Happy Holidays '15

Alright! So today is Dec 17, 2015. After a long time I am getting to update my blog and well I am glad I can. A lot has happened since the last blog post which was somewhere in July. A lot of which probably I might not be able to share and some which I can.

For starters, I’ve qualified my PhD examinations and thus I am an official PhD candidate. Feels more like a relief from the necessary evil part and feels like its time to do some actual contributive work.  I’ve also become a legal driver now! Well it feels great. I guess my feeling of adulthood came to me after I bought my own car and now with the license it is empowering.

Professionally, I feel I’ve started getting a hang of academia and I feel like I'm in control of my work. I feel I have the knowledge ( which is ever increasing every single day) to be able to logically argue with my advisor (at least) about what are the next steps that I can take. I guess I am going slow with my research and possibly my advisor thinks I can do better and well I’m glad he keeps me on the hook coz I seem to be enjoying it. Its frustrating and painstaking of course when things go wrong but I cant even explain the happiness I get from the feeling of accomplishment with every tiny goal that goes according to plan. PhD is definitely a way of life that you choose and its not just an option that you incorporate in your work life. It affects your living and your motivation of existence. You can have several perspectives of course. One can be: You get up every single day, work your ass out, get tired, sleep and repeat. The other is, you start your day with some objectives, try to achieve them and in the process keep realizing the other objectives and at the same time you’re trying to ensure that the objectives at the higher level of abstraction are making sense and you move forward keeping a vigil eye for any interesting results. I like the latter perspective of course  and this whole idea of augmenting this sense of awareness just keeps getting better everyday. I am currently working on something very interesting and drafting a research paper for the same thus cannot discuss it now but hopefully soon enough.

The friends I introduced in the last post have of course become closer and our friendships have transcended the formal boundaries of acquaintance and as a graduate student you definitely need a support system. Talking about support system, my parents had their first time visit to the States and they came to see Purdue. I’m glad they loved it. I took them to chicago. It was great to see them go nuts in the chicago winds. The tradition for thanksgiving has been set with me heading to Omaha for the second time to be with my american family, the Oliver family, which I am glad I've become a part of. Meeting Libby finally was a wonderful experience and boy I’m in love with her persona. After John, I think shes the most intriguing Oliver to me. I had a wonderful thanksgiving with a new born addiction to Settlers of Catan. It’s a wonderful game and you all reading this should try it.

Personally, I’ve grown a lot. I’m still learning to be an adult but I guess i'll get there at some point. This December, Gourav and Shibu are gonna be in Chicago so im super excited to meet em over the holidays. Of course undergrad friends or more like SAMS family is meeting me without Sam himself. That is, Achal and Shailesh are gonna be there in chicago as well and Srijan is back in India so well we will just miss him ( may be :P) . I’m gonna bombard his facebook with all our pictures haha. 

Wish you all a very happy new year!

Anyway, that’s it for now. Pretty sleepy, I hope I update the next blog sooner than last time

If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written It Shorter

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

John Oliver, Alaina Hembree ( and alright, Dio)

There is no better teacher than your own life experiences. I’m those sorts who loves to be an open book, transparent and innocent with my ideas and actions. I cannot plan or plot things consciously to do something hurtful to even the worst of people. What I forgot was that there are people who can do that. It’s such a dilemma. I’ve always been told to be who I am. The problem is if I be that self, I will make myself so vulnerable to some people whom I think are friends and land up being sad and lonely. I call it the sieving process. It’s funny how, be it relationships or be it friendships, you have to go through a bunch of sad people to finally boil down with some decent ones with whom you can share everything, not be judged, be respected and have a great time. Since all of this is probabilistic, some find a good bunch of friends too fast and for some it takes ages. I consider myself extremely lucky in this case because I do have a bunch of great friends. John and Alaina this ones for y’all. I love you both (and Dio haha) . I am glad you were born :P

I would...

I like the word serendipity. The sound of it, it’s meaning, it’s all very perfect. The same perfect that one expects and hopes and wants for one’s own life. Haven’t we all spent those countless moments being lost in the “if only” of a situation? Especially when the “if only” is associated with someone whom you’ve become fond of, with whom these recent emotions of happiness and joy, like you’ve never felt before, have started emerging, with whose existence you feel reason enough to live that perfect moment you’d imagined. That someone whom you so dearly want to call special but still hesitate because you don’t know if it is too early to say so. Love, affection and fondness are the three hot balls ones heart juggles through while keeping up its beats. Anxiety, worry and fear are the three hotter balls. Fear and love go hand in hand because of the value and preciousness associated with the person in concern. But sometimes the fear is uncalled for. Sometimes a leap of faith is more necessary than anything else. If one gets too scared of heart breaks, before even getting into a situation that one assumes to create such a conclusion, it is no point falling in love. You never will. There is all the good and the perfect associated with love but there is compromise and commitment too. There will be jealousy, there will be misunderstandings but it’s that very love that would help over power all of the imperfect. We spend so much time thinking about our “if only” that we forget about the importance of imperfect. When it comes to love, imperfect is the perfect. No one seems to acknowledge it. Including you and me. We all eliminate millions and millions of possibilities with so many people just because of some stupid reasons which if you think deeply about wouldn’t have mattered to you if all worked out well. Sometimes the practicality of a situation will be totally different from what your heart wants and that’s where I guess the tightrope walk of fear and leap of faith comes into play. Just so you know, I would take the leap of faith.