The Awesome Vacation

Time and the hour runs through the roughest day

Ever since my bad run started, things went from bad to worse with an alarming consistency. My morale dropped and was at a low for a long time. In one of my previous posts I recounted with a philosophical perspective of all that went wrong and so that part I am going to skip today.

In a nutshell it was an awesome winter vacation. I was well on my way to recovery and therefore decided to celebrate Christmas with family and friends in a great style. From 27th to 31st December, I spent my time visiting various food joints with an ever changing group of friends. From 1st January to 4th January, I attended a Jazz concert, went for two movies, and had a night out with some old school friends.

Then came coding week. Actually it is a 10 days long event which I entered 3 days late. So from 4th to 11th, I barely bathed, slept and only emerged from my room for mealtimes. Also I noticed that many of my classmates who were hitherto uninterested in coding as a serious activity, started gaining speed as well. This sudden surge of interest in coding amidst our peer group accelerated exponentially, and five of us spent the last three days of the contest constantly debating and arguing about algorithms. Indeed, I gained about twice as much knowledge in the field of coding, than I learnt in a year at college.

End result was that I topped my peer group and also ranked fifth in entire college. It was a huge morale booster. The next week I spent entire days trying to come up with a thesis for my undergraduate project work. I put so much of attention into this task and my mother was forced to break into my room and physically drag me to the bathroom for a bath.

Around 12^th I got a request to form a team with two of my juniors in college for a certain report writing competition. Writing being the only thing I actually love, I immediately accepted. Then in the evening I came to know it was to be hosted at IIT Kharagpur and the event would last 3 days. That meant three nights away from home, just one month into my recovery.

Naturally there was a lot of tension at home, but after some incredibly complex negotiations I got the green light. Over the next few days I got busy preparing for the preliminaries and the hard work paid off pretty well (we qualified in second place).

The day before I was leaving, I came across a Lamborghini on the road. Trust me, that was enough to make my vacation memorable on its own. Funny thing was, I had so much happening around me that save for a Facebook post I literally got no other opportunity to gloat about it at all.

The D-Day arrived and I set off for IIT with mixed feelings. Here I was about to visit my dream institute which I had failed to enter, twice. On the other hand here I was finally heading off to my dream institute. What happened there will always be a great part of me, and maybe a story for another day. But what I remember most is, the moment the shuttle cab started pulling out of the IIT main entrance to take me home, I felt happier than I had been while entering the gates. Happier because the brilliance of IITs had dimmed slightly at last, and because the realization that not being in an IIT did not mean I was missing out on a whole lot.

This vacation will undoubtedly be one of my best ever, and the reason I chose not to elaborate on it is that the more I write about these 30 days, the less it will seem. Hence I limited myself to the essential facts with the hope that one day I will be able to sit down and extrapolate from this post, the various highs which appeared contiguously in a period so small, yet profound.

P.S. It’s been roughly two weeks since college started, and life refuses to fall into its daily monotony. In my opinion that’s the best epilogue possible for such an epic vacation.

Programming the Brain

Carver Mead developed a concept known as Neuromorphic Computing in the late 1980’s which uses V.L.S.I. systems containing electronic analog circuits to mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system. Nowadays this concept has been extended to analog, digital, and mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI and software systems which try to acheive this feat.

We are already aware of the Human Genome Project , a 10 year collaboration that is attempting to simulate a complete human brain in a supercomputer using biological data.The next step in this story comes along in the form of a research project called Cognitive Computing going on at I.B.M.

Our Brain is the main entity separating us from Robots, which follow a specific set of instructions to do a particular task, in the sense that we can feel. However even with the advent of the latest breakthroughs in this field, it seems highly unlikely that Robots will be able to feel their way out of situations anytime soon.

So why get excited about latest developments at all? Surely they will allow us to deal with numbers in a faster way, maybe much faster than what we can imagine. Maybe in the coming years, we will talk in terms of Terabytes of space with nonchalance. But does this serve our purpose in any way? Does this  take us further in the quest to emulate a human brain using technology?

The answer maybe yes. To understand what IBM is doing, we have to understand the concept of Big Data. Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.

The cognitive capabilities of the brain includes understanding the surrounding environment (ie processing Big Data on a daily basis), dealing with ambiguity, acting in real time and within context – all while consuming less power than a light bulb and occupying less space than a two-liter bottle of soda. Fantastic isn’t it? Really puts things in perspective.

So these guys have developed a new computer chip design at IBM. This revolutionary chip is named SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) after our own neurons. The IBM researchers led by Dharmendra S. Modha successfully demonstrated a building block of a novel brain-inspired chip architecture based on a scalable, interconnected, configurable network of “neurosynaptic cores” that brought memory, processors and communication into close proximity. These new silicon, neurosynaptic chips allow for computing systems that emulate the brain’s computing efficiency, size and power usage.

They did not stop after making the chips. Modha and his team have developed a new software ecosystem that support all aspects of the programming cycle – from design through development, debugging and deployment — and could enable a new generation of applications that mimic the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition.

They are trying to mimic the model of preexisting languages like C or Java which use libraries of basic code which are mandatory for every new program we write. Similarly we can also find analogies with our own DNA which is Nature’s way of containing header files for human beings. Modha’s team is using a form of “corelets” and a “corelet library” which makes sure that each neurosynaptic core doesn’t need to be programmed all over again.

While emulating a human brain may still require a shot in the dark or a flash of unparalleled genius, this doesn’t take away the fact that the future holds a certain promise for those who are willing to toil hard. Excited already folks? Don’t just wish for a technological leap, make it so.

P.S. Check out this link for further details.