Our Model Driven Brain

             Million years of evolution gifted us a beautiful and most powerful cognitive machine in this universe which is none other than our 3 pound brain. Each one of them is unique based on environment in which it is grown and intelligently adapts to the different situations by correlating it with the past experience.

        Here I tried to list few interesting everyday situations where we use our past experience as a model to predict the outcomes. In some cases our models are life saving and sometimes it can risky to trust only our models. And this happens when we do not have sufficient experience(Training!) . That is one of main reasons why we learn from our more experienced  elders.

       As with any model driven system there are some limitations. There are times where we use brain-models to predict the outcomes of events which depends on many external factors and is way beyond of our control.

Useful brain-models while

• Navigating: 

          A very simple act of walking or driving involves lots prediction. We try to predict where we will be in next few seconds based on our current speed and orientation. Simultaneously we predict the position our fellow travelers in the road in next  few seconds. Our eyes are the feedback mechanism through which our brain-models are validated in in real time. When we are at collision course our brain immediately corrects the orientations, thereby reducing the error.

•  Limits: We are prone to make more errors when are travelling at high speeds, since we are limited by  our reaction times. Most of the accidents happen during this time.  

       

• Socializing: 

           Our brain-model comes handy during social conversations. When we are talking to group of people, we will try to predict the response of the audience. Here again eyes reads the facial cues from people faces which acts a feedback mechanism and changes our tone or topic of our conversations.

• Limits:When the audience are large in number we are overwhelmed by information overload. This is the one of the main causes for stage fright.

• Estimating: 

            Another useful brain-model that we use daily is to predict the time to complete a task. Here our predictors will be the complexity of the task (High, Medium ,Low) and current     state of mind (Energetic or Tired). 

• Limits: Yet again we will tend overestimate or underestimate if the task is totally new to us(Unseen sample) or beyond our capability(Outliers).

Universal Oneness

Today I had great trip to Nancy in france and visited lot of new places and people  and felt some kind of connectedness with world.  I think I could not express it purely through words.

" Even though we are different by our religion, race, country, gender, language... we are made from the same stuff which made this universe. We are windows through which universe sees on to itself. We as human beings should try to open that window as wide as possible and not try to cloud it with our ignorance. "

Pale Blue Dot - Earth

My one day ride to mumbai

This is about my one day trip to mumbai for my visa interview and this also my first ride in plane. Beware the  post might be lengthy I will  try to be concise in future.

Little backstory:
                 I am one of students who was selected for student exchange program in university of luxembourg which is one month away from now. And for past few months, I had nice travel workout , mainly for visa paper works. I had to go  back and forth between busiest routes(chennai-coimbatore ) weekly. After completing all the paper works , finally I had to face this visa interview in mumbai. My counter-parts to lumxembourg had completed interview a week earlier and I had a delay which is mainly due to PCC(police clearance certificate).  After getting passport in tatkaal , I did a mistake in hurry  by applying PCC before post police verification which lead to 2nd police verification. After daily 7 day visits to commissioner office, I finally nailed the PCC.(but 2 weeks later)...:)

Trip
               I am called for interview at 2 am in belgium embassy in mumbai. I started 7 am in morning in kamaraj domestic terminal,chennai and reached by 9 at mumbai. The weather seemed very cloudy and  I suspected to have heavy rain. On reaching worli by cab from airport, I had to pass time till 2 pm. I had a hot idli-sambar in an south indian restaurant. And my friends told that there is an famous Siddhivinayak temple in worli. I wanted give a try despite my language barrier. I asked few south indian people in restaurant for the location of temple. I somehow managed to get the location and its three stops away.


Stroll:
              After 15 minutes stroll amidst little rain, I reached the temple. I had great view of the temple. And by 11 ,I left the temple not knowing where to go. Then after roaming the streets and found a nice street bench to sit. Then after few minutes an old man came and sat beside me. I noticed Daily Thanthi , popular tamil newspaper with him. I took a guess and asked him whether he is tamilian. And my guess was correct, he had been mumbai since 1960's and we had a little chat about mumbai weather. Within few minutes our talk was interrupted by phone call from travel agent from mumbai who is waiting for me near embassy. I shook hands with old man and rushed to embassy and he gave instructions about the interview.

Sea-link ride:
                 After having a nice lunch in Udipi ,famous south indian restaurant , I had my interview which lasted only 5-10 minutes. Actually I thought of having sea link ride ,which by the way I missed in the morning. Now I desperately wanted that ride. So I took a taxi and told the driver to go via sea link to  the airport. My first ride in a suspension bridge was amazing eventhough sea was little rough due to monsoon. Even though speed limit was 50kmph , most of vehicles raced above 50kmph .when I checked the taxi speedometer it was around 100kmph !. After such a speedy ride , taxi moved at  a snail pace in traffic after crossing sea link. Actually both routes to airport took same time for me.

Chennai Bird-eye view:
                 I reached airport around 3  and the flight departs only at six O'clock. So till then I browsed high speed airport Wifi in my laptop. During the return flight ,I am lucky to get window seat. The  night view of chennai from 28,000ft was breathtaking. Finally awesome journey came to end by 8 O'clock. Then I reached home by 9.30 in usual chennai traffic.

Quantum Computing

Internet that we see today is much more evolved and matured than its old counterpart ARPANET, but it still lags in terms of data security and connectivity. For the existing network, the main bottleneck is the communication channel which is slow and insecure.  Is there any chance of communicating with one another through space without using any medium?  This may sound like science-fiction but in near future this seems possible.

The world that we see through our eyes is far more different from the microscopic world of particles where behaviour of nature is really out of our imagination. At these levels classical laws of science do not hold anymore, we have quirky quantum laws to govern these tiny particles.

One of the strangest and counter-intuitive phenomenons in quantum world is quantum entanglement. Its weirdness can be seen through this unexplainable behaviour. Take a photon (light particle) and divide it into two photons and by nature these photons happen to have opposite polarity. But now separate these two photons far away each other (even miles) and if you try to change polarity of one of the photons, what you happen to see is a bizarre thing. The other photon which is far away will reverse its polarity..!  Till now none could figure out how this thing could happen.  These photons are said to be entangled and by some means these photon communicate to its entangled pair to change its state whenever its own state is changed.  

By using this strange property we could achieve Quantum teleportation through which we can teleport information across the space. The heart of it is the entangled pair which must be shared by sender and receiver and after devising a protocol they could start transferring information securely.This idea could pave way for a quantum internet which is totally secure and it practically allows no way for  eavesdropper to peek into network.

P.S:

I tried to simplify certain  things down here and I didn't go deep into subject  but actually  some of the  processes mentioned above needs  mathematical touch. I will be more elaborate in the later posts.

                      

My short stint in ISRO

   This post is about my  summer intern in ISRO(Indian Space Research organisation), Sriharikota...

As the 4th semester was reaching the end ,we started searching for a summer intern and luckily my friend's dad who is an engineer in ISRO , sriharikota  agreed to arrange  an  intern in computer networks for us and he just  wanted a 5 member team . Since  I was  learning computer networks at that time(4^th sem), I decided to give a try. Other people from our class also showed some  interest in that intern and  within few weeks the final 5 member team was finalised and by the end of semester exams we got confirmation letter from  ISRO signed by our HOD.

Sriharikota is located near sullerpeta, Andhra Pradesh and it’s a two hour journey by  train from Chennai. So we got a suburban train  to sullurpeta from chennai central on may 5. While travelling in the train my friend (G) who is well aware of this area told that we could see ISRO launch pad from the train. As soon as  train reached Andhra pradesh border, one of my  friend told  us he found  lauchpad tower at the   horizon...we eagerly  looked through  windows and waited patiently   to  get  the glimpse of ISRO, later we found that it was actually a  cellphone tower..:)  As we neared  sullerpet, we could see some kind of mushroom shaped towers across the barren lands. We began guessing  about the use of the   tower, is it  a  RADAR or watch towers or a lauchpad...? With   little bit of knowledge about rocket science we felt  that it could not  be a RADAR , since it could  track  vertically moving rockets after some range. finally we assumed it to be  a satellite  communication device  since it had shape of parabolic reflector. On reaching sullerpet  all our guesses went wrong, the mushroom tower was actually a water tank for the ISRO colonies... :)

In sullerpeta, we stayed in our friend house  located  in the ISRO colony, from there,  to reach sriharikota  we have to cross the pulicat lake(India’s 2^nd largest brackish lake), but only mode of transportation is  by road which is built over sand bed on the lake. On the first day  morning  we got the bus to SHAR(Sriharikota High Altitude Range which is now called as Satish Dhawan Space Centre ) and on the way we found pulicat  lake  to be mostly dry and to our surprise there is hoarding saying that “Do not throw plastics. This is  a pulicat lake bird sanctuary”. we could actually see  few  flamingos and pelicans scattered over  lake. after 15 minutes of travel we entered  dense forest  along  the sea shore. To our disappointment  no laptops and cameras were  allowed inside SHAR. By  late afternoon   we got  our id’s , thanks to my friend's dad  who helped us getting the things done.

 As days went by we could  see that SHAR is not  a small organisation. Various departments are separated few miles  apart which are connected by a narrow  road  which cuts through dense forest and we must need some sort of vehicle for the travel. One day we missed our bus and in SHAR we could get  buses only at specified interval of time. so with no  other way, we started walking.  on the way  most of the  people from vehicles looked us peculiarly and we don’t why. we walked 4 km in scorching sun and  we were totally  dehydrated and it was hard to find a shade on  these  roads. with  2 more km to go we rested on  the road  itself . and finally a van stopped for us. Inside the van, we came to know that  panthers has been spotted around the forest and no one is allowed to walk  on  the roads and we were lucky that our timing didn’t coincide with security patrol or else we would have been caught...:)

Some days ISRO engineers will take us to various facilities and they patiently explained their usage and workings ,but some  were relatively new and unknown to us ,but somewhat we got an abstract idea about their systems. Related to computer science ,we saw the   implementation of remote monitoring   systems , which is one of the core  systems of ISRO ,since during the time of the launch no engineer will be allowed near the launch site , every system will be  monitored  from mission control centre(MCC)  through a  fibre – optic  network.

One of  the unforgettable moments  happened  during  the last day  of our stay, my friend's dad took us to top of launch pad, the breath taking view of bay of Bengal  blew us away, we never seen that  kind of bluish tint of the sea .

 The internship was over by may 25 , we had loads of fun during  this short span of time and  I am grateful to everyone who made this summer a memorable one...

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