Making all the difference in the world

Google is setting up their base in Kenya (read the full story here ). Now that's what is called making the real difference in the world. Really! They have money and so do others, but Google, so early in its life-span, is trying to change the world for better in its own innovative way.

One of my colleagues, a couple of years earlier had told me about this display in the Google reception office which had a 3-D globe on the screen and the small points of light that were blinking at various places. These light-points illuminated the places around the world where people were using Google search at that instant. I remember he told me what he was told about Africa looking at the display, it was indeed the dark continent with very little light emanating from it. When I saw this display myself, it was so surreal. With Internet penetration hardly anything, this was but natural to observe.

But the interesting part is not just observing and pondering but taking action. Setting up of a Kenyan office is indeed a concrete step toward making technology accessible to all, irrespective of geography, infrastructure, policy and various other kinds of issues. It strengthens my belief that technology (and especially Internet) is (and has the potential of) bridging numerous barriers that was not possible earlier.

Web Hoaxes and related thoughts....

I read an article on yahoo titled "Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks". It is an interesting read though repetitive at places because it is highly unlikely that being on internet you have not seen one of such emails already. These hoaxes range from 'last picture taken before WTC collapse' to 'someone being terminally ill' email. Infact, I thought some of these mails to be true (though I never forwarded them) before I looked at this article, specially the ones that showed extraordinary pictures (like the iceberg one or the Africa one). These are just 25 and there are heck more that lot of us would have received and fortunately or unfortunately which are not as popular so that they make it to PC World's top 25 list :).

I remember when I used to receive such mails in India, they always used to end with some superstition advice. That leads me to the question whether the content of a web hoax exhibit some geographic locality? And by that, I mean: are the kind of hoaxes you receive in India different from the ones in United States? Yeah I agree some of them are global and have nothing to do with a particular location. But, it makes sort of intuitive sense that since the main reason behind sending such mails is to reach as many inboxes as possible, so exploiting the local culture (or beliefs) is the first (and easy) step towards accomplishing this goal. For example: in India, given the enormous belief in superstitions, you most likely would have seen something like the following at the end of the mail:

"If you send this now to 40 people, good luck will come to you now,
if you send it to 20 people, good luck will come to you tomorrow"

or some such stuff. Now this might not be happening in India alone, but I am just writing a personal experience.

Another surprising bit to this saga is that generally these mails are not from unknown users i.e. someone in your friend-list forwards them to you. So, although the content is spam but because of the ignorance of the sender, it doesn’t count as one. Even more surprising is the fact that young and educated people who look at these messages believe them enough to send it to their other 'n' friends, mostly without giving a thought about magnanimous amount of 'useless' network traffic these messages can generate. Strange Enough!!

A simple practice that can help curb such messages: even if the email content looks oh so real, the first thing to do before forwarding it to other people is to confirm the veracity of the message. This can be done by simple googling or better still checking at the Urban legends website, and if the mail is indeed a hoax (and you have truck loads of time) possibly replying the sender back. Lets be responsible on internet.....

ITs Google all the way!!

I had a chance to attend a computer science technical conference recently. Although topic of the conference was data mining and it is not my research area but I thought I will get good exposure to the way the conferences work in US, so I chose to attend. My main goal was to attend the keynote talks which I thought are very high-level and easy to absorb for an outsider. I was indeed correct at the end of the conference and I liked almost all the keynote addresses. I will not venture here into technicalities of the topics of various talks, but I want to share some observations I made, specially about the talk given by one of the Google's researchers.

The topic of this talk was "Next generation Algorithmic challenges in Google". This was an interesting talk, not that I got all the stuff that was said but overall it was interesting and not completely OHT. Cutting short the context and coming to the portion of the talk, I really wanted to talk about, starts at the beginning of Q n A session. Some of the questions being related to machine learning were really out of my grasp in their entirety, the questions not related to the talk (but which were asked) is the topic of interest in this post.

These questions were related to the Google's mission statement (which centers around providing universal access to information) that was read out by the speaker during the beginning of the talk. Someone questioned something to the effect of - will you make information in my wallet universally accessible. To this, speaker replied that they provide tools and the rest is upto the user. Attached was another question, which inevitably pointed towards Google's policies in China, though it was asked in a very indirect way. To this speaker replied, china is a big country and some presence is better than none at all. (Of course, what is the point of asking such a question, after all Google is a business and they have to make profits to stay alive and it was their business decision. The kind of work they are doing might have different political implications in different countries governed by the local laws and you have to abide by them.)

Anyhow, now picture this: a person from a research lab comes to a technical conference to talk about algorithmic challenges and is asked questions about Google's policies. My question is, first of all, does asking such questions make sense? specially when speaker just talked about algorithms for the last one hour. Its really not a press conference where a company spokesperson is briefing about company policies etc., in which case these questions might make perfect sense. This happened not only at this talk but various other Google talks in the past that I attended. It surprises me why people bring the same topic again and again even though the talk was about core computer science. A better way to put such questions might relate to addressing privacy/security/copyright concerns when making the information universally accessible but then again they have to somewhat relate to speaker's talk and not just appear out of the blue.

Nonetheless, I do not know why but after coming out of Google's talks, I always get a feeling that everyone wants to get in there (and of course why not). I might be generalizing a lot but the kind of questions asked by people (who might be from other companies :)) makes me feel that. Good for Google though.

A bit of this and that!

I have so many things to write about but still nothing concrete that I can pen. Its alright I guess to be random at times and this post is all about random things crossing my mind right now.

My last post on this blog was just at the beginning of Fall semester last year. I have learnt and thought about so many things since then, that there is no dearth of topics that I can write and express my opinion on. Infact, I wanted to write about Windows Vista from a long time, I have read so many articles about Vista (mostly talking about its shortcomings), so I wanted to give my 2 cents on Vista. A few weeks back I did write a couple of paragraphs but alas it never made it to this blog. Well, some day!!

I went to SFO last weekend and attended a grad cohort workshop organized by CRA-W. It was pretty nice, the whole experience, I mean, not only the workshop but visiting and roaming around in SFO. I went to Fisherman's Wharf and really enjoyed my ride on the cable car starting at Powell Street in the downtown. Apart from the fun, one of the important take-away's for me was that inter-disciplinary research in Computer Science is on an all-time high. I met so many people doing research related to Bioinformatics, the hot topic these days in CS research.

Coming back from SFO to snow in Minneapolis was, needless to say, quite a shock:) but cold seems to be receding now. Temperatures are not sub-zero (degree C) any more. Feels quite good to just go in one sweater outside and not 'n' layers which were unavoidable a few days back. I remember how I got frozen in an attempt to take the picture of frozen Mississippi (see the pic below).

I am digressing here again, but I have been subscribing to Time Magazine for some weeks now and I like reading it, its like what India Today was in India. I like reading analysis of news, opinions of different people and then compare and contrast it with my views, its fun! Although, sometimes I feel lost when articles discuss US politics; I do not posses enough information at this point on how the US political system works. And infact now I am a bit out of touch even with Indian politics. But notwithstanding such articles, I enjoy the rest of the magazine.

Today, while reading I found a small article about photo editing and the writer had referred this site called picnik.com. I went to this site, which is still in Beta and found it to be extremely useful and light-weight as compared to all the image-editing software that I have tried to use till now. I found them too complicated for little things I want to try on the pictures. But this site is simple and beautiful, some of the nice features include:
1. No signup required
2. Fairly easy to navigate
3. Connects to the webcam to take fresh pictures
4. Can take images uploaded on some website for editing
......

And lastly, before I end the post, I'd like to mention that if you keep a schedule and have not yet started using Google Calendar, give it a shot, its fun!!

And oh yeah, World Cup is coming!! :)