November 01, 2009
Fall Colors:
Yeah! Fall term is finally here and I have taken 15 credits again :-(. This time I am taking a lot of interesting ones like SI682, SI688, SI561 and all the basic ones :-) SI500, SI501. This semester has gone by really quickly, almost as fast as the leaves have fallen off the trees. Yup, the leaves first started turning red, I thought maybe it’s a new color they take up during this time of the year, then they turned yellow, then brown and then one fine morning there were no leaves. Now Ann Arbor has started looking like an English country side, clouds all the time and cold winds blowing against my face, feel like writing a sentence from an English novel – “the wind was crisp and smelt of fir leaves, there was no sunlight…”, sorry for fooling around, but really Ann Arbor has changed a lot, those shaded areas are now all bare and yeah I can see farther now, since leaves used to block the view from my window but now I can clearly see into other people’s homes and I think they can as well :-)
This term I have been working on a lot, there are two big projects, then I am re-doing my online portfolio and yes how can I forget JOB SEARCH!!! again :-(. Sometimes I feel that I have nothing more to do than just sit and apply. Applying sometimes feels like shooting an arrow in the dark, with no feedback as to what happened and then suddenly one day someone switches on the light and you see you have been shooting in the wrong direction. I hope this time I am standing facing the bull’s-eye not the other way as I was for my internship.
I take a pledge now I will keep my blog up-to-date from now on ;-)
Posted by malhar at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2009
More details about the winter semester:
I know I have been very brief about my winter term here at Michigan, so here it is…
The winter started out really fast and got over really fast:-). After giving 2 tests I got my SI502 requirement waived off. Then I got my JAVA programming requirement waived off. After all the waive offs and after an hour of brainstorming with Judy Lawson, I figured out the courses I wanted to take for my first term in the United States. I took:
1. SI627: Managing the IT organization
2. SI630: Security in digital world
3. SI650: Information Retrieval
4. SI760: Language & Information
5. OMS501: Business Statistics
I have an advice to all my readers; don’t take 15 credits in the first term. I will start from the top and describe each course in detail. SI627 had a lot of readings and online participation (needed to get accustomed to CTOOLS which was really hard). For the online participation I had to read a chapter from the reading and lead the discussion on that reading on CTOOLS. Once I figured out how to start a discussion on CTOOLS I was all set :-). We had two more deliverables for this subject, one was a presentation on a new and upcoming technology, so I chose augmented reality and gave a really amazing presentation with a video clip and everything. At the very end we were to give a project presentation, our team consisted of only 3 people so we lagged a bit in the project and the end result wasn’t as impressive as I had thought, but was good enough.
SI630 was a great class specifically because the professor himself was very passionate about security, so much so that he has his own public key setup :-). There were 3 papers due during this class which was fun since the topic chosen were really interesting by the professor. At the end of this class we were to present a project which helped people learn more about security in the digital world. So we developed a system which was a computer adaptive test that would test how secure are your data storage and data transmission habits and at the end this test would give you a score and compare you with others who have taken this test. We made a flash application for this project, which used to learn from the user’s responses and then give the next question based on the answer of the previous question. This test can be taken from my online portfolio. This course helped me a lot, in-fact I got together with the professor again over the summer to get some advice about a project that I was doing for one of my internship.
SI650 would be the most unforgettable class I have ever taken; Prof. Drago had a very different style of teaching. He was teaching this class here at University of Michigan and Columbia University in New York simultaneously. It was fun! The course was all about how information is retrieved by the search engines and how this information should be organized so that it is easier for the search engines to find this information. The course had 3 assignments, programming based in which we were supposed to use CLAIRLIB developed by Prof. Drago himself in Perl and solve the problem of the assignment. There was a final term for the course along with a project. My project was really interesting; Prof. Drago had a large data set of user queries to the AOL search engine. I used this corpus to form a graph of the users and then on this graph I performed Random walks to assign weights to each user so that at the end based on these weights I can cluster the users and see some pattern. For this I used JAVA and the JUNG API written in JAVA for the visualization of the clusters. I also made use of the LUCENE API. JUNG API was really cryptic for me at first, but I was able to grasp it through the help of the support staff at sourceforge.net
SI760 was a good course specifically because the instructor had amazing skills of teaching. This course had 3 assignments, a midterm and a final term. I don’t know what to describe about the course, because most of it was just studying and understanding the concepts.
OMS501 was the statistics course from the business school. I took this since it was a requirement and also I got to complete my cognate, but I still plan to take more cognates. This class was held in the new business school building and was real great fun. The professor had a really good sense of humor and used to explain the concepts really well. For this course there were two projects and a number of assignments on the Wiley site, for which I had to purchase an account. Apart from that this class was fun and most of the students were part-time MBA students there so got to learn a lot from them.
Posted by malhar at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2009
My projects
I never got around to writing about the projects that I did since I have come here. Well here they are:
1. Alternate Spring Break 2009:
I volunteered to work at Cabrini Connections, Chicago. This is a small not for profit organization which helps under privileged children move towards a first career through various activities like after school programs, etc. They are connected to a lot of organizations in various fields like legal services, corporate services, etc. which help them in their endeavors.
I transformed a static conceptual map at their website into a visualization applet. This applet helped new volunteers understand the role of Cabrini Connections plays in helping these kids. This applet can be seen on their site at: www.tutormentorexchange.net (its on the rightmost link on the top named "Village strategy map").
2. I made a computer adaptive security test for my SI630 class. This test can be found here. This test rather than evaluating how secure your computer system is tests hows secure you are in terms of computer security namely your browsing and data storage habits.
The questions that are thrown at the test-taker are based on their responses to prior questions. At the end each user is associated with a score, which tell the user whether he is in the safe zone or the danger zone, along with a couple of recommendations about how to improve.
3. Clustering users based on their queries to the AOL search engine. Yes I had access to thousands of actual user queries from the AOL database. I used JUNG and lucene to perform random walks on this data and then cluster the users based on their similarities in querying. More about this would soon be appearing on my personal blog, where I would be talking about the algorithm I made and how I finally cracked into how to use JUNG :)
Then there were a number of other projects for the management class and the statistics class that I took, one of them was about a regression analysis I did in predicting the market based on a couple of parameters like GDP, dollar index, etc.
Posted by malhar at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)