof one is looking for, since it simply search down the web and display a listof  matching queries, ordered based on pagerank, which is loosely speaking in the order of relevance.

Not all queries are bound to get a result with wolfram alpha, atleast for now. That is expected since it is not yet in launch mode, but on soft launch. In the coming days they are likely to have it running full fledged with all kind od queries supported.

So, the wolfram alpha is definitely going to be useful for very many cases and it surely is going to rock in scientific searches. I initially thought the Google squared which is going to come from Google shortly is addressing the very same segment of search area, but it is clearly different.

I tried “tallest mountain Switzerland” . It gave a very nice cute quantified table. I love this kind of result. It is also state things with less ambiguity. For instance the height is mentioned in meter, but there is a list of unit conversions listed along, which help people to map them into the units of their convenience.

I tried a query “Who is Claude Shannon”. This is what it displayed. Of course, the result you get is a very brief information about him. Same query in Google will lead you to the more detailed Wikipedia entry of Shannon or may be the Mathworld entry of Shannon among the list of hits .  Wolfram alpha gives information more like in capsule form. If you need to know more, you should ask more. Clearly, what search engine to use is thus subject to the query type.  I strongly see Google and Wolfram alpha are complementary. Wolfram alpha gives more or less one reply to a single question. Of course you can renew the query and then get answer to that. In some sense, this is like people asking questions to one another in real physical scenario. Imagine you ask a friend, knowledgeable pal that is: Who is Shannon? He would perhaps start answering in those lines as Wolfram Alpha do. On repeated question he will give more details. On the other hand, Googling is like broadcasting your query to a large pool of friends, each one of them sends what they know or heard about Claude Shannon. It is you,who decides whichamong the many answer(s)/explanation(s) suit your need!

We can afford some amount of spelling errors while entering the query in wolfram alpha. Since it is natural language based, that is a decent feature to have. I deliberately typed the query “distnace from Bangalore to geneva ” instead of “distance from Bangalore to geneva “. It understood the intended query and displayed the result in a nice quantified table. Eve the geographical trace between the two places is shown. Incredible!

When I tried “weather in Lausanne”, this is as good as it gets.  Spot on with all possible things you want to know in one screen! It had a list of mountains and their heights mentioned!

In a nutshell, Wolfram alpha give you the best cooked food, given a user recipient as input. Google will give you a list of foods available and then you pick the one tasting suit . It  really then is a question of preference, time, and satisfaction of the end user on what to choose from. As far as I am concerned, it is subjective. I see both of these are invaluable and both will co-exist. Scientists,economists, finance folks, mathematicians, historians are all bound to benefit from this new computing engine.  I am waiting for a full release!

Today, I attended a very good talk given by Emo Welzl of ETHZ. I could not quite appreciate the drinks and snacks prior to the event, since the organizers kept too little of them and by the time I arrived,  smart guys had grabbed hold of almost all of them. I had to content with a glass of orange juice! Anyway nothing comes free in this country. So getting an orange juice is itself luxury, one would say! Nevertheless, glad that I attended this talk. Monika Henzinger did the speaker introduction part, which she did very well. She mentioned that Emo comes from the same village as that of her husband (Thomas Henzinger). That is not really relevant, but I like such personal, less formal introductions. It takes the audience to a touch curious and close. He indeed proved her (Monika promised us that we are in game for a great talk) right with a truly nice lecture, calm, composed and thoughtful;words precisely chosen, well articulated throughout. He gave some insights into a problem which was never known to me. My field is not quite into SAT or algorithms, but at the end of this talk, I got to learn some thing. Moreover, he instigated me to learn a little more about these nice problems.

Here is a gist of what I understood. If you are interested in the talk subject, perhaps you should visit his homepage. What I state down is something my little brain, which never for once trained on this topic, digested out. Suppose we are given a Boolean function (that is a logic function which has either true or false, equivalently 0 or 1 results). Deciding satisfiability (known as SAT problem) of such formula in conjunctive normal form is known to be an NP complete problem. He discussed some nice (surprisingly simplified bounds) combinatorial bounds on the number of clauses (or equivalently constraints) for unsatisfiability. As usual in talks, I hardly could grasp the proof in total, but he began quoting the Lovász lemma as an essential ingredient. I got to learn a little bit about this rather nice and cute lemma. Loosely the lemma has the following setting.
If we consider a sequence of events where each of these events occur with a probability at most . Suppose each event is independent from all other events, except at most of them, then , where is the Napier constant (named after the famous Scottish mathematician John Napier). This did not strike me instantly, but pondering a little bit about it, I have realized that this is really cute a bound. I can think of a nice, little example scenario, where this can be applied. Let me figure out another cute one. You can expect me to post it. Now let me get back to that optimization problem on compound sets of channels that I have been stuck for the last four days.

Soccer matches, champions leagues in particular are never short of emotions. It reached the very pinnacle during this years champions league semifinal between Chelsea and Barcelona. Players went a little too far in the climax stage. Norwegian referee Tom Henning Ovrebo was the perceived villain in the whole drama, while Chelsea players went a little wild to protest against the faulted referee.  Considering the significance of a decision separating a finalist from a tournament exit; that too one of this magnitude, it is partly understandable, the outburst in the heat.

Have your ever wondered the value of three minutes of time? Try to seek an answer from Chelsea players and fans! That three minutes of extra time brought the team from heaven to earth. The simmering semifinal at this year Champions league saw high drama throughout the match and especially towards the end, where an equalizer from Barcelona shutting all hopes for the home team’s chances to get through to the final. I have been quite unhappy with the away goal rule as an equivalent to win mandate, but that is a rule which is well into the league and nothing can be done about it. But the sad thing in this event is that Chelsea was badly overlooked by the referee in many penalty claims. At least one for sure for the handling the ball by Gerard Pique in the Barcelona penalty box. Hard core Chelsea fans would consider that they were clearly denied of as many as five penalty claims.   The emotion displayed by the players in the heat of those high sensitive moments is partly justified in that sense.

I can understand the heart breaking letdown for Chelsea fans. It is not that big a club in terms of history or fan following, but Chelsea managed to gather a reasonable fan base since Abramovich poured money in the last few years. Considering that they were in the final of the championships last year, this loss would bite the fans so dearly, shutting that elusive wish list of a repeat final and a possible return of fortune against Manchester United. Alas! That was not to be! In any case, the match was an incredible one. Both goals were stupendous. But Sanford bridge fans would have never ever imagined that three minutes of extra time would break their heart so very dearly. But that is the way sport and sporting emotions go at times. That is the beauty of sport too. It can bring in surprises from the most unsurprising corners. This match will be remembered for a very long time.

Barcelona on the other hand is playing well and can seriously challenge ManU in the final. So, we are in for a thrilling contest in the finals.

On an impact side, the danger coming with this loss for Chelsea is the money investment by its boss Abramovich. The billionaire owner is hit recently  by the world wide economic downtime where in a single year he found himself poor by 40%. That being said he still has over 10 Billion USD or so, but the question is whether he will still have the enthusiasm to pour (his precious) money to feed the Ballacks and the Lampards. After all you need a lot of money to keep these boys.

Now, looking forward to the final, I hope Barcelona beat ManU! Barca is in great form and the chances are high for them to clinch that trophy. I wouldnt care less if ManU wins another one, but Barca and ManU, please give us another thriller.

I am eagerly waiting for this new search and compute engine promised by Stephen Wolfram.  They call it wolfram|alpha (If google always went with the beta release, Wolfram is going even early).This, if it work in the promised lines is going to rock the Internet evolution. From the outset, this is not just a search engine. It is kind of an intelligent searcher who can loosely understand the human requirements. 

For long, it was perceived that a search engine driven by natural language processing is the way forward. But it is pretty hard to build such a system since natural language processing is no mean business.  Wolfram’s idea is to create an abstraction and then algorithm of these realizable models. Once we can do a mapping of the requirements  to algorithm that is computable, at least in principle we can build such a system. But that is a whole lot of heavy statements already. How easy it is to build all these methods and models into an algorithmic framework? He is using the New Kind of Science (NKS) armoury to realize that. We have to wait to get the full rainbow, but when he promises we can confidently expect something big. 

Now once the algorithmic mapping (and implementation) is done, then the question of natural interacting between humans and the system comes. Natural language is the way, but according to him we don’t have to worry about doing that as such. Once the knowledge of the individual is made into a computational framework, then that is enough.  I am not an expert in this natural language processing and NKS framework, but for sure this is pretty exciting,both from an algorithmic point of view as well as a practical MontBlanc. As Wolfram himself pointed out Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task. Indeed it is still being considered a difficult problem, both in academia and industry. So there is excitement aplenty in the offing. I am eagerly waiting for this to hit soon.

Considering that, the big wig search engine houses including Google are still struggling to make that dream natural language engines (the many pseudo ones in the market are not quite approved). I remember www.ask.com started their business in those lines, but never seemed to have crossed that elusive mark of acceptance, atleast not to an extend to capture a world wide wow!  If Wolfram has a new way to get this through, that will be a big breakthrough. I cant wait to see that. Wolfram promises that it is going to be very soon. He says it is in May 2009. My guess is that they will release it on May 14,2009.

I had earlier promised to update on the Xitip, when a windows setup is ready.  Though delayed, I have something to say now. I have finally made a windows installer for the (Information theoretic inequality prover) Xitip software, which was working pretty smoothly on linux, cygwin and mac for a while. I was not too keen on making this windows installer since a few DLL files are involved with it. Besides it was  a bit painful to include these nasty DLL files which would unnecessarily increase the bundle size.  Some of these may not be required if Gtk is already installed on the machine, but anyway I made one double click style version to suit the layman windows users in information theory community. 

Vaneet Aggarwal is the one who motivated me to make this up since he uses Windows. He showed some interest to use it, should a windows version be available. If atleast one user benefit from it, why not make it. In the process, I got to learn about an easy way to produce a windows install (setup maker) program. I used the freeware Install creator to produce it. 

I will put this installer available at the xitip website, but for the time  being you can access it from here. A lot of people suggested to revamp the xitip webpage which is pretty unclean at the moment. May be a short tutorial is impending. That will take a while; the next two and a half months are out of equation since I am pretty busy till then.

It was today. I’ve just come back to office, after the dinner party hosted as part of the I&C anniversary celebrations at EPFL. Andrew Viterbi was the guest of honour and largely because of his fame, there was considerable crowd attending the function. Martin Vetterli made a nice colourful, flashy presentation illustrating the history of I&C in EPFL as well as scientific progress in Switzerland. He mentioned the names including Jim Massey, Ungerboek who are undoubtedly pioneers of modern communication theory and practice. He began saying that “…Ungerboek is our friend, and now not quite..I will come to that in a minute…”. And of course he didnt come back and fill the circumstance in which the friendship derailed. But I reckon it was a casual remark, perhaps to indicate that Ungerboek, now with Broadcom is a bitter rival to Qualcomm. Since Qualcomm recently established a scientific partnership with EPFL and Viterbi being a Qualcom founder and associate, he perhaps just jotted that remark. It was a nice, usual interesting presentation by Martin.

He also mentioned a nice story about the current EPFL president Patrick Aebischer. Interestingly Patrick Aebischer after an MD (Medical science) degree was fond of computer science and decided to venture into taking a MS degree in CS . He then decided to test his luck at EPFL and approached the admission committee with a formal application. CS was affiliated to the Math department in those days. EPFL politely rejected his application and in due course that ended Patrick’s quest for an EPFL CS degree. He then moved to the US, as a successful surgeon and took a career path of entirely different trace. Years later, as one would say, due to the uncertain turn of things in the great cycle of life, he became the EPFL president and now ruling not only the CS department, but the whole school.

Viterbi talked about the Digital Communication history. He started giving a perspective of this field starting from the days of Maxwell, Rao, Cramer, Wiener and Nyquist. Then he discussed the impact of Shannon’s work. He said the three driving force which made this digital mobile revolution are

1) Shannon’s framework (1948)

2) Satellite (Sparked by the Sputnik success in 1957)

3) Moores’s law, which is more of a socio economic law, which dramatically kept driving the industry so successfully.

The talk as such wasn’t too attention gathering, but he made a rather comprehensive presentation discussing the impact of  digital communication evolution spurred since Shannon’s days (and even early) knitting a dramatic success story of digital wireless world with millions of cell phones and similar devices, which showcased literally the realization of theoretical promise Shannon made in 1948. He himself has his name etched in part of that success story, at least in the form of Viterbi algorithm, which is (one of the instance of it) an algorithm used to detect sequences when perturbed by a medium.

Quite a lot of fun activities were organized by the committee. It was quite fun. Since many programs (especially the fun part) were in french, the appeal was considerably deaf to non-french speakers. But then the rationale given was that, the alumni in good percentage are french! I found it funfilled , mainly to see these successful people like Viterbi sharing their views in real. After all we can learn from history. Not many people can claim to have done so well in everything he touched. In the case of Viterbi, he is an academician, researcher, successful entrepreneur and now a venture capitalist, all scaled to the possible limits. Incredible role model, whichever way we look.

Oh God! ? Shattering scenes coming from SriLanka…

The incoming pictures and videos from the civil war in Srilanka is making a mockery of what human lives and values should be. We are in 21st century and belong to what is perceived as a modern society. Yet, millions of people are caught between two ethnic ideologies in a small country in the foot hills of India, the largest multicultural, democratic country in the planet. What an irony! Well, I am not suggesting that India is freed of problems, but looking at the magnitude of the ethnic problem to its total size bemuses me. The LTTE who have used various despicable methods of terrorism over more than a quarter century in the name of a seemingly improbable Tamil Ealem goal has made the life of poor people, nothing less than hell furnace.  The Sri Lankan government on the other hand seems to be in no mood to stop the bloody battle before they see the end of the Veluppillai Prabhakaran. 

War has never solved any problem,irrespective of the goal it ever aspired to achieve. What it leaves instead is the loss of millions of innocent lives and an unrepairable, long lasting trauma. Children who are caught between ethnic rivalry and stupid power struggle are denied of a life. It is easy to blame one another for this mass misfortune of innocents. The LTTE, now in the brink of being annihilated are wounded and are further exploiting poor peopleas human shields to counter attack the more powerful army force. It is a battle of loss. Sadly, the loss is imposed on to their own people for no genuine fault of theirs. What kind of doctrine is it? People are forced to flee from their dear land in desperation, hoping against hope. Clearly, their supposed leaders and power points have made life hell than the promised dream land. 

What  (and still is) needed was a political solution, not war. It is a shame that such a tiny country couldn’t arrive at a political situation.  If that had happened, we could have avoided one of the most shameful refugee crisis in modern era. LTTE is a terrorist organization which caused havoc not only in SriLanka, but they also made a mess in India by killing a promising youth leader Rajiv Gandhi. In the name of achieving a mirage, they let the downtrodden Tamils in the northern Srilanka to suffer.  It is easy to promulgate an ideology of creating a dreamland, but the price you pay is in the form of innocent lives. It would have been far better to become part of the existing political system to put forward their demands. It might sound so silly, but in a country as big as India, it worked. Millions of religions and sub castes with varied social classes lives without a civil crsis as big as the one faced in a tiny SriLanka. I hope Kashmir too learn from this hard lessons from SriLanka and get to a more peaceful dialogue path than weapon confrontation.

I may be a little naive to comment on this SriLankan struggle, since I am not really aware of the intricate issues between these ethnic groups. No matter what the extend of enmity exist, as an outsider I find it hard to chew these gross deaths and massive refugee crisis. Seeing the pictures of millions of refugees walking away from their little homes, children and old people included, make me sad. We cant do this in a modern society. What is worse is that, the actual ground realities may be much more heinous and gruesome than the few aired videos and pictures. Oh! God, if only we learned to live in harmony! 

Now, when the war end, what next? Will those refugees get a life back? A generation is in danger. What is the UN doing? War! no more of that beasts please. We have had enough of trauma. 

Here are two video documentary on this unfortunate ethnic trouble in the naturally beautiful island nation.

Todays IPG seminar had Fritz Eisenbrand (the Disctete Opt chair, Math department EPFL) talking about Diameter of Polyhedra:Limits of Abstraction. I don’t think I followed the topic too well, but this is a share of what I understood.

The topic is about a convex geometric problem on the diameter of a polyhedra. The question of whether the diameter of a polyhedron is polynomial or not seemed to be a longstanding open problem. The largest diameter of a dimensional polyhedron with facets has known upper and lower bounds.

.

The lower bound is due to Klee and Walkup and upper bound to Kalai and Kleitman. These bounds also hold good for combinatorial abstractions of the 1-skeleton of non-degenerate polyhedra (Polyhedron here is called non-degenrate). What Fritz and his colleagues have done is to look into the gap between these known lower and upper bounds. Apparently, the gap is wide and they have made some progress to get a super linear lower bound if is allowed to grow with .

The way they showed this bound is by establishing the bound for the largest diemeter of a graph in a base abstraction family. Let us say, the abstraction family of connected graphs be denoted by .The largest diameter of a graph in is denoted by . They find that, and then using the fact that , they conclude the bound

I have not had a chance to see their paper yet. I must say, the proof was not all that within my grab during the talk. However it appeared that it is based on some layering and combinatorics. He said some applications to covering problem, in particular disjoint covering design which I didn’t follow that well. Sometimes I get the feeling that I am a little dumb to grasp these ideas during a talk. I wonder whether others understand it very well on a first shot presentation. I have put it in my agenda (among the millions of other papers to read) to see through this problem and proof, one day! His presentation was very clear and legible though.

…and it is Oracle! Quite a surprise! Thats the least I felt, when the news broke out stating that Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems. The once great and proud maker of some of the best servers and computing power houses is now leading to the hands of a software giant, largely focused on database solutions. There is no natural connection to the obvious eye But who knows? Oracle may be eying something big! I cant see a justification of spending 7.4Billion $ to get hold of Java and MySQL alone. These are the big software solutions from Sun, apart from Solaris.  Anyway both these are open source software too. Afterall Sun is known for its champion make of servers right? Is it that Oracle feared an imminent acquisition by some other competitor, which might have distracted their lead? For a good amount of time the speculation was on whether IBM would still buy Sun. Then it was the Cisco, and the HP taking rounds as potential buyers. None of these materialized, but Oracle, the one choice with maximum entropy!

Would it be that, Oracle saw something big with Solaris? Are they eying on a solid operating system market? In any case, a decision to buy a company for 7.4Billion cant be for fun. Surely there got to be a plan, at least in theory!As someone opined in some article recently about possible consolidation of SAP and a possible buy over by one of he bigger fishes like IBM or HP. Now, that would take some shape too. Nothing can be ruled out at the moment. This is the sort of indication floating around.

Today, during the evening chat, Emmanuel Abbe threw an interesting question: Whether the sum of square roots of consecutive binomial coefficients converge to some closed form! That is, . We tried a few known combinatorics tweak, but no meaningful solution arrived. We were also wondering whether this has some asymptotic limit, but that too did not yield anything. A quick check on Mathematica wasn’t helpful either. Now the question is: Does this sum yield some closed form expression.

While playing with this sum in Mathematica, I found that for the sum of squares of binomial coefficients, there is a nice simple closed form.

I was toying with a proof. It turns out that, the proof is extremely simple and is a one line tweak of the Vandermonde identity . Simply substitute and we have the results on table. The natural question then would be: Is there a generalization for for any . Ofcourse now for it is trivial.

Apparently, it turns out that, there is no closed form expression for a general (all) . There are some interesting divisibility properties of these sums. An interesting account of that is addressed by Neil Calkin (Factors of sums of powers of binomial coefficients).

At the moment, I get a feeling that sum of fractional powers of binomial coefficients is not trivial. May be there is no closed form. May be not!

It was almost unthinkable that a single company would rule the EDA world. At least this is what I strongly perceived, a few years ago. Now, put the present dishes on the table and I see that, Synopsys is giving nightmares to all other EDA shops. While working with Synopsys, we always saw Cadence as the rival company to get floored on. All of that, was in the wish list and not many of us thought we could do that, ever so easily. Cadence was the obvious leader of EDA for many years and Synopsys strongly stood at the second position. Then there were the Mentors and the Magmas, at a fair distance down. Magma was the emerging company with a strong future predicted by many pundits within and outside the EDA world. It was imminent that Magma one day would give a stronger competition to both the big brothers Synopsys and Cadence. They may still be a force to reckon, but sadly they tried to act over smart and it all triggered a downfall. I am not sure whether their, rather peculiar sue attempt on Synopsys was wholly responsible for their slide. Definitely that may have had a role. 

Now it appears that, the discounts offered by the EDA big fellows are giving more aches to smaller players. It is well known that the EDA tools are phenomenally expensive and the marketing always revolved around giving deals for bulk purchase of tools. What is more colourful is that the buyers offer to make the deal public in exchange of more discounts. The concept of primary EDA vendor was not that prevalent a few years ago. However, the trend these days is to grab that extra mileage by roping with leading semiconductor houses. It is a big win for both the buyer and seller. Synopsys for sure  is going to enjoy this. First they are among the very few making profit even in these difficult economy. They are perhaps the only one from EDA. Considering that the EDA market itself is only about 4 or 5Billion dollar market, the impact of a near 1.5billion dollar Synopsys doing too well is going to give more headache to other little fellows, in the coming days.

Cadence is literally having a plate of their own problems and now with the whole semiconductor market trying to minimize their R&D spending, it is double advantage for Synopsys; That too with newer friends adding to their primary EDA friends list. Magma is becoming more or less a prospective buying target than a rival. A few years ago, Synopsys had worries about a growing Magma. Now I wouldnt rule out a potential buy over by Synopsys itself, may be Cadence or Mentor Graphics! 

Some people say that Synopsys is going to be the next Microsoft in EDA. Aart perhaps rightly said they want to be the Apple of EDA. I would prefer Aarts view here. Not just because Synopsys was my breadwinner for a while and not because I attended the same grad school as De geus, nor because of the well known fact that yours truly is an ardent fan of Aart de Geus. But because Synopsys is  well managed by a great management team with great work ethics. When the ratable (subscription) revenue/ licensing model was announced there were lot of eyebrows, but it was a long term vision and Synopsys is really reaping the fruits now. 

Having said all these, like many of you, I am too worried by this single monopoly trend in EDA. We need smaller players in every market and we need more innovation. From Synopsys standpoint having less competition would yield relaxed days ahead, but for the market we need better products and superior innovation. We need Cadence to revive and at the same time companies to emerge to take position for the next Magma. At this stage, I am worried about Magma. Is Magma to follow the Avant! route to get merged with Synopsys?

Aart has aptly mentioned that “I understand that the entire world is under economic pressure,” he said. “When that happens, some will do better than others”. One thing for sure. Among all the EDA executives, Synopsys folks must be getting better sleep these days.

…High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince.

Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy prince‘ is one of the many stories that I have read during early school days. Remarkably, this is one of the few I still remember! I was barely able to read difficult English literature per se then, but still the story of Happy prince was within my grab. I don’t recollect whether I had understood all the words of Wilde, back then. This was at a time, when I was happily enjoying my schooling and life in my mother tongue Malayalam. Malayalam literature had its penchant style and aura, which is difficult to explain to non-Malayalam readers.  I was ‘at-home‘ when it came to reading the Malayalam literary works. Yet, I had thrived to learn English stories, albeit at a reduced speed. That whenever, I got a chance to read. Oscar Wilde was one of the rare English writers whose work, somewhat accidentally came to my reading list.  I was surrounded and enthralled by the works of great south American and Russian writers, otherwise. Partly, thanks to the communist influence in Kerala society, the translations of great Russian and south American books were far more available at ease  and at cheap rate (In fact I don’t remember buying anything, but all borrowed from various small local libraries around). 

Coming back to the Happy prince, the story had indeed put a stamp in my memory as a child.  I may have been 10 years or so when I was ‘introduced to’ the ‘Happy prince’.  The subdued request of the prince to the little swallow was by heart to me. When the prince says ” Swallow, swallow little swallow…”, my heart seemed to have resonated at a lower pace.  As a child, I had never seen an European city, for that matter any great city including the ones in India, let alone city across the Atlantic. It was all in my mind, that I’d imagined a mythical model of such a city, a city of the happy prince!  I used to visualise the position of the Happy prince statue standing tall in the middle of a city. Did I ever imagine the enormity of a city as big as this? As a child it is difficult to fathom and relate the seriousness of people’s struggle, a statue could see.  For sure, I was touched and moved by his sorrows and pain.

The swallow represented a role model so to speak  when it comes to helping others. Subconsciously, the little swallow literally drenched my cheeks by living through that difficult winter.  Back then, I had never seen what it is to be a snowy winter, still, could feel the chill of that season, when the shivering swallow wholeheartedly fulfilled the Prince’s wishes. Years later, the words ”…Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow. Stay with me one night longer” still linger my ears. Tears still beckons! Perhaps that story have had a deep influence to me since childhood, to an extend that I’ve never imagined. As a child, I wished if only the swallow could go to Egypt, but alas!

Now, I have accidentally come across that very same story in video form in youtube. That brought in a rewinding of years! I feel the same chill now, as a 10 year old that I had felt years ago. I had told this story to Nivedita a few times. I could see her expression when I uttered the prince’s humble request ”…Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow. Stay with me one night longer“ .. The impact of Oscar Wilde’s powerful writing tells a story in itself. Don’t they?

…High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince.

The prince and the swallow still stays on.. in my memory…I really want to tell this story to many kids! The youtube video is commendable too.

I’ve finished reading the memoirs of Walter Rudin. It was a quick read for a few hours. His autobiography is titled The way I remember it, published by AMS in the history of mathematics series.  It wasn’t particularly interesting, to say the least. From a mathematician who wrote excellent books on functional analysis and several others,  I was expecting a much better story. Of course one cant write an imaginary story in an autobiography, but then the incidents in his life is pretty much the story of any European intellectual during the war days. The best I liked is the one from Karl Popper. However, I could connect many incidents from Rudin’s life, primarily because of the geography. There is a chapter on his days in Switzerland, which also touched upon Lausanne. That part for once enthused me! Was wondering how Lausanne would have been 70 years ago! If you are completely unaware of the life in Europe around the WW period, then this will give you a perspective.  Like many scientific minds of that era, he had a long route to the United States. He discusses the path and family traits of that journey, in a somehat uncomplicated language.

In his autobiography, Rudin has discussed some of his contributions to mathematics as well. That part appeared a little informative, but technical read. If you know his work already, you would connect it nicely.  I particularly liked the chapter on Function Theory in the Unit Ball of C^n. 

In all, not a book I would recommend, unless you are a Walter Rudin fan and knows his contributions in much more detail. However, this may be a motivating read for a young school kid aspiring to be a mathematician. Why did I say that? I don’t know! Don’t ask me why either!

A very interesting report on the neuro socio development and progress of children from poorer background, is reported in the recent edition of The Economist. In the report they discuss the research study by Martha Farah of UPenn.  Their investigation came out with a worrisome conclusion that, children born with poorer socio economic background have a greater chance of becoming underachievers (read as under performers compared to their middle-class counterparts). The study is of course based on statistical inference and hence there ought to be scope for exceptions (Large deviation theory!). However, being a statistical method, we can well assume that the behaviour is true on the average (expectation). This is truly not a conclusion we would like to hear, but to me, it appears to be a careful study and its conclusion opens up the ramifications of the larger crisis faced by millions of people all over the world, especially from developing countries and Africa.

What these researchers did is to study the stress level suffered by a person over the span of his/her life. They combined various type of pressure (such as systolic and diastolic blood pressure) and formed an index, what they called allostatic load. They found that this index is on the higher range among people from poorer background than those from middle class. They also have found that, the duration of the poverty life of  a person is correlated with allostatic load.

The report appears to conclude that, stress is more or less the sole reason for spoiling the working memories of an individual. We could say that it is a little too strong a statement. Children under too much socio-economic stress tend to do badly in studies and that unfortunately carries on for ever. I am tempted to argue that, a socio-economic push, say by providing opportunities to such children will change the performance of an individual. After all, we know many instances of children born into poorer backgrounds scaled highs.  But if you read the report carefully, they are not refuting this either. What they simply say is that, on a relative scale, the impact of stress during early childhood is much more serious than what we perceived to be. Children of poor perform poorly in school and stay on that way and sadly, remain as poor (under achievers) adults. Clearly, the authors refer ‘poor’ adults as state of ‘under achieving’ compared to their counter parts from a middle class background. In that case, one can always argue on the definition. True, one doesn’t have to be a genius to do well in life. But, the larger picture however is clear. A poorer childhood may limit his/her potential. 

It can be very easily mistaken for that, this report is derived from a non scientific study. I too was inclined to think in those lines when I read the title.  A careful reading however convinced me that, there could be genuine truth in  their argument. After all, the conclusion is not on a single individual, but on a collection.  

I am sure the wider picture of this report may have a scientific explanation too.  Too much stress, at an earlier stage of life may prevent development of nerve cells. Bottom line is that, we simply do not want to take a risk. It isindeed very important that our children and future generations not to undergo that ill fate. We have a social responsibility to be aware of these and try to do a part to ease up the trouble, as much as we can.

A few years ago, during undergrad days, myself and  friend Ramani during our lazy 75 paise mini canteen tea outing, were discussing a small riddle. It was motivated from a real world experience from our computer center in NIT Calicut (REC Calicut). In REC those days, we students almost exclusively used rubber slippers (Yes, those Paraqon brand which used to cost 20 rupees or so), usually called by the name ‘chappels’. With that, we were not only comfortable while walking and running around, but we’re equally at ease playing cricket and badminton with the very same foot support; and many other things too, including jogging. Those thin hard rubber slippers used to last an year or more without giving much trouble, other than perhaps an occasional tearing of the rubber tie. In all, we were at peace with that.

But there was an issue, not exclusively for this brand, but for chappals in general (shoes were a luxury of sort in the campus;atleast it wasnt very common). Not for everyone though! If and only if you were fancied of visiting the computer center! Well, computer center wasn’t all that fanciful then, since we were provided with only graphics less Unix terminals (no colour monitors!). You might wonder, huh! what age am I talking about? Besides, Internet and Emails were only taking shape then. Chats and browsing were not quite there yet;Unless you felt a touch inferior to the computer wizkid around, that was not a compelling centre de visite. As, ‘would be‘ electronics and communication engineers we had that occasional inferiority complex!. Computer center was air conditioned and was strictly slippers free. We were expected to keep our valuable slippers outside (no clock room luxury! well that was not a necessity either) before entering to that cooler room, filled with monochromatic terminals. Since most of the chappals dropped outside were alike (in size and also sometimes color) there was a good chance that at the time return, we ended up with a different pair of slippers (Some folks found happy for themselves by a visit to the computer center, just for a pair change, often to an improved lot!).  Sometimes, we ended up having differently colored ones, say left foot white and right foot blue. That wasn’t a problem socially either, as long as you stayed within the campus. It was socially accepted within the walls!

Anyway, coming back to the riddle we were busy conjecturing on. We wanted to automate a clock room. The idea then would be to just deposit the chappals there at random. The clock room work automatically. Upon asking (at the time of return, say) it will select a pair at random and give it to you. Sorry, you cant have a choice. Just accept and hope for the best. We asked the questions:

1) What is the probability that everyone gets their own chappals

2) What is the probability that none of them get their submitted pairs

Assume number of  people (and hence pairs). We can assume that, a pair is a single entity (say both left and right slippers are tied and submitted as one) . This simplified the problem to people slipper scenario. A simplistic model assumeed that all people submit their slippers at the same time. We wanted to build that great randomized clocker machine! And we wanted that to work for any , which means, the algorithm had to be implementable and to work well in expectation!

We had thought and pondered about it for a while, then. In the end, we had found that the first one is easy, but the second one a little harder to generalize for beyond or something.  As busy undergrads, we left the problem after an hour of discussion, probably until we had finished sipping the tea. Aside, we were busy with many other extra curricular activities including a 3 hour daily cricket match at the lush green international hostel ground. The megadeth team, as we proudly grouped ourselves, the electronics and communication batch hardly missed those cricket matches. We were electronics engineers and had taken pride in ourselves by not really bothered to ask any fellow discrete math or combinatorics folks! That perhaps helped in some sense.  Ramani found management more interesting than those technical details of counting. I am sure he took the right career. Anyway…too much digressing already!

Now, it turns out that, the very same problem is akin to a well known problem in combinatorics. It is called the Hatcheck lady problem. It is fairly easy to solve it using the inclusion exclusion principle. The proof outline is shown below. As I type, memory fetches that discussion,  sitting leg-folded on the cement bench at the REC mini-canteen, perhaps an occasional cool breeze around too. 

The inclusion exclusion principle is the following:

The Hatchek lady problem can be stated with a similar story as the random clocker machine. (From Harris, Mossinghoff, Hirst’s book on Combinatorics and Graph Theory)

A lazy professor gives a quiz to a class of students, then collects the papers, shuffles them, and redistribute them randomly to the class for grading. The professor would prefer that no student receives his or her own paper to grade. What is the probability that this occurs? This indeed is an equivalent statement of the well known Hatcheck lady problem (I guess the exact name come from a hatcheck lady who collects hats and absentmindedly return them)

For Hatcheck lady problem, the probability .

When gets larger and larger it converges asymptotically to a constant!

While the talk and boom about multimode multiband phone in CMOS is turning greener, there should be a natural question around it.  How about doing all these in software? Rather add a level of programmability such that a great deal of issues from a  hardwired implementation are shifted to more flexible firmware.  Without contention, pros and cons with the idea of programmability still prevail. Clearly, one definite advantage I see with programmable design is the significant cost reduction and reuse.  Additionally a migration or upgrade, which is imminent from a future gadget design point of view, can get done with relative ease with a programmable multimode chip. Building a suitable processor architecture to suit the modulations schemes (say an OFDM based scheme can have an inbuilt FFT engine or a WCDMA can have a correlator engine). Aren’t anyone working seriously in these directions? I am sure there are many, atleast startup ventures.  Vaanu and Icera indeed are two things coming to my mind.  How about the big boys? There were lot of furies about software programmable baseband chips being developed. Not quite sure what is the latest in that front.  Isn’t it the next big thing in the offing? I am sure the EDA big houses have thought ahead for building tools for a heavily software oriented design, at least for years ahead. Or is it that, I am jumping the gun a little too far? However,  I see some top level bottlenecks in making this programmable multimode chips realizable at an easier pace than a textbook concept. One of them is difficulty in getting away the analog front end. As a matter of fact, now I feel that, analog is going to stay.

So where are we heading to? Clearly, an all CMOS multiband multimode single chip (baseband and analog) with a near perfect RF and a software architecture would be the ultimate holy grail of cellular chip design. How many bands and how many modes to be incorporated becomes less important, if the programmability aspect is assured. Challenges within a single chip concept are themselves many.  Clearly the RF portion is expected to take up lesser share of the overall chip size. An all digital front end is aimed in that direction. While a direct digitization of radio signal of high frequency eliminates analog life process significantly, there are several practical bottlenecks with this Utopian design model.  We are not quite there to say good bye to analog entirely. Analog signal processing is still critical and inevitable, even for a programmable multimode dream.  I will give you some numerical facts to substantiate my claim:

Suppose we decide to build  programmable all digital zero if receiver for a 2GHz system (around the UMTS band). Then,  Shannon Nyqusit sampling would demand at-least 4 G samples/second.  Even with  a processor which clocks 4Ghz and say 8 operations per cycle, our full steam purchase is going to be a maximum 32000000 operations per second. This theoretical figure is based on the assumption that processor memory is fully utilized. At the sampling rate of 4G samples/second, we only are going to get  operations per sample. How are we going to have all the fancy radio algorithms shape life with this? Even to implement realistic functionality of a typical modern radio, this is inadequate. Another important thing is the imminent power dissipation to run a processor at . For a portable gadget, where  these chip are targeted for, we still need more and more hand in hand optimization and integration with analog processing, software as well as digital processing, in addition to an optimized system architecture. My feeling is that, the analog front end is going to stay for some more time, if not for ever. At least on the immediate future, we need more inroads from analog processing, to realize the small size, cost effective multiband multi mode chip dream.

From this blog piece, I came to know that the smart MIT theoretical computer scientist Madhu Sudan is making a move from MIT to industry. He is set to take up a research position with Microsoft. At this economy troubled days, lesser mortals would take the conservative route that ensure stability and so on. They would say a move from a tenured professorship to a more volatile industry is risky. But then one of the smartest mind in the world can have a world revolve around him, if need be. So no surprises here. On the positive side it is a gain for industry, while it is a big loss for MIT, if Madhu decides to stay away from academia for too long.

Interestingly, on the very same blog, someone commented about other famous moves. Apparently, Venkatesan Guruswami, Madhu’s celebrated student is also making a permanent move from UWash to CMU.  In industry, we are often associated with frequent hops. Academia is not too immune to attrition either. However, I see no harm in making smart moves. It is going to help the world, atleast  in expectation.

As in EPFL too, there is imminent big fish attrition(s). Tom Henzinger and his wife Monika Henzinger are about to leave EPFL to take up a permanent position in Austria. The awesome twosome will be missed in EPFL.

I wonder how this song found itself a way to the drains!  I remember listening to this audio in All India Radio chalachithraganangal program during childhood. It is a little slow but I have enjoyed the  rhythm. Never seen this video before. Now, the video brings more nostalgia about those paddy fields and picturesque Kerala, my home land.  Missing Kerala!

Hope you guys enjoy this music. (For information the music is in malayalam)

Today, there appeared an interestng (and perhaps general) question posted on the Linkedin Analog RFmixed signal group. The question was this “Regarding multi-mode multiband RF transmitters for handsets (CMOS), what do you think are the hot issues (besides PA)?” I have given a short overview of the challenges that I could see when a multi mode phone is to be designed on CMOS: The phone has to support a wide range of frequency bands as well as multiple standards/technologies/modulation/air interface. Here is what I wrote.  I am not sure whether the discussion is accessible to public. Hence I repost here. 

Integrating the RF transmitter and receiver circuits is a challenging thing since we have to support multiple bands (within a single mode. Say GSM/EDGE should support GSM900 to 1900 bands) as well as support for multiple phone modes. For instance a natural multi mode multi band phone supporting GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/LTE will have to consider a wide frequency ranges from 850MHz to over 2GHz. If we were to consider incorporating GPS and WLAN, add that extra consideration. Not just the transceiver circuitry, but also other components such as oscillators, filters, passive components, frequency synthesizers and power amplifiers. Another thing is that, for multi mode, the sensitivity requirements are much more stringent than a single mode, multi band design. 

Since CMOS offers low cost, better performance and better scaling, to me that is the way forward. The natural choice of transceiver in CMOS would be the direct conversion/Zero IF, since it eliminates the costly SAW filters, and also reduce the number of on chip oscillators and mixers. Now, there would be several key design issues to be considered now with direct conversion architecture. Most notable ones are the well known ghost “DC offset” and the 1/f noise. Designers will have the task cut out to get a cleaner front end and as well as near ideal oscillators. 

Now I see another problem with multi mode, depending on what level of flexibility we prefer on this integration. Do we need the phone to operate in multiple modes simultaneously? Say a voice call on GSM and at the same time a multimedia streaming on LTE. In such a case, the question of sharing components are completely ruled out. If not, say some components such as synthesizers and mixers (if in the same band for multiple modes) can be shared. Clearly, simultaneous mode operation will ask for increased silicon die size as well as cost. Challenges may be there for circuit isolation for different modes as well. 

In all, depending on the level of sophistication (and of course all these things will have to be scaled economically too) the design,partitioning, architecture challenges are aplenty. Now the choice between a single chip (containing both analog baseband and digital baseband) versus two chips (analog and digital partitioned) will get a little more trickier with multiple modes. With multiple antennas (MIMO), add another dimension to this whole thing:-(. 

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The latest edition of The Economist reported this shocking fact based on Amnesty international study on capital punishment: our civilized governments have executed close to 2400 people in the last one year alone; all in the form of capital punishment.  Over 70% of these numbers are coming from China.  Perhaps more revealing is the fact that Saudi Arabia and Iran took the percentage share (per population) when it comes to executing supreme order, all to its people. 

Now, there may be a stronger story to defend these killings, because some of those criminals may indeed have done heinous crimes. But that, simply cannot justify capital punishment, Can it? To me, killing a human on any count is unjustified. By doing so, we are exhibiting more insanity. Why killing? We could rather put them in jail and let them be forced to work extra hard and learn the hardship of life. 

The other day, couple of my Iranian friends and I were discussing about the sort of criminal law practiced in our respective countries (here India as in my case and Iran for them). One of them asked me about the kind of punishments that would be given for instance to a guy who accidentally injures someone on the road.  I had to tell him, in India, a capital punishment is usually given only in rarest or rare crimes.  Even then, there would be widespread opposition to the hanging.  On the other hand, I was shocked to hear that in Iran, some crimes are dealt with a ‘blood for blood’ response. Apparently in Iran, for a recent case wherein a husband poured acid to permanently disable his wife’s eyes, the judge ruled a replica punishment so that the culprit get to feel the pain and agony that his victim had gone through.  To me, this sounded too uncivilized a punishment, even though the victim deserve no mercy. He surely does not deserve rights  for any decent public life for the heinous crime he carried out.  The best way to punish such barbaric people is to put them through the most rigorous hardship over a prolonged period. That way, they get to experience the bitterness of life. Killing someone to compensate the loss of innocent people  is simply no justification: At least I find no solace to accept it as a civilized way of dealing crime and criminals. 

In a way, by killing the criminals we are giving an easy escape to those in-humans.

The popular documentary on this fascinating mathematical prodigy of 20th century is now available on you tube. Personally, while watching the video, the cam river and the row boat brought a touch of nostalgia! I have heard mountains of stories about Paul Erdős. This documentary is a must watch for not only mathematicians and mathematically curious guys (or guys like me who are just curious about mathematics, mathematicians and mathematical minds or for that matter about anything in this world!), but for everyone interested to know about such an extra ordinary mind of our times.  What a fascinating experience it would have been to listen to one of his lectures live. Now this youtube brought the gap down to finite length/time reality.

I have never seen Erdős. Now that he is no more warrants any thoughts anyway.  In a away I am lucky this semester to attend courses of another prolific mathematician of this era Janos Pach. Interestingly, Janos Pach is one of the few living mathematicians with Erdős number 1.  His lectures on Graph theory as well as the one on geometrical graph theory are truly fascinating. 

Anyway, if you have not seen the documentary yet, here is the link. It is a must watch. I bet, you wouldnt miss the time. On many occasions, the Cam river and its slow movement etches something in the backdrop of those days.  Didnt I like that place?

It appears that, both the LDF and UDF have overcome the usual uneasiness in coming out with the candidate lists to the coming Loksabha elections. Quite strangely, LDF candidate selection meetings turned out to be much like the usual UDF fights.  LDF known for their discipline and ideologies, had to face a lot of mudslinging exercise, not only from opponents, but as well from their allies. However, largely, their candidate list showed some sense of vibrancy by fielding young and cheerful candidates. After all, people need their MPs to talk and present their woes; more importantly present and represent them well in the Parliament.  Personally, I am not too inclined and happy with these Ponnani episode. Nor am I happy with these religious mongers having a big say in these elections.  Sadly, the sense of reality hastens that, even the religious outfits have their agendas waiting to be exploited by one of these two fronts, namely LDF and UDFs.  

Now, what do we have from the UDF list? Quite frankly,  all but two are hopeless. Among the UDF list, I would like Shashi Tharoor to get elected, even though he will have to sweat it out from Thiruvananthapuram. I am not enthused by the religious agenda dominated constituencies like Ponnani and Malappuram, partly because I am ignorant of the real scene there and partly because of my uneasiness in mixing religion and politics.  In the remaining 16 seats, I would rather prefer LDF candidates to win, simply because the opponent candidates stay no chance of being effective representatives. Congress has been lacking smart leaders.  Their usual choices are drawn from the pool of factions and castes.  LDF, in spite of all their hodgepodge alliances, fielded some decent candidates.  It will not be easy, I reckon even for LDF, because the unpleasantness among allies and even within the members of major party CPI(M) is looming large.  Going by the corruption history and ability to stand up and speak, many of the LDF nominees deserve to get elected over the UDF counterparts.  For sure, I would really think Shashi tharoor is an appropriate candidate to represent Kerala.  If elected he can perhaps be a very vocal MP for not only Thiruvananthapuram, but Kerala as a whole. To be honest UDF inspite of the minor opposition from within Congress party, got a good candidate to contest from the state. You can argue that he is not a big wig politician, but he knows more about India and is an exemplary policy maker, which will help in the parliament. 

As a footnote, it is appalling that Rajdeep Sardesai cant even say the word Thiruvanathapuram, not in one, but four or five trials.   Quite pity that, a leading national  reporter cant get this right. I don’t mind a little change in accent, but he seem to care little to get the name correct. Horrible. At least a sense of respect? Anyway, their credibility tag is lost long ago, with their sensational reporting.  Sad thing is that, they seem to continuously relish on that ideology. And they are sort of ridiculing Mallika Sarabhai, by asking something like “You, urban English speaking candidate fielding from Ahmadabad?” It was (and still is) so stupid a question that, Mallika replied in Gujarati to create more splines and wrinkles on their face (Suhasini Hyder the other news anchor in this case). Weren’t they expecting it? Or do they think that, everything in this world revolve around their concept of Indianness? Being a broadcast medium one thing is that, they can say any nonsense, but being responsible is entirely another.  Over the years, Rajdeep who had been such a fine journalist, now all confined to being one among the many, new era sensationalizing breed. It saddens people like me, who had enjoyed their good piece of reporting; all when sensibility prevailed!  She is standing in an election from a constituency where she lives. How ignorant are these urban news reporters on her ability to speak her mother tongue? They fielded similar question to Shashi tharoor as well. For their information, he can speak Malayalam, pretty decently.

Oh boy! Didn’t this five foot five inches little big fella make us feel a little better today? Didn’t those back foot cover drives served our eyes as little soothing gels? Didnt the rolling of the leather ball deflected from middle of that MRF stickered famous bat, on to a lush green turfs to the boundary boards of the beautiful Hamilton cricket ground, fetched moisture to our eyes, even while gluing to the live stream on the LCD screen, all  in the darkness of the midnight hours?  I had stayed awake into the wee hours of a cold Lausanne night, to see his masterful show in the first innings of first test at Hamilton. As  Mark Richardson commentating remarked,  the innings of Tendulkar had been an absolute batting clinic. There were quite a few stamp shots of class, which included a few front foot cover drives, couple of back foot cover drives, the cut shots and the impeccable straight drive which separated the trace of the ball  epsilon inches away from the stumps at the non striker’s position.

The latest talk/demo at TED opened up a fresh life to the possibility of a sixth sense.  The MIT Media labs now have unveiled a prototype of the sixth sense setup. The whole thing is  reasonably economical already and all indications are that this is going to rock some day. Incredible idea which went all the way to realization. Kudos to Pranav Mistry, Pattie Meas and their team.  One thing I am really hoping out of it is that, this paving way to assist disabled people. For instance a blind, deaf or dumb person finding avenues to get a sixth sense aid would be really helpful. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

Video Link

An interesting bound (problem from Rudi’s  Modern coding theory book) regarding the chromatic number of a random graph.  I first attempted it during the course.  Here is the problem statement:

C.5 (Concentration of the Chromatic Number – Spencer and Shamir). Consider a graph  on  vertices.  The chromatic number of a graph , denoted by , is the smallest number of colors needed to color all vertices so that no two vertices which are joined by an edge have the same color. Consider the standard ensemble of random graphs on vertices with parameter : to sample from this ensemble, pick  vertices and connect each of the Ž ordered pairs of vertices independently from all other connections with probability . Show that for this ensemble 

.

My solution is as folllows: (PDF typeset as single file is available here. Look for problem 3)

Let  is a random graph with vertices.  If is the probability that a given edge is in . The probability space be .  Let be a filter on the set of all such random graphs. We can define a Martingale as follows:

where

and is the Chromatic number of . Chromatic number changes at most by one , when the information about the new edge comes in. Clearly, satisfies the conditions for Azuma’s inequality.

is a Martingale, with ).  Let . Clearly 

Now we can use the Azuma’s inequality on to get,

.

Since , the result 

follows.

Here is an interesting riddle on random matrices.  

(Rank of Random Binary Matrix). Let  denote the number of binary matrices of dimension  and rank , so that by symmetry .  This is a repost of the solution that I have arrived at (certainly not the first!) and submitted as part of a homework (9) problem from the doctoral course  Modern coding theory (by Rudiger Urbanke) at  EPFL.  The sumbitted solution in PDF is available here.

Rank of a matrix is essentially the number of nonzero rows when the matrix is expressed in echelon form. So, we just need to compute the ways these matrices can be created with non zero rows. Since the elements of the matrix are binary (from ), we can simply do a counting.

It is trivial to compute for and . For  , only all zero matrix possible, and only one such matrix exist. Hence . For  , since  , no matrix exist, which means  . 

Now we consider .  How many ways? We have   non zero rows of the   matrix, which means all rows must be nonzero. Without loss of generality, for counting, we could assume that, the rows are ordered. The last row ( row can be be done in ,  since there anything other than all  vector (of size ) is allowed. On -th row, anything other than that of row  is allowed. There are  ways here. -th row can have anything except any linear combination of the rows  and . This is nothing but . Row then have  and so on. In all, Following the same procedure, we can have a total of  

 ways.  For , we can construct a rank  matrix of size  in any of the following ways:

1.  Take a rank matrix of size  and add an independent row.
2.  Take a rank  matrix of size  and add a dependent row.

For every  matrix, 

and hence,

ways. (Essentially avoid all possible linear combinations of existing rows).  Using the second (item 2 above) method, we can have  and 

different ways a rank matrix can be formed. Where,the first term () is when the all zero row is picked as the new row. In ways we can pick any one of the exisiting row as a dependent (new row). In general for  we can have combination of  existing rows  out of in  different ways to make a dependent (new) row.

So using (1) and (2) we get,

Putting everything together,

In this post, I tried (for the first time) to write something in Malayalam, my mother tongue. My dear English only readers, please excuse! The pleasure of writing something in mother tongue is different.  Sadly and regrettably, I seem to have forgotten some of the alphabets of Malayalam. I feel ashamed. 

മലയാളത്തിലെഴുതാന്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ വളരെ എളുപ്പമായി. പണ്ട്  ഞാന്‍ മലയാളം LaTex malayalam ഉപയോഗിച്ചിരുന്നതോര്‍ക്കുന്നു (In 2000 or so, it was. Now, latex omega is pretty nice and easy too, especially while LaTexing). കുറച്ചതികം ബുദ്ധിമുട്ടിയാണ് അന്ന് കുറച്ചു വരികളെഴുതാന്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞത്. എന്നാല്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ എത്രയോ എളുപ്പമാണ് (all thanks to Google Transliteration). എന്തായാലും വേര്‍ഡ്പ്രെസ്സില്‍ ഒന്ന് എഴുതി നോക്കാമെന്ന് വച്ചു.

കഴിഞ്ഞ രണ്ട്  ദിവസ്സമായി ഞാന്‍ കേരളത്തിലെ രാഷ്ട്രിയ സംഭവ വികാസങ്ങള്‍ നിരീക്ഷിക്കുകയായിരുന്നു. ഇവിടെ യുറോപ്പില്‍ ഇന്റര്‍നെറ്റ് വഴി കിട്ടുന്ന വാര്‍ത്തകള്‍ മാത്രമാണ് ഒരു മാര്‍ഗം. പ്രധാനമായും വാര്‍ത്തകളെല്ലാം വരുന്ന ലോകസഭ തെരഞ്ഞെടുപ്പ് സ്ഥാനാര്‍ത്തികളെ ചുറ്റിപറ്റിയുളളതായിരുന്നു. സി പി ഐ എം, സി പി ഐ തമ്മില്‍ പൊന്നാനി സീറ്റ് സ്ഥാനാര്‍ഥി നിര്‍ണ്ണയം ചൊല്ലിയുള്ള വിവാദം ഒരു പക്ഷേ അനാവശ്യമായിരുന്നു. സി പി ഐ സെക്രടറി വെളിയം ഭാര്‍ഗവന്‍ തീര്‍ത്തും നിര്‍ഭാഗ്യകരമായ രീതിയിലാണ് പത്ര സമ്മേളനം നടത്തിയത്. ഒരു മുന്നണിയില്‍ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ ചില അഭിപ്രായ വിത്യസങ്ങളൊക്കെ ഉണ്ടാകുന്നതു സ്വാഭാവികം. പക്ഷേ അത് ജനങ്ങളുടെയും പ്രവര്‍ത്തകരുടെയും മുന്നില്‍ അവതരിപ്പിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ കുറച്ചു പക്വതയൊക്കെ ആകാമായിരുന്നു. ഇത് കോണ്‍ഗ്രസിലെ അടിപിടി പോലെയുള്ള ഒന്നായി മാറ്റിയതിനു വെളിയത്തിന്‍റെ കൊള്ളരുതായ്മ്മയായി മാത്രമേ കാണാന്‍ കഴിയു‌. ഇതില്‍ ഏറ്റവും വിചിത്രം പൊന്നാനി സി പി ഐയുടെ കൊട്ടയോന്നുമല്ല. മിക്കവാറും തോക്കാറുള്ള മുസ്‌ലിം പ്രാധിനിത്യം അത്യധികമുള്ള ഒരു മണ്ഡലം,അതില്‍ ഒരു പൊതു സമ്മതനെ അങ്ങീകരിക്കാന്‍ ചേര്‍ന്ന ഒരു മീറ്റിങ്ങില്‍ തങ്ങളുടെ ആഗ്രഹം അതെ പടി സാധിയ്ക്കാതത്തിന്റെ പേരില്‍ ഒരു പത്ര സമ്മേളനം നടത്തി ശകാര വര്‍ഷം ചൊരിഞ്ഞ് വെളിയം അദ്ദേഹത്തിന്റെ ഉള്ള വിലയും ഇല്ലാതാക്കി. ഒരു കണക്കിന് ഭര്‍ദ്ദനും വെളിയവും ഏകദേശം ഒരേ പോലെയുള്ള മൂക്കിന്‍റെ അറ്റത്ത്‌ ദേഷ്യം ഒട്ടിച്ച രണ്ടു നേതാക്കള്‍. നിര്‍ഭാഗ്യവശാല്‍ രണ്ടുപേരും ഒരേ പാര്‍ട്ടിയില്‍. അതോ ഭാഗ്യവശാലോ?

Inkscape has come off age. Creating vector graphics has now become pretty cool with inkscape. I too tried to make one.  The one I tried is an egg. Afterall, I am convinced that egg is first and then chicken (I mean on eating preference). The drawing is not that stellar neat, but then, I am a novice when it comes to inkscape. This simply is my first drawing and I will be excused, Won’t I? I am posting the scalable vector graphics (svg) file, just in case a random enthusiastic reader find it useful to make it better!

The inkscape source file (svg) is available from this link;

Wondering why I created this figure? Well, I was trying to illustrate the P versus NP. My idea was to say the yellow yolk is P and white outer one surrounding the yolk would represent NP. Anyway that is for another post!

Since you are my dear reader, it is my privilage to serve you something. Look, I took the extra pain to borrow these yummy stuffs (from here) for you. Enjoy this to get cooked.     

Egg ready to pan

I am caught with a little trouble to figure out an easier way to set up and solve a  summation of a function of several variables.  I just realized that Mathematica doesnt allow me to add a constraint in the summation operation.  My problem  is that, the summation should be performed over  the ordered partition set of a number. 

An example, will illustrate the problem definition a lot better.  Suppose I want to compute the sum of a function of variables over all variables such that, the sum of the index variables always equal to a constant . 

Clearly, the indices here runs over all the ordered partitions of the number .  Since is not that big a number, we can simply write these partitions by hand and somehow get the job done.  Let us say denote the ordered partitions and unordered partitions of the number by and respectively. 

. The ordered partition will have the permutations of each of these on the three positions! So and are different sets of whereas, they are considered as one in .  The summation needs to be carried over the ordered partition list .  Since both  and  grow pretty big with even modest , the job of manual summation is not that appealing. I really hoped mathematica to aid me here. Unfortunately, I don’t see a way out here, other than the painful individual partition sum.  Anyway, for the curious reader, the sum I attempt are of the following types:

typical values for is and is around . If any enthused reader finds a way/trick, I will be happy to sponsor a coffee (Sorry at this recession time, nothing more sadly…).

In fact, the first one is easy (Interestingly, I just found a way, while typesetting the blog).  I can do a differential with respect to and then scale it to get the requisite sum.  It can be written as follows:

Second one is the trouble maker

Oh man! power of a coffee.  As I am typing this on a moody Lausanne swiss weather, here comes the trick.  I just made a coffee and that seemed to have worked.  I guess I can apply a similar trick to the second one too.  Basically, we can split them into two expressions and then write each as differential versions of a multinomial sum. Here it is:

Amazingly, we can simplify both to get a simple looking expression. I am glad! Here is what I finally got:

Dont these terrorists and such insane folks have no other job? They are much more than a migraine now.  What was considered to be a never ever target has now become the soft target of these terrorists. The latest dastardly attack on the touring Sri Lankan cricketers, near the Lahore stadium in Pakistan make us all the more worried about Pakistan. The horrific memories of Mumbai incident on 26/21/2008 are still ringing and now in the backdrop here is one which happened in the place it originated.  I am hurt and saddened to see and hear these incidents happening again and again.  By all means, these attacks are well planned operations and surely must have a background which cant be beyond the know hows of supporters and the territorial government. Will this be a wake up call to eliminate the terror network. They say cricket is a religion.  Which religion? Fanatics from all religion made a mess in the name of cricket and otherwise.  It is time for the  entire population of Pakistan to come out in public and express a solidarity and say, “you terrorists made a mess of this world and you have no support from us, whatsoever”. Same pledge should be made by everyone in India, Srilanka and even Bangladesh. Terrorism cannot be justified, whether it is internal or external. This applies to not only to Jihadis, but also to folks like Ram sena and LTTE. All the doctrines which insists killing innocent section of population are of the same colour and they don’t deserve a piece of sympathy.  The troubles of our times is getting worsened, ever so deeply. I am lost to get a feel of these fanatics. All these youth armed with AK47 should have been pillars of building a nation; alas! these very promising prodigies are sadly dragged, into those filthy cause in the name of religion and ethnic freedom! Terrible.

I feel sorry for Sri lanka who went ahead to express solidarity to a nation which was deprived of cricket by every other nation including India.  They were promised express security! yet, in the end caught in the fallacy. Same sympathy to Pakistan normal folks who, to their innocence are denied of watching an international cricket game in their land.  Now is the time to stand up and say, strongly against the doctrines which advocates terror. Act now, please…. Humanity is in danger at the hands of these cruel terrorists.  Nurturing a wicked terrorist to kill your enemy can bite you back.  So, never do that.

Firstly, thanks a lot sufiwindsurfing for bringing the story of Ravi, a young boy from the street of Mumbai India. This boy, without any formal education, all by himself learned some very commendable language tricks.  Now he speaks over thirteen languages (albeit few sentences only, but still an incredible achievement) including English, french, Italian, German, Persian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic.  Amazing! It is quite sad to realize that, the society we live in is so much unaware about the plight of millions of kids like him who are forced to suppress their talents in pursuit of making their ends meet.  In the many streets of India, we may be able to find so many such Ravi’s who are unfortunately pushed to the dark side of the fortune wheel.  I really wish and dream of an era, all the children of this world have equal access to love and education.  It is cruel to leave them alone into the  world of difficulties this early. Forget all religion and fanaticism. Who needs that, when a vast ocean of basic social problems still loom large across the world? It is a known story that, many of the kids begging in the streets of India are abducted and forced into the urban chaos. My heart goes to those parents whose beloved ones are oppressed forever. Every time I see these kids,  my mind goes into that wild scary thought of that beautiful would have been childhood, denied for the millions of underprivileged. Who knows, we may have lost millions of future hopes into the drains of mass urban disaster.  As Betrand Russell said in his beautiful autobiography prologue, “I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot and hence I too suffer“.  As he said, this indeed make a mockery of what human life should be!  We are simply not doing enough! 

and here is Ravi, when he was younger (may be 5 years then?) in 2005 

As expected the 11th game drawn and Anand one must say easily defended the world title. Congratulations Anand. http://live.chessdom.com/kramnik-anand-2008-g11.html

He, more or less singlehandeldly changed the face of chess in India. Incredible. Not many can stand up and claim that he could trigger a sport enthusiasm in a country as big as India. A champion of a generation.

Phew! After the heck of debates and discussions (over years) on the standard evolution of the IEEE 802.11n for multiple antennas (MIMO), now it appears that we are all in for a single stream (single antenna) chip. It sounds more like an 11g upgrade, or perhaps a conservative lead from there on? If Atheros believe this is is the way to go I have my belief that Broadcom and Marvell have it in the delivery line too.  Here is that interesting new story at EEtimes.

An incredible article came from Rohit Brijnath today on cricinfo.  Truly brilliant! I must say, it is heartening to see that a gem came in the middle of all these scuffle by the crazy Indian media, barking senselessly, discussing and debating for the Fabulous cricketers to retire.  I am glad that, these fantastic cricketers (Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Kumble and Ganguly) played in an era when I enjoyed the game so much. Without them, the game can never be so exciting. 

http://content-uk.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/current/story/372146.html

Here is a list of some of my favourite Indian commercial ads.  Thanks to youtube, I get to see them again! The adhisive brand “Fevicol”has produced some inredible and funny ads.  Most of their ads stuck on to the viewers mind.  Among the other funny ads, I liked camlin erasurs and marker ones.  I better dont say too much here. As they say, the fun in an ad is best viewed and chilled out! Have a look and enjoy the fun and appreciate the creativity of these fabulous ad makers.

The old Ericsson mobile phone ad (I guess 1996). The concept of a  ”small” phone back in 1996 perhaps is too outdated for today.  All boils down to Moore’s law!

Rimii Sen and Aamir Khan did a nice job here in this Bengali accented conversation.  The coke ad is one of the better ads from the cool drink folks.

Fevicol: Simply superb ad from the popular adhesive brand.

Naukri.com’s famous Hari Sadoo funny ad:

How about this one. To be this is too good an ad from Camlin.

The Peugeot ad used to appear in Channel 4 in UK. It was an incredible ad. I am glad that this is there for viewing in youtube. Superb one.  

I have been searching for this ad for a long time. One of the best (in terms of creativity) ad I have ever seen. They used to show this ad in England. To me simply amazing ad this is. If not mistaken the ad was created by the Italian agency Euro RSCG Italia based in Milan and by a Dutch director.  Superb ad.

With 8 Gold discs from this single Olympics (besides the 6 at Athens in 2004 and 1 Medley on debu four years prior to that on debut), he rightly comes with the right to assume a definite spot in all the news paper sport pages. I didnt watch much of the Beijing 2008 Olympics on TV (nor youtube), but the coverage in most of the news papers are pretty allround. It is incredible to have this swimming demon scoring and breaking every possible records, when it comes to sprint on water. Comparisons are drawn to Spitz which is truly fair. Reckless as it sounds, few columns already appeared with vigorous claim that he is the best athlete of all time.  This is unfair and unwanted. The number of medals cannot just be the parameter to decide the greatness of the “all time great athtlete”. Well, one could call him the best swimmer or something like that. To me,  a Carl Lewis who excelled in different variety of atletic events, and that too consistently over a period of time marks among the pantheons of the all time greats. In anycase, it is impossible and at times irrelevant to call someone “all time great”.

By the way, I am glad to have many records being broken. It is imperative to scale higher as much as possible….with time!

Interesting and truly encouraging news about the MIT researchers who have now the idea to generate electricity round the clock, from solar energy.

While trying to understand the Luby transform (LT) code, I stumbled upon the well known coupon collector’s problem. It took a while for me to figure out the connection, but as it turned out, there is a stronger connection between these two.  In LT parlance, if we were to use only degree one packets (that is, packets sent and collected as it is) what is the expected number of packets to be collected (when collected randomly, one at a time) such that all the required packets are collected atleast once. For illustration let us say we have information packets at the transmitter. The receiver collectes these one by one at random. How many packets on the average, we need to collect until we have collected all of the different information packets. Remember we are collecting the packets randomly (On the other hand, if we were to collect things deterministically, we just need to collect packets to get all these , when done without replacement).

Assume that there are distinct coupon types.  We have, a large pool of these coupons at disposal. Every time you go to the shop you collect a coupon picked uniformly at random from the pool.  The picked coupon has equal probability of  being any of the types.  Naturally, some of the collected coupons (over multiple visits to the shop) may be of the same type. The question asked is this:  Suppose the coupon collector aims to have coupons of all types.  How many (number of visits) coupons he  has to collect till he possess all the  distinct types of coupons?

In expectation, the coupon collector should make   visits to the shop in order to have atleast one copy of all  distinct types of coupons . This coupon collector problem can sound a little confusing to a fresh reader. For simplicity sake we can assume that, there are differently coloured coupons at the shop. The question then is, on average (i.e., expectation) how many times one needs to visit (each visit fetch a coupon) the shop so that all coloured coupons are fetched atleast once.

There are different type of coupons.  The coupon collector collects a coupon upon each visit. The collected coupon is among the types, picked uniformly at random (from a set of possibly large pool of coupons) .  Since the coupon is drawn uniformly at random, there is a non zero probability that some of the collected coupons over multiple visits may be of the same type.  Suppose that at some stage, the coupon collector has different type of coupons collected.  The probability that his next visit fetch a new coupon type (not of the types he already have in the kitty) is .  So, the expected number of coupons to be collected to fetch a new coupon type is .  Let us denote this number by .

The expected value . From this we can compute the expected value of . In other words, , the expected number of coupons to be collected (i.e, number of visits to the shop!) so that, the he would have all the different types of coupons is:

So, what is the trouble? This number is prohibitively high a number to be acceptable (as decoding time of  is significantly higher than the wishful linear time !). So, simply using degree is not a good idea. This is why Luby went ahead and identified some smarter distribution like Soliton (and its variants proposed later on, such as robust soliton and then the recent raptor codes by Amin).

Stumbled upon the news on New York times: it is about a new search engine being developed by some former Google folks. First there is excitement when it comes to a startup idea when you know that they know how it is to be confronting their former employers in business. Anyway, the new engine is called cuil (pronounced just like ‘cool’). I am all for new ideas. Hopefully we are into better search engines. Since these folks are also from Google, you can expect a certain Google standard guaranteed. Google undoubtedly changed the search engine business, by simply scaling the internet to a level hitherto unimagined. Yet again, a Stanford connection to a new startup. Tom Costello and his wife Anna Patterson (former Google architect) surely will know this business better than us (correction, better than me to say the least).

If their motto of producing a more appropriate search engine, bettering Google, then we should feel happy and proud of this adventure. Surely Google cant relax either. In all it is a win win for the world. A preliminary look at the search engine game me a good feel. I am not sure whether the change in appearance (after being stuck and used to Google search for so long) gives me this impression. Anyway I look forward to see their progress.

I leave it to you to try out for a comparison. I did a Cuil on “compressed sensing” and found this where as a google of “compressed sensing” displayed this. Google displayed the search result as a list (rows) where as the Cuil results to a tabular form. Too early to say anything discrete, but I am going to try the new one as well. Google is by far the fastest (at the moment).

Came across this New york times article on the Bhopal tragedy. It pains to know that the left over of that fateful tragedy still rolls on. Isn’t it still true that, the dreams of poor are never rich enough to be noticed? Their problems are not important enough to be cared?

I am quite saddened to hear about the demise of Professor Randy Pausch. The 47 year old CMU professor who was diagnosed with terminal cancer finally succumbed to death. It is unbelievable that, he showed courage to confront life when you know that there is nothing positive to look forward to. I have gone through his famous last lecture over and over and many a time wondered how can someone be so positive when the odds are so much against you to lean forward. Simply heroic. He showed us the value of life and the way to look forward to. I couldn’t agree more when he coined what “experience” mean,

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted

Randy, may you rest in peace. Your life has changed many lives for good. You must be proud. You have truly left and enduring legacy. Our thoughts are with your family.

Randy Pausch giving the last lecture at CMU

His last lecture video is a must watch, if you have not done yet. Here is the video link:

Growing up in Kerala is an experience one cannot describe in few words. One must live through it to really feel it. It is different! This video

brings back a whole lot of those memories of childhood. I may be heavily biased here to say so much uniqueness about the social life in Kerala, but to me they simply remain so. The greeneries and the beautiful countryside, the many little ponds, rivers, streams, lakes, paddy fields, the list goes on. The days of Onam and Vishu are more than festivals for the people of Kerala. The expectations and excitement build around these festivals on children’s mind and the fun of playing so many little games: playing in rain, then invariably fall sick, all that in spite of being truly aware of the consequences. August-September time frame also had the monsoon settles when all the ponds and lakes are filled with water. As kids, those were special days to spend near full days swimming and play the various games by staying in water. Beautiful! Now, all those little games like Kuttikol, Pulikkali, lathi and the countless many games all must have disappeared and perhaps paved the ways for cricket or computer. I wish to believe that it is not!

Looking back, it is amazing that people of Kerala unanimously enjoyed the festivals like Onam, Vishu and Christmas irrespective of religious beliefs. The excitement of a festival was much more than religion, even though there is mythological trace to each of them.

Coming back to this video, it instantly took me to the days of Onam when we all kids (my siblings, cousins and neighbourhood friends) took pride in displaying new dresses, (more traditional it used to be) and group ourselves to play the whole day, with intermittent breaks for lunch feast etc and the pleasure of eating a sweet or two from the neighborhood house and to feel it tastier than the one at home.

And how can I have enough of those Kani konna pookkal (Cassia fistula), a seasonal flower seen all around during vishu summer days! (Courtesy, this beautiful image of kani konna is taken from http://www.ulujain.org/album/casino/casinoflowers/cassia1.jpg)

kanikonna poothappol

Until the recent past, south India was freed of all these callous folks who gets thrill by killing innocent people. Now, they are sneaking in and creating havoc everywhere. Inhuman activities happening anywhere hurts and the people who are affected only knows how bad they are. The sad trend is that, these are spreading across boundaries. Yesterday’s serial blasts in Bangalore is an example where the cancer is eating all sides of society. No matter who these stupid people/groups behind these and what their motives are, it is simple attrocious and pity to hear that such insane gangs exist. I fail to understand their doctrine of deriving sadistic pleassure by killing and terrorising common people who struggle to move a life on the side lane. Koramangala was a relatively quite area (but well, outskirts of them are heard to be a little notorious for the few religious gangs, but it was a hearsay I wished to not believe, but now truth must be properly investigated), but these inhuman activities are spreading everywhere.

To my innocence, I began to think that, there is support, directly or indirectly to these callousness. If the entire mass vehemently isolate the doctrine of killing innocent people these things simply cant continue. One random blast somewhere can be considered as the work of some streaky individual or group, but a series of such things ought to be coming from more planned inhuman groups. I really wish everyone think above these pity factions, whether it is religion or silly politics or any other doctrine. If you cant respect humanity and that too helpless armless poor people then your God cannot care you either.

While searching for the book Information theory, Coding theorems for discrete memoryless systems by Imre Csiszar and Janos Korner, I came across several sites which echoes the fact that this book is one of the rarest specimen on earth. However in the process, I found a blog forum which lists a whole lot of out of print books. This book, as expected is in demand already. We can even vote to request to bring the out of print books to a possible reprint. I am not sure how effective this is, but there is no harm in trying! We can suggest any books you may want to have a reprint. To me, this is a whole new and welcome idea. For learning, we should have access to the good books. Already quite a few demands (See this blog for instance) for the Csiszar and Korner book. Man, the world sometimes think alike!

Over the weekend, I finished reading a very nice book, The Kite runner, by Khaled Khosseini, an Afghan born novelist. This is first of his books, that I have read. In fact this is his first book as well. The book is written in an easy story telling style, but he did an amazing job to make me really satisfied. There were echoes of pain and suffering and the realization that the fate of a nation and its people can sometimes be so cruelly altered by invasion of other nations. Ofcourse that is a starting point. Later on the so called protectors of God then take over and make an even more mess where humanity is let to shame. Well, we can go on and debate those issues which unfortunately is affecting like cancer to human society as a whole, across the world.

Coming back to the book: The story The Kite runner is the story of two young boys Amir and Hassen. The setup is in Afghanistan, where these boys are born and spent their childhood. Amir was born in an affluent family, but his mother dies immediately after his birth. Ali, a servant to Amir’s father (baba) and his wife have a son named Hassan. On strikingly similar terms, after Hassen was born, his mother elope with someone, leaving him too motherless. The two kids are growing up together. Hassen lives in a hut in Amir’s mansion, baba’s house as he often refers to as. Baba (amir’s dad) loves both these boys, but Amir finds he being more critical to him than Hassan. Youn Amir thinks that baba’s attitude is perhaps due to the fact that Amir is indirectly responsible for his wifes (Amir’s mother) death (she dies after Amir’s birth). Baba’s friend Rahim Khan however is more lenient and friendly to Amir, and he provide support and encouragement to young Amir to develop interest in writing stories.

Amir and Hassen grows up together, with Amir as the lead boy and Hassen more submissive and obedient friend. The Russian invasion to Afghanistan then changes their life forever. Amir find himself as an immigrant in California, whereas Hassan forced to take a route to Pakistan. Fate shows the cruel flip to Hassen and he dies. Years later Amir take a difficult trip down east to rescue Hasan’s son, all in the middle of the Taliban reign. A tocuh of unrealistic melodrama where Amir fights with the brutal Talibans, but that afar the story is incredibly nice and touching to the reader. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

I have been posting my random thoughts, somewhat on irregular terms at Ratna’s ergodic view. The way I was led to this new blogging door is motivated by Compressed sensing. Well, I must not mislead anyone. I have heard about compressed sensing as an active research area, but today’s talk by Martin Wainwright on Statistical estimation in high-dimensional settings: Practical and information-theoretic limits in a way did more help than expected. It was indeed a very very motivating talk. My professor Rudiger Urbanke had earlier suggested to attend this talk and had promised it to be a remarkable one. Martin proved him dead right. Well, that is not the point. During the talk Martin touched upon examples and possible applications of estimations in high dimensional settings in compressed sensing. He described the compressed sensing problem in a simple setting. In all, the talk triggered me to study what is this subject of research namely, compressed sensing. First thing we must do is google for compressed sensing. It leads to the obvious pages. The IEEE signal processing magazine had a small tutorial paper published in 2007 July edition. It was quite an easy read which gave me a good idea on this topic. Then I chanced upon seeing the blog of Professor Terence Tao. Incredible timing and I am so glad that this visit had two immediate effects. First I am heaven pleased with his humbleness to share his thoughts to the world, in spite of being busy with his work and research. In this blog entry I came across, he describe the problem of compressed sensing with a very very simple example. He has not only presented it well for the target audience, but also gave it in a very very motivating manner to aid the interested audience to explore further. To be very honest, I did not expect a Fields medalist to spare his valuable time to help a larger audience by writing about a subject which is not easy to understand. His lucid presentation style is indeed a lesson I like to take as valuable note when writing articles.

In his blog Terence talks about a whole lot of things and I would very very highly recommend anyone, especially students and folks who are eager to learn just about anything. In one blog, he writes about the importance of writing down just about anything we learn, doest matter whether it is a simple thing you understood or a part of proof gathered. I have been following this method for a while and I found it amazingly useful as well. Well, I have decided to strictly enforce this on a more regular term.

Just aside, the beautiful thing about blogging in wordpress is its simplicity to incorporate mathematical expressions (Latex style editing is simple awesome). I have been searching for a simple way and here is the way. I am glad. Say for example this is pretty. I am going to enjoy this:-)

I promise to write more about compressed sensing (and about several other things as I always) in future blogs. For now, this much is good enough for a first blog!

Today, as part of EPFL annual research day, there were 3 interesting talks. In the morning Prakash Narayan gave a very interesting talk titled “Common randomness, multiuser secrecy and tree packing”. Essentially it covered three distinct problems and he showed a connection among the three. The first problem setup is the following: A set of terminals observe separate but correlated signals. The classical Slepian and Wolf formulation of the data compression then is essentially the problem where a subset of the given terminals seeking to acquire the signals observed by all the terminals. And this is done by means of efficiently compressed inter terminal communication. This is a problem of generating common randomness. This of course does not involve any secrecy constraints. Now suppose a secret key generation problem. There the same subset of terminals seek to devise “secret” common randomness or a secret key through public communication. Assume here that an eavesdropper can observe this. So the setup is such that the key is concealed from the eavesdropper. Such a secret key can be used for subsequent encryption. Prakash’s talk was then to explain the connection between the two problems. He went on to establish the connection to a problem in computer science namely the maximal packing og Steiner trees in an associated multi graph. I dont think I figured out the details that well, but it triggered some curiosity to read the work a little more detail. I hope to do that sometime soon.

The afternoon session had two talks. One was by Shamai who talked about Broadcast approach in communication systems. It went over time. I thought I focused well in the beginning to follow him, but partly because of the post lunch effect and partly because of the tiredness I lost the flow. From what I understood, he outlined a lot of communication scenarios incorporating the broadcast strategy. Some examples were MIMO rate diversity trade off, ARQ, multilayer schemes etc. A lot the work seems to have gone in this direction, especially Suhas and Sanket etc (from the citation) and David Tse, L. Zheng, Al-Dahir and Shamai himself. I am somewhat amazed by the areas Shamai worked on. He seems to have covered a broad spectrum of research and yet produced some stellar work.

After Shamai, it was an interesting talk by Amos Lapidoth. He presented handsomely. I was attentive enough to follow this. Also, it happened to be a talk of different kind. He talked about the well known Matched filter used in communication. He sort of started with a little story. The story of a man from a village, venturing out of that place with a mission to find the meaning of life. So he goes to the mountains with a resolve not to come back until he finds the meaning of life. So days passed, months passed and years passed. Even after 10 years no sign of him. Finally he comes back after 11 years or so. The whole village feels curious: Aha he has come back. They ask him, wow, you have figured out the meaning of life. Please share us what is it? He says, with a pause: Life is (he pauses again)…. : Villages out of patience ask him, : ” You please go on .. life is …”. The man completes and says ” Life is like a train!”. Then they ask what you mean by “life is like a train”. Then to the surprise of the entire village he says, “may be not!”.

That was simply amazing a prelude for the talk. The talk abstract is the following:
One of the key results of Digital Communications can be paraphrased very roughly as follows: “in guessing which of two deterministic signals is being observed in white Gaussian noise, the inner products between the observed waveform and each of the signals form a sufficient statistic. Consequently, it is optimal to base one’s decision on these two inner products.” It is surprising that this basic result is never formulated as a theorem in any of the textbooks on the subject. This may be because of the difficulties in defining white Gaussian noise, in defining sufficient statistics for waveform observations, and in relating sufficiency to optimal detection. In this talk I shall describe a number of approaches to formulating the above statement as a theorem and point out some of their shortcomings. I will finally describe my proposed approach, formulate the theorem, and prove it from first principles. The proposed approach does not rely on the Ito Calculus, on Brownian Motion, or on generalized stochastic processes. It does not introduce non-physical infinite-power noise processes. Moreover, it is suitable for rigorously treating colored noise.

He gave a counter example where we can do better than matched filter. He says a Gaussian noise, but choose a point at random where the noise is made zero. Since it is randomly chosen (the null point) he claims it is still Gaussian. To me, that will result in SNR to blow up to infinity. So, are we missing something. I cant wait to read the full paper presentation of this. Otherwise, it seem to be a very very interesting way to look at matched filter, without needing the sojourn mathematical machinery.

Anyway all these talks are available (schedule at the moment) at [1]
[1]http://ic.epfl.ch/page65253-fr.html

iFixit [1] did a rather fast job with providing an inside view [2] of the latest sensation iPhone-3G. They have done a superb job indeed. I was expecting Infineon to have a major presence in the 3G phone and to some extend Samsung as well, but this time it was the latter’s SDRAM. You can read the details from [1]. I would rather strongly recommend you to! Here is the summary of the winners (number of chips listed after the maker):
Broadcom 1,Infineon 4,Intel 1,Linear Technology 1,Marvell 1,National Semiconductor 1,NXP 1,Samsung 1,Skyworks 1 (Man I wish this resurrect them),SST 1,ST Microelectronics1,Toshiba 1,Triquint 3 (Wow!),Wolfson 1.

Broadcom, Samsung and Infineon were expected. The surprise winners to me are Triquint and Skyworks. I wish this came earlier for Skyworks! If you look at Conexant at the moment (Skyworks spun off from Conexant earlier) it is pretty mazing how some leads turned up for them. Well, the market is quite demanding anyway. Ah, the surprise emission to me is CSR. I expected atleast for bluetooth they would have a winner there, but Marvell outwitted them with Bluetooth and WLAN!
Apparently, the pricing of this phone is pretty well done by Apple! Interestingly, there was huge rush even in Lausanne (Switzerland) where Swisscom had some offering day before yesterday.
[1]http://live.ifixit.com/
[2]http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=PQBC4HQHI4MTSQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=208808554

To me there was never a slim doubt on who this should go to. The one and only Salman Rushdie deservingly got this. Well, I am referring to the best of Booker award set up on the 40th anniversary of the Man booker prize. Hearing the announcement, this is what he said (in reply to a question),

“I really have no regrets about any of my work. This is, as I say, an honour not for any specific book but for a very long career in writing and I’m happy to see that recognized”.

Let us also recollect that the same book (Midnight’s Children), besides winning the Booker Prize in 1981 had also won the Booker of Bookers in 1993, which marked to honour the best Booker Prize winner in the first 25 years of the award. Now, this is still the best in 40 years. Pretty cool!

Aside, I am reading an interesting book now. A picked it from a friend’s place last week and I found it a very very interesting read. The Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini, tells an amazing story. I am mid way through the book and I surely am going to write more about this later. As of now, I leave to remark that the book is about a young boy Amir born in an affluent family, who regrets in his later life for all the trouble he made to his trusted poor friend. I am thrilled by the story telling power of the writer. Simply superb (so far atleast). Interestingly, I saw a French translation of this book in one of the student house, a few weeks back. I am glad that, now I happily read the readable version!

I don’t get to watch Indian television daily, but I still keep an eye on them once in a while by visiting their websites. The two sites I visit so are CNN-IBN and NDTV. These are sort of the two large English visual media in India. For the last one month or so, one issue (other than perhaps the left Congress party fiasco over the proposed nuclear deal with the united states) widely flashed is a murder of a young teenage girl Arushi in Noida, a suburb of Delhi. The unfortunate girl apparently had to pay an innocent life to the cruel world of cunning and sheer callousness. The callousness of the cruel people leave the society to a state of shock and uneasiness. A sense of fear is invited all around. But my point is none of these.
I am appalled by the way the Indian media went about sensationalizing this news. I can understand the many soap Indian yellow news channels (most of the Hindi news channels are just that) going this way. The two celebrated Indian news channels NDTV and CNN-IBN are just no better. Day in and out their journalists competed to present a set of tabloid style news with the quest to attract the greedy readers and audience. I say this with utter disappointment. Here is a girl, the only child to their parents and she is lost. There is investigation on going. It is a basic courtesy not to write stories about the victim’s family without having enough substance to what they talk about. News readers and media can talk senselessly on any topic and feel happy for it. Their flash news are spread across the country like tabloids. There must be some integrity and social responsibility before they venture into such silly acts. I dont have a problem when they expose any irregularities in the investigation or any cover up. But they should not air their verdict as if they are the supreme, even before doing a proper evidence collection. After saying nonstop incorrect stories about the family, now they can simply accuse the police and CBI for all what happened. Look at the family. They lost her daughter, they are portrayed as villain to the public, they lost their social reputation and health. Man this is agonizing. Police and CBI can be questioned, later on for all wrong doing. They can still be brought to justice, for any harm they created, but who can question or challenge the media? They offer all kind of accusations, but they are the one who enjoy the freedom to tarnish anyone of their choice. This is not a good going for the channels which claim to have reputed journalists. Pity!

Of late I have been so hard pressed for time that, my blogging has gone for a severe miss. Several things I wanted to write. The last 9 months or so, have been extremely tight to do anything to change it. But 2008 Wimbledon final:-I cant stop evading. It was one of the finest match I have ever seen, let alone in Wimbledon. Borg and McEnroe says this is the best final in Wimbledon and I couldn’t disagree. How can I. When Nadal lost the last year edition, it was pretty close too. It was a case of no-one lost scenario. This year, however I have to say Nadal deserved it better. Federer, the champion we all know (and my favourite since Sampras) did what he is capable of: Making an amazing comeback to the verge of a turnaround. But the champion Nadal showed strength to beat Fedex in his comfort zone. One thing I am glad. Now there is some serious challenge for the championship. It never looked nice to have an easy game over for the number one seed. I thought Fedex was not challenged enough over the years. This by no means is to diminish the class of my favourite player, but it appeals better when a champion comes out after stiff challenges. Sampras’e era to me that way was truly amazing. He fought against a series of champions, notably Agassi and Rafter (in grass mainly) and many others. He could never afford to relax against any of the seeded (even unseeded) players. Yet Sampras won 7 Wimbledon. Fedex was all set to achieve that number or may be even surpass, until recently. In the latest scenario, we have to wait and see how precious is to say that someone has won seven Wimbledon titles. This place an altitudes of sort to place Sampras among the pantheon of sports greats.

Coming back, to the Fedewx-Nadal final, I thought Fedex was not out of form at all. He served awesome and his backhand was as good as ever. Nadal served to Fedex body most of the time and he was aggressive from start as well. Because of the superior serve, Fedex always have this advantage on break points. If you look otherwise, Nadal owed more points and thus deservingly the champion. In the end, I am so glad to see the sort of respect they have for each other. Fedex humbly admitted and gave credits to Nadal, while Nadal was quick to praise Federer as the champion and as number one. Man, sporting spirit taken to a level. I am glad and happy that I follow this sport.

Aside, it has been a while I played tennis. The swiss summer is pretty nice, but my partner Adrian is away in Romania. May be I will get to play a bit in India during August-September. Exercise has been missing for a while. May be an hour of running around the lake side until Maladiere is a good idea. I need to plan my sleep and schedule to get that going. I hope I can do something about it soon starting next week.

Last winter Etienne Perron, Suhas Diggavi and myself together, have developed a tool suit to prove inequalities in information theory. The tool is adapted from the previous work of Raymond Yeung and Ying-On Yan at Cornell. We have made it a complete C based software and removed the matlab dependency in the back end. There is also a pre-parser (using lex and yacc) built in to have flexibility on choosing random variable names. More importantly, a graphical front end is developed (using Gtk), which works well across the platform. Even though the beta version was ready in late 2007, for many reasons, including exhaustive testing (we always find scope for improvement) it was delayed. Last month, we finally made an official release. The original xitip project page in IPG has a short description and pointer to the exclusive Xitip page in EPFL (http://xitip.epfl.ch). A lot of things still need to be done, before we could say it is satisfactory. One of the main thing pending is the user guide and some kind of exemplified documentation. There is a technical report, I have prepared, but that is a bit too technical at the moment. Of course Raymond yeung’s amazing papers introducing the theoretical idea behind this prover and his book are valuable resources. I have tried to provide a little more easy understanding of the concept using some illustration and toy examples. I hope to put this report anyway in the EPFL repository sometime. The first version of the project discussing the background is available here in PDF form.

Xitip screenshot, the French version

The software is open source. If you are not bothered to compile and make an executable yourself, then please download the binary executable and just run. It is just a matter of double click in the latter case. We have Linux, Windows, Windows(Cygwin) and Mac versions available. There are two different linear programming software used. One is a Gnu open source GLPK and the other one is Qsopt (developed at Gatech). The Qsopt version is faster than the GLPK. Just in case you are obsessed with a perfect open source model, you could avail the GLPK [5] version.

Hopefully during this summer we will get to complete the pending work on this project. If any of you happen to find it interesting please don’t forget to update us, on what you though about the software (Comments can be good, bad and ugly!).

Aside, I better mention this: Xitip is a software useful for proving (verifying) Information theoretic inequalities [7] only. Such inequalities contain expressions involving measures such as entropy, mutual information etc. It is a pretty handy tool if you are trying to prove some limiting bounds in information theory. In reality, there is broad classification of Shannon type and non-Shannon type inequalities. Non-Shannon type inequalities are not many, but they exist. Xitip at the moment is equipped to solve only the Shannon type inequalities. You can expect more information on this at the Xitip home page [2]

[1]http://ipg.epfl.ch/doku.php?id=en:research:xitip
[2]http://xitip.epfl.ch
[3]http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~wcook/qsopt/
[4]http://user-www.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~ITIP/
[5]http://www.gnu.org/software/glpk/
[6]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
[7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequalities_in_information_theory

I got this as Email forward. Superb creation, whoever conceived this original idea! I am curious to know who created this one:-)

Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

“House” for instance, is feminine: “la casa.”
“Pencil,” however, is masculine: “el lapiz.”

A student asked, “What gender is ‘computer’?”
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether “computer” should be a masculine or a feminine noun.

Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men’s group decided that “computer” should definitely be of the feminine gender (“la computadora”) because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval; and
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

(THIS GETS BETTER!)

The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine (“el computador”) because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data but still can’t think for themselves.
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time, the ARE the problem; and
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

I have never thought I could meet an evangelist, let alone the one for internet. It so happened that, day before was such a day to the contrary. On Friday I had one of those rare opportunities to meet one of the founding fathers of the internet, Vint Cerf, who has this bizarre title ‘Google’s internet evangelist’. He told the story behind the title as well. When Google asked him to join the company, he was given the option to chose the title. He had the name duke of internet in mind, but then someone warned that a similar name triggered world war1. Then came this name. Well, there was also a bizarre (well, I seems to have got this bug of using this word too often, after listening to Emre Telarar) photograph of his first day in Google office. It was funny indeed.

Now, he took the EPFL audience to a highly enthralling talk filled with unique humour and history of the internet evolution and packet data transmission, and finally into some extra terrestrial feasibility of spreading the internet. Not surprisingly and octogenarians listener asked him whether we could eventually meet God one day and is that God Google itself?

Some of the interesting things he said, that would be seen in the internet evolution are
1) An Internet refrigerator
2) A space internet
3)

Last friday (5th October) there was this event named Spunik50@EPFL here in EPFL. The idea was largely to celebrate the remarkable scientific glory of the Sputnik launch, 50 years ago, which in many ways influenced scientific research in many fields, including communication and signal processing. But then Why EPFL? Incidentally, the EPFL Professor Martin Vetterli was also born on that Sputnik launch day. His friends and colleagues thus couldn’t have thought of a better place and date to say Happy Bday to him.

Since it was happening right under my noise and being free, it didn’t hurt me to go and attend the series of presentations, by some leading researchers. Most of the topic of discussion happened to be in image processing,but there were few interesting connections to my interest in communication as well, especially the one from Kannan Ramachandran from Berkeley, when he talked about ‘being unorganized” and “gossiping”

The event also presented me a chance to meet Professor Gilbert Strang. His influence on me is more than what I could describe in few lines or pages. I have began to appreciate linear algebra much more than I ever comprehended to be. He was a very nice person as well to talk. He gladly obliged to chat for a few minutes and I felt good to have got that opportunity. The pleasantness in his face reminiscent itself to the way he gets involved while giving the lecture.

[1]http://www.rle.mit.edu/stir/Sputnik50/

Would you imagine a theorem invented as early as 600 BC is still used widely? Jim Massey in his course notes mentions that, this is the single most important theorem in mathematics (applied math as well) which stood against the test of this long a time gap. Frankly, I began to appreciate it more now (with the Abstract algebra course currently going…). Barely ever I had an idea that this is invented in the BC. However, the algorithm was probably not discovered by Euclid and it may have been known up to 200 years earlier. Historians claim that Aristotle was aware of this fact (which is 330 BC or so)

Since we are in the age of programming, let us write the algorithmic steps, rather than the math: The original algorithm of Euclid is,

function gcd(a, b)    while b ≠ 0        if a > b            a := a - b        else            b := b - a    return a

But we can simply write this in modern algebraic terms as

function gcd(a, b)    if b = 0 return a    else return gcd(b, a mod b)

This morning, finally I managed to reach Lausanne.

One of the greatest opera singer has left us. Sad to hear that Luciano Pavarotti left this world today, after fighting valiantly against cancer for a long time.

Looks like the year 2007 has cleared quite a bit of progress in Wimax chip development and entered the deployment stage. Even though there were hopes and at the same time skepticism about the realization of Wimax, this year has seen progressive signs of the product evolving to get integrated onto the notebooks and PDAs. Initially since the standardization phase, the big leaders emerged included Intel, Fujitsu, Samsung and few others. Thanks the big buy out of Flarion by Qualcomm, the latter must surely be having the cake ready as well. There were also very promising startup ventured to develop the Wimax chipsets for the CPE side. I am not quite sure whether there is any startup working full fledged, all alone to develop the co/network side solution. I have so far heard of Beceem, Altair, GCT and Runcom which are promising focussed startup houses develeoping and deploying the IEEE 802.16e chipsets. Among this Beceem is one company, where some of my former colleagues and friends working.

The simmering legal battle between Broadcom and Qualcomm are not yet over. Rather, it gets hotter day by day. These two fine communication firms have engaged themselves into a fight which was initially perceived as just another patent battle between two rivals, which is somewhat usual in the high tech industry off late. The Synopsys-Magma was one prominent fight which had stung and stuck for sometime, until recently when Magma gave up the suit, realising that, it was a case of ‘giving the stick and getting the whack’.

In the Broadcom-Qualcom case, Broadcom’s concern is the way Qualcomm is monopolizing the CDMA technology leading to 3G cellular phones. According to them [1] the licensing arrangements of Qualcomm failed to provide fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory licensing terms to users of technology incorporated into telecommunications industry standards. Broadcom asserted that Qualcomm’s licensing abuses included charging discriminatory royalties, collecting double royalties and demanding overly broad cross-license rights from its licensees, among other things.

[1]http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=QY4UKU1WCH5IQQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=165600495

Last week I conducted couple of quizzing events in Bangalore. One at the apartment and the other at office. It is after quite a long gap, I ventured into this nostalgic event. It was fun recollecting some from my old notebooks and some I added with the context in mind. Of course the level of questions were all prepared for not strict quizzers but enthusiastic folks. In the end both the events turned out to be good. In Fairmont, some genuine quizzers were in and that made it more interesting, but overall a satisfying experience. Since the few ones I conducted in Synopsys, it was worth a try. The days of weekly quizzing at REC and inter-college events all came to my mind.
I am not sure, whether my rational to quit quizzing in 2000 for the mere waste of time and insufficient depth in topic were all quite true. If I were to look back, the fun of quizzing created a huge data structure of events and topics where in I began to appreciate depth in few of the subject of my interest. If I were to be back in high school and undergrad, I should still do this. The fun of knowing this world, the people and the trivia are little too much to resist.

I composed the list I prepared for these events. They are uploaded here [1]

Some of the sample questions used are:

1. Ys was an opulent mythical city. It was believed to be the most wonderful city in the world. When the city collapsed and the Romans decided to build a modern city, they wanted the newer one to be as equal if not more to Ys, in opulence and magnificence. The native ethnic Britons and the Romans thus called the new city by this name, as it is known today. Which city am I talking about?
2. This company was established in 1865 as a pulp, paper and rubber company on the bank of a river, from which the town and the company name itself derived. The name of the river itself originated from a dark fury animal which was known in the local language as the word, now given to the company. Knut Fredrick Idstam started this company. Later in the 1970s they have decided to venture into Communications and stormed into the world leadership. Which company am I talking about?
3. Could you please tell me who the person on screen is? What is the significance of this presentation: Double points at stake: The ‘e’ is written little differently!

4. Who said these words and to whom: I am speaking with you from the Oval Office of the White House and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made?
5. This drink was originally named Bib-Label Lemon soda. Its inventor then considered and rejected 6 alternative names before deciding on the final name. Which drink?
6. Edvige Antonia Albina Maino attended a certificate course in English at The Bell Educational Trust’s language school in the city of Cambridge. There, she met her future husband who was studying at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her marriage to him in 1968 took her life on a course that would later see her being named as the” Third most powerful woman in the world” by the Forbes magazine in 2004. Identify the couple.
7. These are some of the facts about this company. Dead give away cluesJ
   The capital amount collected – $2718281828 , Natural Logarithm, Napier constant e = 2.718281828
   The total number of shares floated during initial public offer – 14142135 ( Square root of 2 = 1.4142135)
   Total number of shares offered during second round of IPO – 14159265 (Pi = 3.14159265)

Just name this company

8. In an effort to put together the perfect tennis player, World Tennis magazine once chose the arms of Martina Navratilova, the hands of Stefan Edberg, the shoulders of Gabriela Sabatini, the
   torso of Ivan Lendl the mind of Michael Chang and my legs. Who am I?
9. Cricket: Listen carefully though! Tell me, who is the only bowler who credit to have dismissed all the opposite side batsmen in a test match (Dismissed all the 11 players in either or both innings).
10. Identify this city (See the image):
11. By 1907, the term began to show up in high-profile women’s magazines and eventually, around 1912, it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. Which term. The word derives from an Old French word meaning “arm protector” and referring to military uniform. This later became used for a military breast plate, and later for a type of woman’s corset. Which term?
12. I was born in 1852. My passions were mostly elliptic functions, integral equations, quadratic reciprocity, number theory etc. Unfortunately I was living my life during which there were lots of political struggle in France. I do believe that mathematics and research should not be influenced by Politics. As a result of my refusal to vote for the government’s candidate in 1824 my pension was stopped and I died in poverty.” This is what Abel had to say about me after my death. “He is an extremely amiable man, but unfortunately as old as the stones”. “I believe that I am quite highly respected in the Higher mathematics world these days.”. Who is this prolific mathematician?

[1]http://ratnu.tripod.com/quiz_purva.pdf

It is indeed heartening to hear that Kerala government imposed a ban on plastic. The ban has come to effect from 20th August 2007[1]. In the recent times, the havoc created by plastics on the ecology and environment in many parts of India necessitates this ban. Studies points out that, the flooding in Mumbai itself had its root cause stemmed to the drains locked by plastics bags. These plastic bags are very common all over from vegetable vendors to supermarket shopping, to carry the goods. Kerala has shown out a good example here and every state must follow this suit and impose restriction on usage of plastics. It is not very surprising that Kerala came out first with this new law to protect the environment and to some extend the livelihood of people. In the past, they had came out to ban smoking in public places. This rule is quite strictly implemented in this tiny state. I heard a real life incident when the police caught someone smoking near an (minor) accident spot in a hilly village road and fined him Rs. 500. From what I heard so far, the plastic rule is already enforced not only in towns and municipality areas, but also in remote villages, where village authorities randomly inspect plastic wastes dumped or abandoned in any locality. I hope this gets serious notice and let us hope that the rule stay on.

The plastic is such a messy waste that, most of the places in Bangalore are filled with the polythene covers. Many open garbages in the residential areas have piles of plastics. Interestingly some reports says that, the wandering cows in the city limits (I wonder why they are freely allowed to do so!) have their stomach filled with chunks of plastics. These cows easts the vegetable waste from garbage cylinders with lumps of plastic covers. This startling revelation came out when some of these cows were operated by the veterinary surgeons. A hugely worrying fact is that, their health is taken for a ride merely because of the insane attitude of we humans.

[1]http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070024722

“Like Lara, he has scored runs all over the world. I have seen him run down the pitch and hit Glenn McGrath over the top for six, and I have seen him hit me for six against the spin going around the wicket”

When the best spinner of all time, ever to have played the game of cricket say this, it means there is more than substance to it. Surely, Shane Warne knows what he is talking about. Anyone who has seen the Tendulkar era would rate him as one of the best batsman of his time, if not more. So, in my reading, Shane Warne got his assessment very neatly right. As the legendary spinner remarked, Tendulkar and Lara are two of the finest batsmen played during his playing era and there is only fine line separate these two. I personally, don’t prefer to separate them. To me, both of them complimented very well, and at times very similar too. One a right hand bat, the other l