Great Academic year!
Our paper on 'Efficient Session Type Guided Distributed Interaction' was selected for publication to a special issue of 'Science of Computer Programming' (link). We had originally submitted this paper to COORDINATION 2010 for publication.
It was fun working with KC, Luke and Patrick on this paper, which was the outcome of a Distributed systems course project. We were able to build a system to show significant network performance gains over naively programmed Java programs. These gains were the benefit of two simple techniques known as Batching and Chaining. Our main contribution was the automatic code transformation of normal Java code into network-efficient code using Session types.
Also this year, our work on 'Finding Latent Performance Bugs in Systems Implementations' was accepted for publication into FSE 2010. It was three rewards in 6 months!
The PDF version of the original paper published at Coordination 2010.
Bloom energy: The next generation power?
Recently, a Silicon Valley startup has come into the news. Bloom energy has started manufacturing new age fuel cells that are claimed to be small, reliable and clean. These small cells can be used as mini power-plants anywhere from a basement to power a house to datacenters and large establishments.
The research which was secretive for a long while was unveiled last week, led by KR Sreedhar. He happens to be an alumni of NIT, Trichy: a proud moment for all us Nittians! (His profile says Madras University but it happens so that REC, Trichy back then was not autonomous, but was affiliated to Madras University).
Catch the following video to get a first hand update on whats new about Bloom energy fuel cells.
BitTorrent Visualization
This is a good Javascript visualization of p2p file exchange using BitTorrent.
http://mg8.org/processing/bt.html
You can add seeds, peers and see how the bitfield on each peer changes with time.
This is helpful to understand how it works.
Hibernation
I realized a couple of days back (and many more times earlier) that this blog has been hibernating. All this while, I just did not bring myself to sit and pen something down. This one is to catch up on those missed months.
I have been keeping myself busy primarily with my PhD coursework in my 4th semester at Purdue. This is the time when I finish most of my coursework and delve into research. I'll be taking my final oral Qualifier exams this semester and I hope it goes well and I officially become a PhD candidate. We worked on a couple of paper submissions and the reviews are pending on them.
Last Thanksgiving tempted me a lot into buying my first DSLR camera - a Canon 500D (Rebel T1i). I can see people going - "Aah, one more guy with a fancy camera", but I really hope I can impress myself with my photos. I truly believe that photos keep memories alive through the years. Anyway, I've decided to start with the kit lens 18-55mm and a 55-250mm telephoto zoom lens. I've transformed into a Flickr user over Picasa after receiving recommendations from a couple of friends and here is my Photostream. The zoom lens is producing some superb images when I use it for shooting portraits with easy background blur.
My camera is my second best companion while traveling. I prefer spending and visiting different places instead of lazing back at home. Last winter, I went on a small road trip with Ashwathi to Brown County state park. I was pessimistic at first about the worth of this trip during winter, but it turned out to be quite a nice trip. Brown county park is located near the small town of Nashville - I really mean small; the whole town is built around Van Buren street. The park was a quiet escape and the weather was in the 40s and partially cloudy with bright skies, perfect for photography. I'd love to head out to a similar park sometime in Fall to camp and spend more time close to nature. And finally, I spent a quiet and exciting New Year back home at W Lafayette with an Italian Dinner at Olive Garden.
I've also been doing this one-new-restaurant-every-Friday thing, which actually started out last Fall. A couple of us guys pick some new cuisine and restaurant every Friday and try it out. Although we've had a few experiences that were not too good, we get to try out so many different styles of cooking. And after all, its TGIF!
Meanwhile, I also caught up on movies such as Sherlock Holmes, 3 Idiots (Hindi) and Avatar (3D IMAX) and a couple of other older movies. I am so happy we discovered the Purdue DC++ network for content. We had a similar one in our GZ LAN at NITT and this brings memories back..
What I was doing – the week of 2009-05-17 (Twitter)
- Back home again!
# - @Arvind_srid Yeah man! #
- @suren Where are you now? I am leaving now on a trichy-bangalore trip and will be back to chennai on Monday night. #
- @suren Lets plan to meet. You can contact me on another person's number
(if you don have my old number) #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
What I was doing – the week of 2009-05-17 (Twitter)
- Back home again! #
- @Arvind_srid Yeah man! #
- @suren Where are you now? I am leaving now on a trichy-bangalore trip and will be back to chennai on Monday night. #
- @suren Lets plan to meet. You can contact me on another person's number (if you don have my old number) #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
What I was doing – the week of 2009-05-10 (Twitter)
- @rvivek After taking a graduate course in compilers, I really pity compiler developers! The complexity!! #
- @divinjohn IIT, Madras is not on the list! #
- Its frustrating!! #
- Going back home after 8 months! excited
# - Happy Mothers Day to all mothers out there! #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
What I was doing – the week of 2009-05-03 (Twitter)
- @verma: Which conference are you submitting it to? #
- @verma Poster went well. Got a lot of feedback and motivation to work on it #
- A hot day led to some sudden showers late evening. Weird weather! #weather #
- @rvivek Leaving home or leaving for home?
Sounds like u are running away from home (with someone? ) # - @satya3656 Introducing yourself to twitter? #
- Youtube has a better UI! Nice #
- Leaving for the last class of the semester. Damn this year got over so soon! #
- @viveknshah To get some overhead baggage space #
- @rvivek Use a 2 column database. Or use DB (Berkeley DB). They do just that. #
- 5 more days! #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
What I was doing – the week of 2009-04-26 (Twitter)
- Another Mac key combination learnt! Fn+Backspace = Delete. Yay! #
- At Boston, MA #
- @themudd congrats!! #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
What I was doing – the week of 2009-04-19 (Twitter)
- What a Kesari it was #
- @manian_pbs Yeah!! #
- @vatsala: Yeah! #
- Going home early friday afternoon #
- If you are a vegetarian, DO NOT go to a TGI Friday's restaurant!! (atleast in the US) #
- @anshprat: Maybe that can be Ajaxed like Gmail #
Powered by Twitter Tools.