Thoughts

Obsessed with Monitoring Self Telugu translation using Google Translator here I saw this news item “ Smart Earring Monitors Body Temperature ” in my mail box from ACM and the first thing that stuck me is when was the last time I measured my body temperature. It was a very long time ago may be during COVID when the doctor advised me to keep track of the body temperature, SPO2 among other things and assume it an emergency if the temperature was consistently high for some period of time (may be it was two days!). That was the only time I recall monitoring my body temperature with some continuity. Else it was only when one had fever and the local physician would shake a thermometer and plop it under your tongue and then wait for a couple of seconds and read the temperature on the hard to read mercury scale and pronounce 101.2 (you know it was high even if he did not mention the unit of measurement!). Any high temperature meant no school, wet towel on the forehead and a sympathetic ...

 Almost Conned Ring. Ring. Ring. An unknown number.  Aah again some young kid interning with an NGO and asking for support for an urgent need, I thought, and was preparing to hear this and was trying to mentally make up what to say because I was busy. Most of these calls are from people who generally speak in English or Hindi or in some cases Marathi having figured out that the number they are calling has origins in Maharashtra, a state in India. However, the call was, to my surprise the call was from a seemingly elder person for he spoke like an elderly man and claimed to be 78 years old and spoke in Telugu. I was taken off guard, no quick pre-determined response was part of my repository to address this situation! Most of the callers who seek donations know the name, so that was not a surprise but the garu certainly was! He started off with a “ garu ” post fixed to my name. I was floored and he went on saying  “ You might not recognize me or my changed voice because of ...

Before I try and put my views on what we should be doing in terms of Technology in Bharatiya Bhasha (Indian languages), I would quickly like to skim through what is the current status or the work that has happened, especially in terms of using technology in Bharatiya languages. If you look specifically at the topics for discussion, on Day 2, Session IV session ,  namely, development of Indic keyboard , handwriting recognition for Bharatiya scripts or the voice-to-text conversion for Bharatiya languages , they broadly fall into the realm of Human Machine Interaction or Human Computer Interaction . A significant amount of work has happened and is happening, as we speak, in several academic institutes, startups, established industries, but in isolation and in pockets and in many cases the same things (same languages, same use case) is being done. Fortunately, several academic institutes have been liberally funded by the department of science and technology and the progress in term...

At what point in your career did you start publishing your works and what really motivated you?  My journey into publishing my work began during my master's program, although I can't pinpoint the exact moment it started. It was around the time I was pursuing a master's in engineering, and towards the end of my program, I found myself involved in a research project as a research assistant. This project involved classifying ships in the ocean using emerging neural network technology. While the specifics of the project aren't crucial, what mattered was the timing – this was when neural networks were just gaining traction, and I recall the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks publishing its initial issues around that period. Working with limited computing resources in the early '90s, I achieved some promising results, and it felt like something worth sharing with the scientific community. I was fortunate to be part of a research team that had a strong culture of publish...

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These day...

{A Personal View} Background Apprisals are an yearly ache that we have imposed on ourselves to make ourselves a better person than we were previously. It is stressful to both the  assessor (manager) who is on one side of the spectrum and the assessee (team member). It is at this time of the year the distance between the manager and the team members is at the maximum, even though they are part of the same team. Irrespective of which role you play you have a solid list of greviences against the  other role. So it is nothing to do with the role, it is to do with the situation. While the tension is on during the apprisal time - the folks in human resource bring in their wisdom and introduce the dreaded Gaussian curve\band and introduce a constraint where you as a manager have to necessarily have a certain number of your team members in a certain region under the curve and then the finance folks attach a monetary value to each part of the curve. These two, the constraint linked to ...