Google Internship Interview experience and a few updates

It has been a long time since I have written anything.  Welcome to 2015.  It has been nice, though I feel everyday as I am growing older, the pressure seems to be more and I have to update myself to handle the pressure in a comfortable way.  I am still learning it.

I visited India for 14 days in January/Feb.  It was a really late decision but surprisingly I managed to get ticket in a surprisingly low price.  I guess late January is the best time to visit India, both for a foreigner and a native.

The trip has been very refreshing but also invoked some weird feelings.  First of all, I lost my grandmother (thamma).  This is the first time I have witnessed death of a family member and also been to a cremation ground.  I tried to not think to much during that time as I knew if I dig deeper, more sorrow will emerge.  But still I could not hold my tears in sudden moments.  I do not want to go further into it.

Apart from that, this was after one and a half year I went home.  But I somehow felt a bit different in Kolkata.  The endless love and care from my family and known ones were overflowing, the time with my girlfriend and my parents seemed priceless but still the environment felt a bit too much for me (all the pollution and tropical weather) and I had a feeling anything more than 14 days would have been a problem.  I never thought that I would feel something negative like that for my homeland, oh well.

One more experience.  I was referred by the Google Munich people for a summer internship in Google.  I always wanted to experience an interview with Google.  Given the fact that they have one of the most grilling interviews among all the companies.  Though for an internship, only 3 phone interviews are done (as compared to the 7 interviews that are done for a software engineer position!), but still that was something I never experienced before.

All my interviewers were Indians, one from Google NY, one from Mountain view and the last one, I do not not, he did not tell me.  They will help you during the interview process, they do not care too much about the correctness of the code you write but about the algorithm and how you approach it.  You write your answers in a Google doc which is shared between you and your interviewer and the interviewer keeps it for reference.  I must tell, "Cracking the coding interview" is the best book you should read for a google "internship" interview.  The questions are VERY VERY similar.  Only my last interviewer was a fan of number theory (this was my worst interview, I gave a sloppy n^4 algorithm) and the questions were a bit difficult but first two interviews, I had above average performance due to reading the book.

I have to wait now for a week for the results.  I do not think I will get in but hey, it is the experience I wanted to have.

Invited by Google to attend their compiler summit 2014 in Munich

I should have told this before but did not have time to post.  Anyway, I consider this as a second milestone of my PhD.  Thanks to Tobias for sending me the reference email that Google Munich is asking PhD students from Europe to apply to attend the Compiler Summit in Munich in December.  I applied and to my utmost joy, got an invitation from Google to attend this.

This is an ALL EXPENSES PAID trip and also by Google, a company I have been dreaming to be a part of since my coming abroad.  Who can tell, this can be the beginning of a long collaboration with them?

Also, the cool thing is the summit ends on 10th Dec and on the day of 11th, they are arranging a trip in Munich (which is my Birthday).  What more can be better as a birthday present?

GRUB Problem Ubuntu Windows 8.1 Dual Installation

It's been a really LONG time since I have written a blog.  It's not because I did not have anything to write about.  Trust me, I have many more things than ever  to write about in the blog.  But I was so lazy to post.  I will probably add one of them as that is related to my PhD progress and many people might be interested in it.

Anyway, today morning I ran into this problem.  In my Dell laptop (which my supervisor gave me), I had dual booted Ubuntu and Windows 8 (native OS) perfectly fine.  Yesterday I had to boot into windows (which I normally do once in 6 months, but now I am taking a machine learning course and therefore had to install (and use) MATLAB in windows.  Because I did not trust the version I installed in Ubuntu that much.

Anyway, yesterday I received a free upgrade offer from Windows to upgrade to 8.1  I recently bought a laptop for my mom (in my glorious US trip, which I should have mentioned in blogs given that it was one of the most memorable trips of my life) which had windows 8.1 installed and I kind of liked it.  The upgrade ran for hours and I did not check yesterday what is the state of my laptop after the upgrade.

But when I came to my office today in the morning, I discovered that the boot menu has been corrupted and I was not getting the option for booting into Ubuntu.  The laptop was directly booting into Windows 8.1  For a moment, I got a chill because a LOT of my research materials have not been backed up and they reside in the Ubuntu partition.

A quick search through Google revealed that this is a common problem after the upgrade to the Windows 8.1 and the problem can be fixed.  But there was infinitely many solutions to choose from and trying every one of them can easily ruin your whole day.

Therefore I'm gonna talk about the solution that worked for me.

1.  Disable the fast startup feature of Windows 8.1 as described here.
2.  Restart with the advanced startup option as described here (until Step 5), this is necessary to boot into Ubuntu to your modified firmware (which hopefully is not broken).
3.  Select the Ubuntu option once you see the UEFI boot list.
4.  This should take you into Ubuntu.
5.  Run sudo update-grub from Ubuntu terminal.
6.  Voila, its fixed :-)

This was really easy and saved a lot of time for me.  Hopefully it will help someone who is facing the same problem.

The day has come...

After the hustle of 3-4 months (but the dream started long back), finally the day has come.  Bai and Mom will be leaving TODAY from Barasat to come to Edmonton.  If not, this is gonna be the most happiest trip of my life after growing up.  I dreamt about this the moment in the Spring of 2012, I saw people in their convocation dress.

It has been a really LONG preparation, starting from getting passport for both of them, then getting VISA for two countries (USA and Canada), booking flights, hotels, getting my VISA for both countries.  Finally it's gonna pay off.  Hopefully they will be safe and sound through out the trip.  Also, I am going to drive for Jasper and Banff for the first time ;)

Two days earlier, an issue came up regarding my subletting my room.  A guy from Netherlands told me that it's guaranteed that he will take the room.  But when he came .. (Just now Bai and mom came online, let me talk to them and then I will write the rest. :D) (Just finished talk with Bai and Mom, they seem OK, a bit nervous which is common).

So about this Dutch guy -- just 3 days before my leaving, he told me that he's not gonna take the apartment.  It was a lightning on my head -- how I am going to find a tenant in this time.  After recovering, I put up ad again and asked Dmitry to show the room if somebody comes.  Thankfully, one Italian guy has asked for it.  Let's see how it goes.

Anyway, so I am geared up for the dream trip of my life.  It's always special to bring your parents with parts of your savings, now I am joining the troop too.  Next stop, Edmonton!

A few events and Torsten's first milestone

A lot have happened in the past few days and I thought it is a good time to jot them down.

1.  I tried my hands (and legs) in indoor climbing with Greg and Dmitry.  Dmitry did a super splendid job for a first-day climber.  I did average.  This was expected because I really have bad forearm strength.  That is the reason why I can't do chin-ups in the gym.  At first you think rock climbing about climbing or lifting yourself up with your hands, but that is actually wrong.  Thankfully towards the end of the practice session, I realized that a LOT depends on your legs.  Though Greg (a semi-expert climber) was telling me this all the time, but it took me a while to get the grasp of it.  But once you start concentrating the placement of your feet, the hands are really a lot relaxed.

But you can't apply the same into "bouldering".  Or let me put it this way -  you can put this into bouldering, but you need great strength in arms too.  For a big guy like me, it really take a lot of strength to perform bouldering.  I failed to do it, as expected.  But I must say, I enjoyed climbing more when I was belayed by Dmitry than the time I was belayed by a machine.  How can I forget the first time when I had to let go and jump backwards with the belief that the belayer (the machine in the first case) will stop you.  It was really difficult to let go this fear. Here are some pictures:

Dmitry

Me (left) and Greg (right). Don't get carried by the fact that I am a bit higher than him ;)

Dmitry bouldering.  He did great!

My "try" at bouldering

2.  Greg left the lab.  Yes, the only guy who knew some music and seemed a bit chilled out ( a bit like me), left the lab.  Though he had a top tier publication (In SPAA) and his static analysis may be the major reason that our paper gets accepted in ASPLOS, he left.  He told that he did not find anything cool to do with polyhedral model.  I don't now who took the decision (whether he left or Torsten fired him), but that's that.  BTW, Marius is also on the verge of leaving.  Tomorrow he will talk with Torsten and decide whether he is staying or not.

3.  There was a department bbq in the restaurant top floor.  It was fun. Here are some pictures.

http://www.gallery.ethz.ch/inf/view_album.php?page=1&set_albumName=album12

4.  Yesterday Torsten presented the progress of his lab and he was greatly accepted.  That means he is only 2 more steps away from getting a tenure (3 presentations had to be there before you get this).  I was a bit surprised by this because I have seen people fighting so much about this and also heard dreadful stories but for him it seemed like easier!

I haven't told Torsten yet about me going to Canada.  Probably I will tell him that during our meeting this Friday.  Tomorrow is some religious holiday.  8 more days to leave for Canada!  Can't wait to meet my parents.

PACT paper accepted, first in PhD

One of the happiest days of my life.  A lot was depending on this, and I was fortunate enough to be bestowed with this really cool research topic and also to find out some quick answers.  Though a lot to be done still, it was so satisfying to find out that my paper got accepted.  PACT is a good conference and having a paper at the beginning of your PhD really helps a lot.

The result was supposed to come out on May 19th, but it came out really early.  One more cool thing is that the conference will be in University of Alberta!  And Dr. Amaral is the chair.  This is insane!  I am so excited.  I was also excited to receive an email from Dr. Amaral congratulating me.

My Canadian passport application has also been processed and it's on its way home.  I was a bit tensed when after 5 days, the France Visa office did not acknowledge the receipt of the passport and I also lost my postal office receipt.  Anyway, hope the VISA is approved and then I can finally prepare for my visit to Edmonton for my convocation and then USA!  Yes, USA... FINALLY!

Phew, lets try hard for the ASPLOS paper now!  If it gets out, I will be overjoyed, but it's too soon to comment.

Always wanted to see this

Got some inspiration

Just when I was in the process of going low about my research topic, something wonderful happened in the last two days.

1.  I got good reviews for my PACT paper and there is a very good chance that it can be accepted.
2.  Today two guys came to give talks.  It was one of the busiest days SPCL.  One of those guys were Edgar Solomonik, a kind of genius from UC Berkeley.  At the age of 24, he is almost finishing his PhD and hoping to join as a Post Doc in our group.  I should tell that if he joins our group, it will be really a feather in the cap.  But his talk was so fast and so dense, we made a lot of jokes about his "super intellect" and how we will quit PhD and become "pizza delivery boys" after he joins our group to save ourselves from depression.

The other guy was Satoshi Matsuoka, a professor and big name in the area of supercomputing in Japan.  His talk was mainly on the future of big data and it covered many other topics.  It was one of the longest talks ever and he really gives LONG answers if someone asks questions.  But I like his flawless english pronunciation.

But the big thing is, both of these guys were interested in the generation of performance models.  Edgar mentioned in the talk that "I know Torsten that you are looking at machine learning methods to generate performance models automatically..."  I then exchanged glances with Torsten because I was the one working on it.

After the talk by Dr. Matsuoka, Torsten told me to have a conversation with him.  And this conversation really made my day.  They were working on a VERY similar topic on the generation of performance models and he was REALLY interested in my tool, PEMOGEN.  He told there is not a useful tool on this topic and a good tool is necessary.  He also invited me to work for some months in Tokyo (which will be one thing off my bucket list , Visiting Japan).  We exchanged email IDs and when I told Torsten this, he told me that this will be a great collaboration.

After this conversation we were gossiping in the la when Timo also mentioned that the research on performance modelling is really cool and one will be really famous if it comes out.

Today I found one use cas eof my research and trust me, this is a great motivation for my PhD.  Looking forward for the final PACT answer.