Thoughts

Background If you are anything like me, a salaried employee, you would have not worried about the money that the organization compensates you. At best, you would look at your salary slip, maybe glance through the deductions and make sure the amount mentioned after the deduction and the amount deposited in your bank match. You do a couple of times, which assures you that there is a match, and then you do not even look to match. You are happy if at the end of the month there is an SMS that your salary has been credited and that is it. Closer to your retirement or superannuation, especially if you are in an employment where there is no central/state government pension suddenly "money matters" especially because your monthly credits in terms of salary disappears and you need to plan or figure out how to try and fill that "monthly salary". This is when the deductions in your salary slip (which was not cared for all these years) requires your attention.  Read on, if you a...

Background : For years, I had a habit of writing whenever I traveled. No laptop, no apps, just a pen, a notebook, and pages of cursive observations about airports, flights, fellow travelers, and the emotions that come with being away from home. Two decades later, I decided to digitize those notebooks and make them available on Kindle, eventually publishing them as Transit Tales: Between Airports and Emotions: Travel Blog 20 Years Too Late (View on Amazon). As a first step, I assumed modern LLM-powered handwriting recognition would effortlessly convert the pages into text. Instead, the journey led to an unexpected discovery: handwriting recognition is still far from "solved." The apparent success of modern handwriting recognition is increasingly a combination of imperfect OCR and powerful language-model reconstruction. What users see is often not what the system read, but what the system inferred. Handwriting Recognition: Better Than It Looks, But Not For The Reason You Think ...

Finding Signals in the Noise (September 2026) From hidden patterns to usable systems   Sunil Kumar Kopparapu   Much of science is the art of finding signal in noise. Looking back, that idea connects every stage of this journey, from algebra and signal processing to neural networks , computer vision, and speech technologies. Looking back, the journey was never driven by a grand plan. Rather, it unfolded through a series of small discoveries, each opening a door to a larger world.  One of the earliest lessons was that aptitude is often acquired rather than inherited. As a schoolboy, mathematics did not come naturally. It was only around Class V or VI that algebra began to make sense, thanks to my father. What had first appeared to be a collection of mysterious symbols revealed an underlying logic. There was a quiet satisfaction in realizing that abstract notation could describe concrete relationships. In retrospect, this may have been the first encounter with a recurring t...

Dated: 2008 (OCRed from Handwritten Notes) Mumbai – London – Dallas – Las Vegas – Chicago → London – Peterborough → London – Mumbai I start off from home with a heavy heart – not sure why because it is just a few days trip. Maybe it is the healing wound in my back or the thought of seeing your family for a few days – not sure, might not really be able to analyze. I came in early – reaching terminal 2C of the international airport. Very crowded – the vehicle in which I came goes all the way to the end and takes a turn and drops me at the gate – I see BA and enter showing my e‑ticket . I see not many people; it is 10:00 pm – the flight is at 02:15 am. I make some initial inquiry and stand in the queue – the wait continues – the queue length increases as it takes 2 U turn and the baggage screening has not yet started – whew… more wait and around 11:30 the baggage screening counter opens – the queue begins to move slowly – both checked‑in and hand baggage go through the X‑ray machine – bo...

Thank you for the kind welcome. I am truly honored and very pleased to be in the midst of this august gathering—both on the stage and in front of me. More importantly, I am delighted to be in front of the young minds present today. I am also thankful to Professor Choudhury, who made my coming here possible through the invitation and the follow‑up communication. Thank you, ma’am. I have a couple of thoughts I would like to share, simply because of my years of professional experience may offer some perspective. One thing that strikes me is the title of this conference. The fact that it is held every two years and continues to grow indicates the energy and enthusiasm of the organizers. I am sure the conference has seen many leaps in the quality of presentations and in the novelty of the work showcased. While I have only had the opportunity to look at the titles—not the full papers—I can easily imagine that the presentations must have been valuable. Coming back to the title, it is very apt...

The essay explores the absurdity of overcomplicating simple communication through the use of advanced AI. It narrates a scenario where two humans use a language model to draft and summarize an email about a 3 PM meeting, highlighting the ironic inefficiency of employing sophisticated technology for mundane tasks. The tale humorously questions whether AI is simplifying processes or merely adding unnecessary complexity to human interactions. This was entirely generated using Microsoft Copilot with little or no modifications. The prompt used was Given the scenario “Human A uses LLM to compose a mail to Human B and Human B uses LLM to summarize the received email!” Compose a humorous essay keeping in mind if using LLM was necessary in the first place. The Curious Case of the Overachieving LLM {Or the absurdity and ironic inefficiency of overcomplicating simple communication using advanced AI, specifically large language models (LLMs).} In the age of technological prowess, one might imagine...