WWW2011 and Interactions with Sir Tim Berners-Lee

The dub-dub-dub 2011 Conference (that is how they call WWW2011) was held for the first time in India, at Hyderabad, during March 28th to April 1st, and I attended it from March 30th to April 1st. The keynote speakers included: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and also our former president, APJ Abdul Kalam.

Our former president Kalam, was as usual at his best, highlighting his vision for the nation (empower the rural and underprivileged people, through Internet & Web), and sought solutions from the research community, for NLP related challenges especially in Indian languages.

On 31st, I got a chance to listen directly to the inventor of Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He did not use any slides for his presentation!, and probably it was not required, as his talk was very much animated and everyone was listening with rapt attention.

Ask him a question related to Web, and you are sure to receive a long reply, which shows his enthusiasm, excitement, and the commitment he still has over his creation, which I understood from the Q & A session, that followed his talk.

He asked the businesses, and the governments to put their data on Web, and create mechanims for an inclusive Web. He also mooted for a multi-stake holder model for governing the Internet, and eventually the Web. He talked about the extremes: Finland and Libya; He also talked about privacy concerns, and the need for being anonymous, and at the same time, highlighted the negatives associated with allowing full anonymous status.

During later part of the day, when I got a chance to directly interact, I asked him whether he still believes in his top-down approach towards Semantic Web, and after finding out that I was from C-DAC (an agency under the Govt of India), he said that govt and their departments should put all their contents on Web, in the form of Linked Data, which could pave the way for the realization of Semantic Web. He was very keen in wanting us to contribute to the linked data.

And then, I took a photograph with him, - really a memorable moment for me!, followed by my colleague and friend - Dittin Andrews.

Also, I need to mention about the General co-chair of the event: Prof. Sadagopan, who was as usual at his best - Warm & Witty. He was the prime person responsible for bringing this conference to India; first tried in 2001, and then in 2006 successfully won the bid, to bring the 2011 conference to India! Lastly about the Venue: HICC - Wonderful place to be; and I could not forget the Coffee that was served throughout the event from the WMF combiNation vending machines.

I forgot the art of Handwriting!

It was mid (19)80's, when I was in school, and had to do a lot of homework each and every day, assigned by teachers of various subjects, who taught on that day. There were two standard homeworks that had to be done each day for the subject of English - One, a vocabulary work - where we have to write about 5 'not-so-common' words from the dictionary, and Two, a handwriting work - where we need to write one page passage as legibly and neatly as possible.

Now, it appears to me all those efforts were waste, because these days, I rarely get an opportunity to write anything on my own handwriting, except for signature. Writing on paper with pen, has changed to typing on your favorite word processor, and if required, printing it out later.

Many would be complaining about the loss of 'personal touch', in computer-typed & printed documents. For those such people, here comes a technique that would help you regain that personal touch, despite it being computer-typed & printed. Check this link for more details.

Now, for those of you who had been signing paper after paper, each day, and cribbing about the 'manual' process, stop worrying as the technology of 'digital signatures', (not same as scanning and printing of your hand-written signature) has arrived long back, and the 'legality' of such 'digital signatures' had been enacted as a law, in India, almost 11 years ago!!! (in the year 2000).

For those of you who have already been using digital signatures, and complaining about its use only once or few times in a year - like at the time of filing your IT returns, do not worry much, as more and more applications would become available in the coming years, and 10 years later, from now, you will rarely find an opportunity, to sign using your hand and might probably be using it over greeting cards or gift packs only.

So, for the future generations, there may be hardly any need to learn the art of writing by hand, unless otherwise they are planning to become artists!

The year 2010 - for me

Here goes the Personal Highlights of 2010 for me!

• The year started for me, with a much awaited approval to work on a new collaborative project, and even had one review completed successfully in the later part of the year
• Got to work on another interesting but an important proposal, that saw its light at the end of the year
• Registered a domain name, for one of the products that we were working on - a first for me
• Submitted my PhD Thesis Report (I really realized the pain of writing a doctoral thesis!, and how relieving it was, after the submission!)
• Submitted two annual reports at the same time (felt like climbing a mountain!)
• Two members of my team - Dnyanesh Pawar and Vikram Kumar quit, to pursue better careers
• Got interested in writing and deploying an application in Google App Engine
• Got a good number of opportunities to develop my 'emcee' skills! - an area that was absolutely new to me!
• Learnt more about ISO, as I was nominated as the QMS manager! and managed to get through one surveillance audit! Also faced audit of a different kind - for the first time, in the later part of the year!
• Regained my interests in PKI technology as I had to get closely involved in a related project
• Learned and handled certain new courses
• Had to do lot of works that I was not previously familiar or comfortable with
• Had some disappointments too: Efforts relating to get into a specific activity (which would have been a honor), failed and a product deployment did not materialize
• Named our second daughter as Aishwarya
• Got our first daughter admitted to a nearby school
• Traveled to a number of places, thanks to a project & for other personal commitments: Trivandrum, Calicut, Cochin, Alleypey, Delhi, Mysore (Palace, Chamundi Hills, Brindavan gardens, Ranganathaswamy temple, and Tipu sultan fort), Visakhapatnam (also visited Simhachalam) , Planetarium at Bangalore (seeing for the first time in Bangalore, despite being here for a long time!) are the places that I happened to visit this year!.
• Overall, the year was good & memorable, for the important milestones that I happened to pass through, and for taking up opportunities & works that I was not familiar with!
  

Boring Coincidences

The last day of the Year 2010.

I had been busy with my thesis writing, conferences, and projects, in the last couple of months. So, could not give priority to writing or blogging, for the last 3 months. So, restarting to bore!

This month (December, 2010) I surprisingly noticed a couple of boring coincidences. I was at a conference in NewDelhi, and it was during the Coffee break, that 6 (known) people saw me one after the other, and asked the question "Where are you staying", and the interesting thing was that the first person who asked was still standing next to me, followed by the next, and the next, and the next .... I was just wondering what would be in the mind of atleast the first three people, who posed me that question.

Though I was bored to repeat the same answer, I tried my best to be creative, like saying - I am staying in Accord's, I am staying in C R Park, I am staying in a area, predominantly occupied by Bengalis, and so on... to keep myself overcome the tiredness of answering

Another interestingly boring (What a Contradiction!) coincidence happened when I was travelling in a local bus (BMTC) in Bangalore. I was standing, and I noticed a girl next to me, who was carrying a book that was appearing to be a novel. Curious enough, I wanted to know the title, and it read "Mister God, This is Anna", and as I was struggling to read the last word "Anna", suddenly a boy from behind was calling me "Anna" - meaning brother in Kannada!, showing me the vacant seat next to me. I noticed his call, when he called me the second time, with a loud "Anna"!!.

Coincidences are a subject of great debate. But let me stop here, as I had bored enough!

Are Great Achievers born?

Well, I am not sure of the answer.

However, when we look around the most famed people in the modern history of the world, we find that most of them had nursed their talents from their childhood days and followed it up with great passion and commitment. Here are a few legends, who have created history in their own right

• Thomas Alva Edison (Came up with his first invention at the age of 16)
• Bill Gates (Started programming at 13, - at a time, when no one did)
• Warren Buffet (Bought his first shares at the age of 11)
• Ilaiyaraaja (Started early, and by 14 years, was a performer in Musical Troupe)
• A R Rahman (Started to play instruments before the age of 11)
• Michael Jackson (Debuted with his brother, at the age of 6 )
• Viswanathan Anand (Started playing Chess at the age of 6)
• Sachin Tendulkar (Started playing cricket as a Toddler)

So, do you need to start things very early, and continue for very long (or if possible through out your life) to become a legend or a great achiever? The answer appears to be affirmative, but not everyone who started early was a great achiever later, as another list of people, who had a promising start, but could not live up to the expectations or failed miserably could easily be put up.

So, what separated the great achievers from people who also started early, but could not attain the fame that great achievers attained? The answer is Passion, Focus, and Commitment. These legends were passionate about one particular aspect, and they worked on it with sincere commitment and focus, and as time passed, they automatically excelled, in what they did, and that lead to the list of great achievers.

Most importantly, these great legends, though would have faced great disturbances, or influences or diversions, than others, in their lifetime, it was their passion and commitment, that should have helped them to cross or ignore the diversions easily.

I also believe that most of the great achievers, including the above legends were never behind money, and their prime intention was on achieving some thing else, and money followed them as an end-result of their achievements.

So, to conclude, if something is started from a very early age, and religiously practiced with passion and commitment for years, then great success is bound to happen.

Update: 2015:  Recently I was reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, (It was published in 2008), and the essence of it is that to be successful, you should start early (in terms of age and time), put in continuous and consistent efforts (10,000+ hours) and be prepared to seize the opportunity (hopefully if it comes to you at the right time). The point here is that Gladwell drives home the point with case-studies and data, emphasizing the same points, and coincidentally the examples mentioned above in this post concur with it.  

Research is Costly!

If you had been guessing that I am going to talk about some Sci-fi or life-involving scientific research here, then you are going to be disappointed.

This week, I had the privilege of attending two events - one was an open discussion forum (that had two renowned guests - one was Dr S P Mudur, and the other was Dr N Vijayaditya), and a project review committee meeting for a project, that was into developing a product, out of research efforts.

In the open discussion forum, after a few questions (including one by myself, on IT infrastructure), the discussions steered towards research in general (with IT or other innovations at the back of the mind). The summary of the discussion was that even a very non-critical research involves risk - risk of time, manpower, & money. Out of several attempts made in research, only a few of them may succeed over time, and that too the success is not guaranteed. This is in a country like India with more than a billion population, translates to spending very less on research, and expecting results in a short time, which imposes constraints on the researchers, to focus on short-term goals rather than long-term goals.

In the later project meeting, there were comparisons drawn between the product developed on home-grown research efforts, and products developed by well-known MNC's. Though the fact that the cost involved in terms of money, time, and manpower, are in no way comparable with those of the MNC products, the expectations were always there. Also, the costs associated to take the product beyond the labs, to a wide-scale user base was even more prohibitively costly affair!, which is the main reason that most of the research prototypes do not see the end of the light, and just lay in the labs.

What's more is that, even cash-rich companies or developed western nations do not expect all their research efforts to produce great outcomes, despite significant costs being associated with them, and here, there is a pressure on many fronts to get a great outcome in a short-time, and with the least of the infrastructure. Of course, this too could be achieved, by an extra-ordinary person in a select field, but could not be replicated every time and every where!

To summarize, research is a form of learning, and one should be open for failures and involves huge cost - not only in terms of money, but also in the form of time, and other risks such as a evolution of a superior technology in the future, turning the scales upside down, for an existing research effort.

God - Representations & Manifestations

This world has an inherent knack of giving numerous representations to a single object!. So, it may not be surprising when we see or create many representations for a single concept or entity that we deal upon. The main point behind these numerous representations is that everyone would like to visualize a particular object or concept or entity in their own way, based on their perceptions, thereby leading to multiple representations. When these multiple representations or visualizations are correlated they could give a much deeper and probably better understanding of a subject.

By nature, all objects themselves can have different forms or manifestations, based on a lot of factors. The underlying base for these factors is time; As time changes the forms or manifestations also differ!. To illustrate this, look at the Sun; It appears or lends itself to different forms (to other planets)- in the morning, during the day, and during the evening. Ofcourse, there are scientific explanations behind it; but speaking abstractly, as time passes, these forms or representations also change!. Not only the way in which we see the sun changes from time to time, but the sun by itself also changes from time to time - as a star it has its own life cycle - for instance the sun is becoming more luminous - at the rate of 10% every billion years.

As there can be innumerable representations of the same object or entity, and also each objects can have numerous forms or manifestations over the time - one could realize that God too can be visualized or represented in many forms and in many ways!, and if God could be factorized to a base - i.e., energy, then God too could manifest in multiple ways based on time!