RoboSub 2011

Robosub (http://www.auvsifoundation.org/foundation/competitions/robosub/) is a competition involving Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). The challenge is to overcome the obstacles and perform the tasks without human interventions.
The winners are:

1st Place: ETS Team SONIA (awarded $7,000)
2nd Place : Cornell University (awarded $4000)
3rd Place: University of Florida (awarded $3,000)
4th Place : Reykjavik University (awarded $2,000)
5th Place: University of Maryland (awarded $500)
6th Place: University of Rhode Island (awarded $500)
7th Place: United States Naval Academy
8th Place: North Carolina State University

Mayor's Cup for Community Outreach: Carl Hayden High School (awarded $1,000)
Second Chance Award: University of Central Florida (awarded $1,000)
Outstanding Technical Mentorship: University of Maryland ($500)
Hardware is Hard Award: Utah State University (awarded $500)
Innovation on a Budget Award: Mesa College (awarded $500)
Best Paper Award: Kyushu University (awarded $500)

http://www.auvsi.org/news/#RoboSub2011
The video:



The team describes the challenges and the experience during the competition:
http://sonia.etsmtl.ca/en/news/final-day-we-finished-in-1st-place

 A great collection of their papers etc:
http://www.auvsifoundation.org/foundation/competitions/journalpaperarchives/2011robosubjournalpapers/

Attending MaxEnt 2011 in Waterloo, Canada

I am attending MaxEnt 2011 in Waterloo Canada.

Travelling to Waterloo was slightly involved because of the few reasons. The first one was the visa issues. At least, I am thankful that it arrived a week before my departure. Few of my friends could not make it due to the delays. Another one was that the airfare to the nearby airport was  very very expensive.  So, I travelled via Toronto (about an hour drive).
However, the best part of the airport was that the the wifi was free. So, I quickly joined the network and started calling people while waiting for my shuttle to arrive.

Here, in MaxEnt 2011, I will be presenting my work on collaborative experimental design by two intelligent agents.  The abstract of the talk can be found here ...(PDF!)

The work is the result of the overall successful (past) developments (by the Giants) of the Bayesian method of inference, experimental design techniques and the order-theoretic approach to questions. 

We view the intelligent agents as the question asking machines and we want them to be able to design experiments in an automated fashion to achieve the given goal.  Here we illustrate how the joint entropy turns out to be the useful quantity when we want the intelligent agents to efficiently learn together.

The details are in paper, which will be put in arxiv soon.

On the side notes:

Google detected right away that I "moved" to canada. So they wanted to offer Google.ca

yahoo music does not seem to work!

Pandora does not work.

Interesting!

Time Calls, once again

Today's Nepal is what was supposed to be the "new nepal" as was envisioned by the people who took bullet(s) in their chest a few years ago.   Those who survived might have a better answer to whether they took the bullet(s) for this. This is econo-political issue, which I am not much educated about, as a physicist.  It turns out that there are a lot of matters which I am not well educated about. Life is a journey where we learn. Either by doing or imitating what others did in similar instances: by following examples.

I wanted to talk about an issue that has been pointed out in a recent presentation by a Journalist (Prem Baniya). Everyone knows how corrupt the elements of the society has been through during these volatile period. Definitely, it needs a huge clean-out operation. One can wonder whether it is possible or simply blame it to the "bad politics" over the cup of the tea.  However, this time, the fingers has been pointed to the professionals; Those who were used to be set as respected examples.

The claim is that the associated professors take the paid leave on benefits, go aboard. And, do not return.
It turns out that those who took the benefits enjoy about $20-25 thousands over the five year period. Coming overseas on the paid leave is some kind of commitment that they had when they left the country.

It is the time to set an example.  As always, it is a call for Physicists. They have been good at setting examples or inspiring  generations.
The time calls once again.
Can the group of Nepali Physicists, who enjoyed the benefits and who have now decided not to go back, pay back what they have been blamed for?

If no one dares to come clean, the examples will never be set the same way.


Ref:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcPVUGSwLMY
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nps_nepal/Pz9TOOp2o9E
• http://www.mysansar.com/archives/2011/06/id/19699 (Comment are much more interesting)

Miss-pronounced Names and Excuses

http://bit.ly/j5WYh7
While doing the Teaching Assistantship (TA) duties, I always advertised my name.

"My Name is this and you can Google me!" and I wrote them with big letters on the corner of the board. Corner because it will stay till the end of the class, just in case. And I always encouraged them to call me by name... instead of "excuse me!".

I also gave them semester specific Email address such as "Email+Fall2020@gmail.com". That way I could filter the Emails according to the semesters/courses.

I always try to relate the name of the students with their faces. Sometimes I mis-pronounce the names of the students. It is a weird situation, you can read it from their face, but I would tell them immediately that "If I mis-pronounced your name once, I allow you to mis-pronounce my name three times". They seemed happy with that deal.
Moreover, Knowing each other by name is good for future networking too. They  grow up fast and become your friend.

Selling  your name, even the first few letters of your name, is better than the situations when  students looking for you asks others with  your description such as the TA with the weird cap, sandle, or may be BIG nose etc. 

Have you ever mis-pronounced names? Any interesting stories that you faced with names?

Disasters and Safety Code Designs

Disasters, they are luck of the draw from a long tail distribution. When they come, they wipe it out.
All we can do is be prepared for such events. The best way to do it is by enforcing better design codes and reinforcing rules for people's safety.

The recent disaster in Japan has left human being, one more time, thrilled with the power of the nature. Since this is one of the best documented disasters, we all have seen videos of tsunami wiping out the whole village or town. Notably, however, one must appreciate the strength of the buildings. Tall buildings by the side of the water wave stood the stress.

Simply, when water wave meets the shoreline buildings ...
The force per second is

Since the density of water is 1000 kg/m^3, assuming that the velocity of the water is 100 m/s, we can see that every square meter of the building  subjected to a 1m thick water intake is acted by 100 tonnes of lateral force (every second). To help visualize, if the walls were the floors, and elephants were to stand; every square meter was virtually supporting at least 20 adult african elephants! This make me highly appreciate the rules made for building strength.

One of the reason several cameramen survived with the first person videography was because such strong buildings were there to stand the waves. They stood the earthquakes and then tsunami.

We can probably relate the safety design codes with structures in our capitol: Kathmandu. However, that makes me feel dizzy. Lets not do that this time.

Out heartfelt condolence goes to all the people who suffered from the natural disasters.

Ref:

Tsunamis are shallow water waves [http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/geol204/tsunami.htm]