How you want to be treated?

The first point that arrives in picture when you take any service which can be from simple dining out to a long international trip : "How would I be treated?". More than five years ago, I remember when I underwent a summer training of customer dealing, I was taught "Remember! You are the face of the company. You portray the image of the company to the customer. So think of your actions and words." This is so true. Each good and bad experience with the companies around reminds me the same lines. I try to see the same point from the both perspective an employee and a customer.

The rule of the world is very interesting: the customer is an employee somewhere and deals with fellow customers directly or indirectly. This makes the situation very easy to understand. For example, we all know that how the bureaucracy sucks sometimes, but only one person sitting on the other side of the table has the power to turn our experience upside down or otherwise. If that person "treats the people as he wants to be treated" the world of bureaucracy will be much simpler. Unfortunately, this is somewhat related to corruption but I do not want to talk about it at the moment. On the contrary, the inverse is also true that "I am treated very badly and the same will now be reflected in my services!" :) So these are directly related nodes of the chain "the customer and the employee".

I hope to see the chain in proper direction and would end with related lines: "Treat the people around the same way you want to be treated!"

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.