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| Fergusson College, Pune |
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I’ve known only my parents and never met most of my extended family like all the aunts and uncles. My parents are both very unconventional and liberal, and as a consequence I had absolute freedom to do anything I wanted. I had no pressure to “score marks” just for the sake of it, but rather focused more on my interests and abilities. I’m a fanatic purist when it comes to science and hate the entire country for not respecting science. My role-models are Alan Turing, C. A. Hoare, and Narendra Karmarkar. You can steal Einstein’s fortune, you can take away his educational degrees, and you can take his life. That’s all you _can_ do. You cannot undo the theory of relativity. You cannot make the Quicksort or Karmarkar algorithm disappear. This is true greatness. No mortal on earth can take it away. Science is irrefutable and irrevocable. |
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My purist attitude
makes me a very controversial figure. My notions of respect
have to deal more with honour, courage, dignity, and consistency
as opposed to great salaries or big positions or big name-tags.
I am in general very frustrated with society.
I’ve been highly interested in brain signals, cognitive
sciences and psychology since I was very small. I’ve been
working with Neural Networks since I was 16 and I’ve been
trying to get involved in brain signal analysis or neural modeling
for the last five years. After 12th I choose to go into pure
science because I’d probably have gone mad anywhere else.
My first real turning point came when I competed at the Brain-Computer
Interface Competition III and which made me the first Indian and probably
only undergraduate student to have competed, and scored higher
than teams of Ph.D, students from universities including Stanford
and Warsaw (http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/competition_iii/results/index.html).
Due to the general social attitude towards someone who likes
to pursue multiple interests, I’m quite frustrated and
a very big social misfit.
My academic interests are towards numerical analysis, optimization,
modeling and simulation, systems theory, signal processing,
clustering and classification.
I am interested in things like making my own toothpaste and
soap or dissecting frogs (only when they’re naturally
dead – I maintain a pond where I breed them). I’m
an amateur electronics hobbyist. I’m pretty good at
Morse
code (this I just learnt for fun – I wanted to get a HAM
license so we could form a cool secret club – which never
happened). I play the Tabla and Harmonium quite decently (Hindustani
style). I’m a big fan of George Bernard Shaw. My
favorite
authors include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, C. S. Lewis, Shakespeare,
Jules Verne, etc. I love cooking and consider myself a decent
cook. I take active part in most college activities as an organizer,
and have taken a leadership role in many situations. I watch
movies and enjoy listening to almost all genres of music. I’m
an active and very vocal contributor to local discussion forums
on psychology and philosophy amongst other things.
Finding ourselves to be complete misfits in the educational
system of studying monotonously and scoring marks without purpose,
some of us friends have started a group called the “United
Domains Camp” which is an effort at gathering and encouraging
people to have varied interests so we can discuss and debate
on issues like literature, philosophy, science and other things
under one roof, and go beyond books and mugged-up contents (and
also to provide an outlet to frustration).
I’m a member of MENSA and have finally managed to convince
myself that I’m a social misfit due to my high IQ. I’m
a big proponent of a content-based society instead of one that
cares for tags, a society where people would be respected for
their content instead of whether they’re “engineers”
or “IITians”. As you may have guessed, I’m
a huge fan of the Star Trek ideologies and principles. I’m
a die-hard fan of Star Wars also. I have a very obsessive nature
and if I love something, I’m a die-hard fan of it or I
hate something to extremes. There are very few things that I’m
just okay with.
My Schooling:
It has been done from a rural school on the outskirts
of Pune, nothing worth boasting about, from a very typical and
traditional school.
My immediate interest is in getting out of this country and
finding a nice place where a person like me would be needed
(or at least could live without prejudice). I’m exploring
Ph.D. possibilities in Brain Computer Interfaces. BCIs are something
that really excite me and drive me to work. I’d rather
be doing something for the sake of it, instead of for its impressiveness.
One of my primary interests in BCIs comes from the fact that
all my life I’ve dreamed of decoding and modeling the
human brain. It is the ultimate frontier in any scientific pursuit.
To answer the questions: what makes us ‘tick’, what
makes us think and what makes us so unique. Secondarily, since
it is not of much value to the immediate-money kind of people,
there are still a lot of people working on it because they love
the field and they love the job. Thirdly, my natural abilities
seem to be geared towards exactly this goal. My interests in
psychology, biology, mathematics and computing make me capable
for specifically this kind of work (its almost like a higher
calling). And finally, this is an upcoming field so there’s
not many defined standards or rules yet, which makes it very
exciting – to be on the cutting edge of defining a completely
new science and seeing it evolve. It sort of gives me a high
to watch a new field emerge and be in the dead center of it.
At some point of time, I’d love to make a movie about
Mahabharata (long story behind this, you can read it on my BLOG
at http://www.geocities.com/archisgore/blog.html).
| Provide a mechanism to subscribe
to RSS news feeds and allow pivoting of news articles
based on user-specific criteria or rules. Specifically,
news articles must be filtered according to the user-configured
pivots on the news. These pivots may be reconfigurable
and extensible through a plugging mechanism. |
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| 1. |
Make a generic RSS News Aggregator with a plugin-interface
to allow adding search rules and methods dynamically. |
| 2. |
Provide plug-ins to identify the pivotal criteria
of each of the news articles based on the various
formats used by different news providers. |
| 3. |
Add plain-text word-based search to search for keywords
in the news text to identify the relevance of the
feed. |
| 4. |
Improve upon search mechanisms by providing rules
to search using heuristic mechanisms. |
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| This project uses the Windows RSS
Platform (provided with IE7 Beta 2) for managing and interfacing
with the RSS feeds. |
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| Primarily to help viewing and pivoting
of news articles based on various criteria thereby helping
user narrow down on relevant and important articles based
on his/her needs, instead of showing a large list of articles
out of which majority will be irrelevant to the user. |
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| Here
are some of the questions that the code4bill contestants
answered. How about trying your hand at them? |
| • |
Multiply
14332 represented in base -7 with 16430 represented
in base -8 and represent the output in base -9. |
| • |
An array
contains 9 occurrences of 0s, 8 occurrences of 1s and
7 occurrences of 2s in any order. The array is to be
sorted using only swap operations. What is the minimum
number of swaps needed in the worst case to sort the
array? |
| • |
You are given an infinite number of cookie boxes containing either 6, 9 or 400 cookies. You are allowed to use these boxes in any combination so desired. What is the maximum number of cookies that you cannot give out using the above boxes? |
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