Today is 21st July, 2015. Today I moved stuff from my bedroom and apartment to get ready to move in to a different apartment on a new lease and with roomies who are two of the dearest friends here at Purdue. No sooner I started packing my stuff than I realized that its been almost a year now in the States and Purdue.
Looking back at this year personally and professionally I feel really good that I’ve been able to develop my own social circle. A circle of special people who are unlike high school or college buds. These guys are different, this is adult friendship I guess. Its very mature, very rich and intellectually stimulating. It doesn’t involve judgements or silly jokes on personality types. There are jokes but they are truly funny and doesn’t involve any pretense. I’ve been able to expand my personality, my knowledge, my behavior and my take towards various relationships. I’ve become an adult. This feeling of adulthood actually came when I started driving my own car. It wasn’t puberty or porn or living alone. It was driving for me. The sheer responsibility of your own life and the possible impact financially, personally and professionally in case of an accident is just too high to mess around with any rule or be ignorant about it.
Financially looking back, although with the measly pay as a graduate student I believe I did a good job on my savings. A macbook pro, a trip to NYC, a trip to Omaha and several trips to Chicago were some of the perks of my savings. I still don’t count my car as my own, as I still have a loan but I’ve managed 7k payment and about half is left to pay off. Well that will happen with time too :)
Socially, well in alphabetical order, Akancha, Ishant, John, Kshitiz and Parul have become the closest of buddies. I spend almost all of my leisure time with them. Gym buds include Parul, Shitty and Akancha, recently Ishant too. It’s just brilliant. These guys know every detail that there is to know about me. Like everything! It is just surprising how much power they have to fuck me over lol.
Intellectually, my research is extremely intriguing and I am glad I chose Purdue, DELP. I am working on crowdsourcing in engineering systems design. More specifically, I am working on game theory and behavioral experimentation. You see, game theory assumes rationality of players. Kahneman and Tversky in their seminal paper have already proved that people are irrational and are not driven by the utility of their decisions but on their gut feeling and misconceptions. This means that depending on the context, game theoretic models can be completely useless despite such mathematical brilliance involving probability. That’s where the role of behavioral experimentation comes into the picture. Understanding the behavior of people and integrating it into the game theoretic model can actually and pragmatically be of some use. However behavioral experimentation is unlike the “social experiments” we see as viral videos on Facebook. This is the field of design of experiments which helps you understand the painstaking task of setting up controlled experiments where the behavior you want to test is exclusively dependent only on the control parameters you want to correlate to and no other bias should be involved. This is an extremely difficult task because you never know what might bias the participants. Each word of the problem statement needs to be carefully constructed to ensure such that, for example, previous experience doesn’t interfere if thats not a part of the control parameter. Having an experiment and problem statement ready isn’t just gonna get you the results either. Firstly, a mathematical model of the tournament is important. The theoretical assumptions are as important as actual behavior. So I started reading a lot about contest theory. This is where I was also introduced to hypothesis based research where developing hypothesis on “intuitive” relationships and then rejecting or not rejecting the null plays a very important role. Thats where statistics comes into the picture. To talk simple, my research objective is to understand outcomes in engineering systems design by studying design under competition. Outcomes mean, solution quality, profit and innovation. If designers of a contest can predict the solution quality especially in a crowdsourced tournament where spamming is one of the greatest concerns then it can be realistically implemented and well that will be fantastic. So back to the research objective. Outcomes in systems design. What affects it? Peoples decision making in a tournament. What affects decision making? Their behavior and the tournament itself. Behavior is easy to understand, that an experienced person will tend to make the better decision, a risk prone person will tend to make the less probable choice etc. When it comes to design of the tournament in itself, i can explain from an example: Consider a 1 million$ competition and a 10$ competition. Of course the higher the price the higher the motivation to win it. Thats how your decision is affected by solely the price. There are other options, like single stage, multistage types, the distribution of the price as winner takes all or multiple winners etc that will affect the behavior in not so intuitive ways unlike simply increasing prize. So studying all of this synergistically to predict outcomes in engineering systems design is what my research is about. I have been able to publish a conference paper in decision making using an eye tracking device and well I am excited for my Boston ASME IDETC conference on the 2nd of August.
Academically, I have been maintaining a 4.0 GPA which to be honest is nothing great. A lot of grad students manage that, but of course it feels great. I have my PhD qualifying examinations coming up this September and well I am bucking up for it too in the mere 24 hours that we unfortunately have in a day. Wish there were more.
And finally, personally, I am just feeling grateful that I decided to pursue a PhD. It is not just an academic decision. Its a lifestyle choice. I end this with a note to myself that
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”-Blaise Pascal
