Do you have 'Frames'?

Yesternight I was watching Vinod Dua Live on NDTV, well its my one of the favourites and I feel bad when I miss it. He has the vision and is outspoken though he does his research before making any point. Basically an ideal piece of impressive and effective journalism. He speaks only for 15 minutes and it feels like he has conveyed something that some ordinary person will take whole day to convey.

This is just a recent show video for your reference (Click on the image):



Personally I don't want to be judgemental about his reports nor am here to increase his fan following because it is none of my business though I am a big fan of the show.

Okay coming back to the title: 'Frames' a concept I was taught by somebody in the school that "If you don't want/like something then just put a denial frame in your mind and then you will realize, that thing is no longer a problem for you. Basically your mind learns to ignore that thing very easily."

We have lots and lots of frames in our mind. I don't want to enlist them because they also include some of the social stigmas. Now, why I introduced Mr. Dua's show? Whenever I watch his show and listen to his sharp comments, I feel he tries to break the frames in the minds of India - the frames which are very bad but we are not ready to break them. He tries to make the point and if a citizen tries to incorporate some of them to which she herself agrees, significant improvement would be visible in the society. Basically I don't like to give any advice but I am extremely sorry to say this piece of advice here as I couldn't help it. I think those frames are so strong in our minds that even such strong opinion and sharp journalism is weak to break them.

"Isi Umeed me ki hamara aanewala kal aaj se behtar ho" I sign out!

Dust is settling down in Spain!

The whole experience of coming over abroad and settle here was beautiful and very emotional. The experience can be seen in three different phases. I try to see an analogy between the situation with the sequence of the events when you first time go for a sky diving. The phase one, is the pre-processing step: It is the time until the day of the flight. I would call that part 'Excitement'. I was so happy and excited to come over and start my work because I was taking a very well deserved vacation of 3-4 weeks after finishing some tight deadlines like: Master's Thesis, Google Summer of Codes, PAN-2011 track participation etc. In the excitement you generally don't think the topic which in this case is to "go abroad", in more depth and knowingly you don't let any negative thought come about your adventure because you are just excited. You want to experience it and also you have to stand by your decision. It is same, when you have decided to go for sky diving and you enjoy your decision, thinking that what a great time you are going to have. Then comes the day of flight. On that day the situation seems real and apparently more real on the airport when you see your family bidding you the final goodbye. Remember, you are still in the excitement phase. As soon as you land, you find somebody to pick you up and you chit-chat for a while and then you go to the house. Rarely you find that you have reached the destination and your luggage has not! Yeah, exactly that happened to me and I was told that my luggage will not be available for two more days because on Tuesday Turkish Airlines does not have any flight to Valencia from Istanbul. Murphy's Law. Then you go to home and sleep tight because you are so tired of the journey and Jet-Lag. The very next day starts the phase called 'Nervousness'. You feel nervous because you are in a completely different environment. You see different people around, sometimes it happens they don't speak your language and even worse that they don't understand your language. Somehow the day is spent and gradually you see your over-ambition for the trip. As soon as you reach home back, you are all alone and you don't have internet and a phone to connect to your world. Now what you have is, a photo of your family and some letters from your girlfriend or wife. That's it, this is the night you are going to cry and repent the decision of coming over. All the negative thoughts which were forced underneath will come out. You somehow take hold of yourself and go asleep. This is the moment which is very crucial for one's stay abroad. It feels the same as when, you are in the airplane for sky diving and your other three friends have already dived and now its your turn. You have to deal with that crucial moment and yes it is crucial because you have always a choice of not to dive! I have seen many people returning to the home country in merely some weeks or a couple of months saying it was very bad there and they didn't like it at all. At that time I used to think why would someone do that. Now I realise, it comes under the phase of 'Nervousness'. Actually in the days of phase 2, if someone doesn't think much about going back and try to see the good things around, it would really help. I started crawling over all the plans I had made before coming over and was searching the reasons which really made me excited to come over. I suddenly noticed, doing that makes me comfortable and I liked that feeling. I notice the improvement in the mental comfort day by day and week on week. Now I really like it here. The dust has settled! Now I realise that I have time for all those things which I wanted to do like walking, cooking, spending lot of time on the research problem I am dealing with and much more. Yes I cook my dinner and weekends' lunch as well most of the times. You can see some of the photos here.



Now starts the third phase called 'Thrill'. The moment you dive, in some time you start enjoying your adventure and you are thrilled! Exactly same is the feeling when you convince yourself that I like it here. In this whole process of settlement, I rejoiced my confidence in self and it is an earned confidence and not the granted one because you see how beautifully you have tackled the situation. This experience is great and has taught me a lot for life!

A new born baby in FOSS world!

FOSS is Free and Open Source Software. I had a long deprived desire to contribute to the Open Source world. But all I did before 3-4 months, was just to use open-source. I switched my OS to Fedora one year ago. On 20th December 2009 my desire went beyond its upper bound and I searched on google "how to contribute to open source". I found a lot of information but one advice seemed to be the easiest and I chose it. It was "If you want to contribute to the open source then at first you should use it as much as possible." Hence I switched to Fedora officially for almost all of my work.

During my Information Retrieval course I used to use a lot of Open Source academic softwares and that added more respect for FOSS and so the desire to contribute got even bigger. But ideally I couldn't pay much back. Then on 29th Macrh 2011 there was a mail from Paolo [my to be Ph.D. advisor] about Xapian Search Engine Library about their participation in Google Summer of Codes 2011. As I love something related to Information Retrieval I right away started investigating about the whole program and what it is. I learnt that its a great initiative by Google in order to turn more students towards Open Source and to cultivate the knowledge base. I learnt on the very day that last day to submit the application was 8th April means merely 10 days left! I went on #xapian IRC channel which was going to be my life for next 4 months and threw some random questions. Soon there was a reply from Olly a.k.a ojwb [an uber cool geek] for my questions and I was told that still there is a room to discuss the possibility of a new project.

That day itself I thought that Learning-to-Rank can be a great project for Xapian as I have done a lot of research on the topic for my M.Tech thesis. I have used many such search engine libraries like Terrier, Lemur etc but they don't have Learning-to-Rank support. So I went on discussing the project with them and this time there was Richard Boulton a.k.a rboulton [Yet another yet effective Geek] who was going to be my Primary Mentor for the project. They asked me to submit an official proposal for the further discussion. That way it all started. Mostly on 28th August 2011 Xapian is going to be the first open source search engine library with Learning to Rank support in the world. On 25th of April this year the list of selected GSoC students published and my name was there too. It was an overwhelming moment.

At that particular time I was much occupied in my thesis work and hence most of the time during "Community Bonding" period I was working on my thesis and in the later half I started my project for Xapain. I quickly learnt there are quite a few weapons which help you to do good like, SVN, GIT, GNU automake, bugzilla, doxygen etc. So I issued a book from library on them and started my flight. I chose svn for version control repository [git might had been a sane option which I am planning to learn soon] .

Just two weeks before, Mid-term evaluation has got over and I am on my schedule to finish the project. It is such a great feeling - a feeling of self satisfaction that I could give something back to the community who makes a lot of interesting things for the world to use for free. It truly reminds me about the line of movie Antitrust "The knowledge belongs to the world!". GSoC has actually given me a birth in FOSS world and I feel like living there very long.

Plagiarism Detection

Today the results of the 4th International Competition on Plagiarism Detection Challenge PAN : http://pan.webis.de are declared. We [ I and my collogues] at DA-IICT are regular participants of the competition. Many people ask me that why are you working on this and its a solved problem so what is the scope of research in there?

Well there are pretty good challenges which still require good amount of research. Plagiariser may not be writing the document as a verbatim copy of some other text. He/She may copy the text or matter with slight or high modifications starting from simple addition or deletion of words to more complex manual paraphrasing. With the good translation facilities available, a plagiariser may also translate the contents from source documents. Another challenge may be what to consider as source documents, in some cases you may have to take whole web as source documents. There are plenty of commercial plagiarism detectors available but they are good only when the plagiarised passages are exact copies from the source documents.

Plagiarism Detection has always been a very computationally complex and resource-hungry task. Because it involves sentence to sentence matches [Please don't consider matches as exact matches] and sometimes the documents being compared are some MBs big of raw text.

With the last years proceedings of PAN, it can be seen that many people have tried very innovative ideas to handle above challenges. But translation seems to be still a big challenge.

From translation I can remember of another big challenge. The machine translation technology for Indian languages is still in its infancy phase. You may have read the news of google has extended support for more 5 indian languages in its translation facility but still the quality of machine translation is very bad compared to European languages. You may try it there using some complex or long english statement and trying to translate it in hindi or so.

One such interesting challenge is going to happen in FIRE at IIT Bombay and the task name is CL!TR and its webpage is http://users.dsic.upv.es/grupos/nle/fire-workshop-clitr.html.

Listening to Your Heart!

One thought dwindled in my mind for last couple of months, that Am I doing What I really want to Do? You may also think of it in this way that you really want to go out for some great natural pictures if you are a photography lover, or you may just want to sit with your guitar and want to try some great songs, or you wanna see whole bunch of movies in your 1 TB hard disk in one week or may be you wanna code something really useful and wanna produce your masterpiece. You may feel indifferent if what you wanna do is not listed above but if its there then you may certainly feel excited. We will consider all those things you want to do as listening to your heart. So you really want to do something but something is stopping you from doing it may it be your job or studies or laziness or any thing. But you should really ask this question to yourself that is it worth not listening to your heart?

I am just coding for my Google Summer of Code project in my college lab and got struck in one nasty error, which I just managed to solve after playing with it for last 5 hours. A sudden smile came to my face as I solved it and that inspired me to share this thought with you all. We can be really very happy if we choose to work what we really like. It is very rare that you get a profession which is very close to something what you really wanted to do in your heart and if you belong to that set then all cheers and you are enjoying what I mean. But if you don't fall in that category then you really should listen to your heart and figure out what is stopping you from doing it and take some time out of your routine and plunge into hearty desires. You will smile someday. Its true. And best thing about it is, smile doesn't take much long to come and you will enjoy.

Another benefit of doing this is you spend some time with yourself, and a bit away from those social networks and you get to enjoy some eternal moments which exclusively created by you and exclusively for you which you really don't want to flaunt on those profiles.

So the idea is you must listen to your heart i.e. should do something what you really like. That may fetch a great happiness to you and sometimes recognition is a by-product of the process.

Great Entries at "A Day in India" Campaign of TOI

Earlier I posted on the "A Day in India" campaign of TOI. Now portal has made the entries public. There you will find some videos, photos, cartoons etc on various themes. They may not be that artistic but surely will let you feel something for India. Looking at some of the pictures you may feel pity or shame or proud or a sudden smile may drop by your face. Ultimately you will enjoy.

Well this campaign is little bit nostalgic to me because I was also once upon a time associated with a "Theme based photography contest" called 'Clickerzparadise'. :) !

Yeah don't forget to check the entries out at http://adayinlife.timesofindia.com/photos

F.A.L.T.U : A Plagiarised movie from Hollywood movie 'Accepted' : Who will detect Plagiarism?

Those who have seen movie F.A.L.TU. may want to know the fact that it strongly resembles with the Hollywood Flick 'Accepted [2006]'.






"A high school slacker who's rejected by every school he applies to opts to create his own institution of higher learning, the South Harmon Institute of Technology, on a rundown piece of property near his hometown." [IMDB Page of 'Accepted']

Don't these lines make you think of the plot of Bollywood movie F.A.L.T.U? Yes its true, its the same story with a little makeover and in my opinion, they had to do those changes because they were inefficient even to reproduce the same story :D . Well I seriously pity on the debutant director who starts the career from such a plagiarised story and talks about creativity and passion in the movie.

This is not the only plagiarised movie, The list is long and includes some of the big names like 'Gajni' from 'Memento', 'Partner' from 'Hitch' . Sometimes songs are copied from some other songs, and our Anu Malik and Pritam are famous for that.

Plagiarism is prominent also in text, like we use someone else's work or text without explicitly acknowledging the person or source. “You know the feeling while reading an article on a topic related to your own research, you gradually become aware of a strong similarity between the ideas expressed and those you published some time ago. A quick glance at the references cited shows you that your article isn’t mentioned. ”[Garfield, 1980]. Here, as I have given the reference to Garfield so it is not Plagiarism! You may find it very frequent in student reports, even there are very funny cases like professor publishing book from the Ph.D thesis of his/her student.

As one of my research area is Natural Language Processing and somewhat plagiarism detection in text, this kind of incidents provoke me to write something about it. Plagiarism Detection has much moral and social impact than merely a profitable application. Because we help directly the society by making life of the plagiariser hard and promote the original work at the same time make the environment more ethical and authentic.

I sign off with a hope not to come across such cases again!

A day in the Life of India!

You may find very interesting things about India at the following link. It is the initiative of Times of India.

A very sarcastic view of India presented there and one should not take it as a disrespect to the nation. You may love it. It captures lot of such scenes where you would utter to the next guy "Yeh India hai Bhai!!"

http://adayinlife.timesofindia.com/

Goverment Employees Are Non-Cooperative

You must have come across the situation when you need to get driving license or passport or any other govt formality. I just describe a typical scene.. You step in the office, you will look for the inquiry counter, probably there will not be anyone to attend you but if you are lucky enough to have one, then the fellow would give so short answers that you will be confused and feel, what should I do to have him/her giving elaboration. And, if you dare to question more then you are gone. They will screw you. Well, I admit that there are also some good people but most of them are very bad and non-cooperative.

Its like if you want your work to be done in a better way then strive hard to find any of your relative/neighbour/friends/friends of friends:)/any damn relation in that office. Otherwise you will need to visit that place so many times and out of frustration you will have to contact a agent sitting outside and give him extra fees (in some cases cumulatively it is a cheaper option!).

When I discuss these things with other people they say its like that only and we have to be habitual. But the situation has risen due to the attitude of the government employees who are less dedicated/committed to their work. If they are responsive enough and humble enough to give the correct and full information then a person who is very much occupied in the daily routine of life would be so happy and satisfied. The person who is frustrated by this, will frustrate more people at his/her workplace and this chain will go on.

I urge to the readers if you are related to any kind of public dealing then please give a better experience to your customers i.e. citizens of India and it can be a very effective contribution in the nation building.