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.

USA Bern Embassy Sucks

I am so pissed off right now, I needed to write something.   I applied for a USA VISA on Wednesday last week.  This embassy does not have an online VISA status checking system.  In stead, if you want to pick up your VISA, they give you a slip that you have to bring on the day they tell you to come.  They announce the day just after the VISA interview.

For me, they told that my VISA will be ready on Friday (the second day after my interview).  I was so happy that I will get the VISA and went there on Friday.

It was a hot day and from Zurich, Bern round trip costs 40 francs.  When I went there, they told me that sometimes there is a problem with the system and the VISA is not printed.  They told me to go back and promised that they will give me a call on Monday to tell me when I can pick up the VISA.  They did not even say that they are sorry.  As if its taken for granted that there can be mistakes.

Naturally, on Monday they did not give me a call, even Tuesday they did not.  I at last called them in the morning on Wednesday when they told me that I have to call between 2 to 4 pm.  When I gave them a call at 2, they told that my VISA is printed today.  They also asked me why I am in a hurry to collect the VISA.  That is NONE of their freaking business, but I told them that I have to get another VISA.  Anyway, they told me that I have to come today at 4pm to collect it.  I asked them if I can go at 4.30, they told that 4pm is the time I have to come!  Even though, they started giving out the passports at 4.10 on the day I went.  As if they run on perfect time!

Now they told me to collect the VISA at 3pm tomorrow.  I told them OK.  After 5 minutes, an email arrived asking me to collect it at 2pm!  They are not even sure when they want to distribute it.  I am so pissed off with the embassy, sorry for the negative post!

European guys say Happy New Year in Bengali

I made the dudes from my lab say "subho nobo borsho" which means "Happy new year in Bengali"  They did a pretty good job.

Installing ggplot2 in Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit)

This version of Ubuntu installs an Older version of R (2.x), thus making the installation of ggplot2 infeasible.  Because ggplot2 requires >3.x version of R.

To upgrade the installed R to a higher version do, the following:

1. sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
   This will open up your sources.list file in gedit, where you can add the following line.
2. deb http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/bin/linux/ubuntu/ version/
   Replace version/ with whatever version of Ubuntu you are using (eg, precise/, oneric/, and so on). If you're getting a "Malformed line error", check to see if you have a space between /ubuntu/ and version/.
3. Fetch the secure APT key with gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key E084DAB9
4. Feed it to apt-key with gpg -a --export E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -
5. Update your sources and upgrade your installation with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade.

This will install a higher version of R.  So you can go inside R and perform a install.packages("ggplot2").

Hope it helps someone.

Moving to Mentalism..First Successful and Unsuccessful Performance Today

For the last month, I have been increasingly interested into magic.  First, I started with card magics and got introduced to the Bicycle brand decks, as they are the mostly used brand my the magician and poker players.  I also bought some "trick decks" as are used in magic like Svengali Deck, Stripper Deck, Invisible Deck.  The sheer genius behind these decks have been constantly fascinating me.  I also constantly started uploading videos in youtube.

On day ( I think it was last week) , I accidentally ran into a website and ran into basic mentalism techniques.  For example, if you ask someone to guess a two digit number between 1-50 whose digits are different and odd, most will select 37.  I got a success rate of 3 to 1 (my dad guessed 35), but still in the case of successes, the reaction were better than the best card tricks.  Thus I leaned towards mentalism.

Yesterday night I was watching videos and reading classic mentalism books until 4 o' clock.  And today, I successfully performed a Liar Detection act on my grandmother (dadan) and mom.  It was amazing to discover how simple clues of body language can detect liars.  It was almost like a science.

But when I performed another mind reading trick on my girlfriend, I was not successful.  Partly because poor internet connection (that's why it was heard to read the body language).  And secondly, I got the routine in a wrong sequence.  I am planning to try it again to my parents or somebody else.  The scientist within me is dying to discover whether really there is a science in human thinking.

Needless to say, I will read a lot of books and see a lot of videos in the coming week.  Though there are many mentalism tricks that use gimmicks, I really don't like them.  I want to do something that is related to science, direction of thinking, eye reading etc.  I will keep you updated.