IST 590 Colloquium - Fall 2008

A role model is "a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others." (Merriam-Webster's Dictionary). During class, I was led to believe that I need to describe a person who was famous for his work and who does work that interests me. An obvious choice in this regard is Nikola Tesla, the visionary electrical and mechanical engineer. Yet, I in this article will introduce an exemplary scientific visionary and former President of India whose name is Dr. Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam).

Dr. Kalam or the "Missile man of India" is a well recognized and respected individual in the Indian scientific community for his immense contribution to the Indian Missile and Space programs. An obvious question that can be posed here is why do I consider his contributions so important? As a defense brat I have always had an interest in the Indian Defense Program as one not only having strategic importance and implications but with the capability to advance Indian sciences on the whole. I will outline over the next few paragraphs why I feel Dr. Kalam is one whom I consider a role model.

India became an independent country in 1947 after around 300 years of British colonial rule. An underdeveloped country at the time of independence, it was ironic that the one of the first countries to deploy advanced rocketry in warfare was left in its defense capabilities in shambles. Dr. Kalam has played an important role in organizing and developing the fledgling Indian weapons program into a leading space program with goals of placing a Indian gaganaut (derived from gagana meaning 'the heavens' or 'vast sky above us') by 2015. Most Indian's would describe this as one of Dr. Kalam's most significant contributions to India as well as his role in developing numerous missiles for the Indian Integrated Guided Missile Development Program.

However, I believe Dr. Kalam's greatest contributions to India have come as his role as an engineering visionary rather than his direct contributions to the Indian Space Program. Materials developed for missile and rocket nose cones have been deployed for civilian use such as for prosthetics. India space satellites have been indigenously developed and are used for a vast variety of civilian applications such as weather prediction, communications and disaster management. Furthermore, as the Indian Scientific Advisor to the Indian government, Dr. Kalam has played a key role in outline a strategic plan to develop India into a superpower by providing focus on Indian scientific development.  His views on economic development, prosperity and technology grids are playing an important role in shaping Indian infrastructure development. More importantly, he is India's most loved president and one of the few leaders who has actively addressed the new generation to play a role in helping India advance.

I just noticed currently that my blog wasn't publishing whatever I wrote causing me a whole lot of headache. I finally did manage to figure out the issue being related to invalid permissions at the file system, i.e., the Blog system was unable to write to my DFS filesystem. I seem to have changed some filesystem permissions when trying out the a new php website on scripts.psu.edu. This blog has basically now doesn't let me mess around in my web filespace. However, the solution is simple: Use the SSH client and log into the DFS servers and try and modify the file permissions, which somehow doesn't work. The simplest solution that I found that works (but essentially the most complicated one) was to reset the ACL permissions for

• blog/ directory: If the error was encountered after the blog directory was written onto your DFS.
• www/ directory: Failsafe, resets all file system permissions to default.

Instructions on this can be found here.

In this post, I will highlight three academic conferences that I would like to publish/ present my work at.

1. ACM JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries): "The intended community for this conference includes those interested in such aspects of digital libraries as infrastructure; institutions; metadata; content; services; digital preservation; system design; implementation; interface design; human-computer interaction; evaluation of performance; evaluation of usability; collection development; intellectual property; privacy; electronic publishing; document genres; multimedia; social, institutional, and policy issues; user communities; and associated theoretical topics." - ACM JCDL website.  I am specifically interested in this conference since it keeps me updated on recent breakthroughs, research directions and current work that is being targeted by the digital library community.
   
2. IEEE TKDE (Transactions in Knowledge and Data Engineering): This IEEE journal targets research which potentially targets an audience whose interests are acquistion, management and storage of knowledge. More specifically the areas of impact include research in the fields of data mining, databases, knowledge engineering etc.This journal is a tier one archival journal which relates very specifically to my research interests in schema matching and value mapping problems.
   
3. WWW (World Wide Web Conference) conference: The WWW conference series is managed by the International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2). It aims to provide an excellent community to discuss the evolution of the Web, the standardization of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. This conference aligns with my interests in the Semantic Web and the next generation web. I have also found a number of interesting published articles here relating to wikipedia and its use for semantic translation, natural language processing and geographic entity similarity.
   

1. IEEE :
   
2. ACM :
   
3. Center for Policy Research, India:
   
4. Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research :

I will take this oppurtunity to introduce a student from the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory. Saurabh Kataria is a third year student in IST and works on image processing and topic modeling. While Saurabh is interested in designing and adapting topic modelling algorithms such as LDA, LSA, pLSI, n-topic grams etc, I am more interested in how these topic modeling algorithms can be applied in information systems to aid user information seeking needs. Saurabh is also part of the chemxseer project and works on extracting data from journal images such as plots. He has published his research in AAAI and JCDL as well as attended these conferences.

On a more personal side, Saurabh is my roomate and friend. His hometown is Jind, India which is pretty close to where I come from. He has a bachelor's degree from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India. He is a great guy and interested in sports such as cricket where he is classified as an all-rounder (a person who bowls and bats).

My advisor has had an interesting path up till this point in his career. He received his undergraduate degree (Bachelor's in Technology) in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He then received his Master's in Sciences in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. From 1995 he worked at the Oracle Corporation in California. He worked primarily in databases which possibly explains his interest in database theory and software. He then decided that the industry position doesn't really suit his goals and decided to pursue a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. His advisor was Prof. Gio Wiederhold and he received his PhD in 2004. Interestingly Dr. James Z. Wang at IST is also from the same research group.

Prasenjit's research interests include database systems, digital libraries, data mining, semantic web, information retreival and artificifial intelligence. His current active research projects are chemxseer (chemistry digital library), NEVAC and GeoCAM. He has recently gravitated towards data mining problems in the Geographic Information Systems domain on which I collaborate with him. I have also worked with him on the ChemXSeer project. His current research collaborators include Dr. Giles, Dr. Wang, Dr. Lee (all Penn State IST), Dr. MacEachren and Dr. Klippel (Penn State Geography) and Dr. Mueller and Dr. Garrison (Penn State Chemistry). Most of his recent publications involve digital libraries (EDBT, AAAI, CIKM) and image search (WWW).

He has taught the following courses over the past few years:

1. IST 220: Networking and Telecommunication
2. IST 461: Database Management and Administration
   
3. IST 512: Information Processing Architecture and Technology
   

When I arrived at Penn State five years back I believed myself to be one smart bloke though I quickly realized my shortcomings at being a genius. The first professor with whom I interacted here at happy valley was Dr. Prasenjit Mitra who has had a great hand in personally shaping my research and intellectual processes.

Prasenjit had arrived a semester earlier armed with a fresh PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and I became his first student in some respect. Over the past years I have got to know him quite well. Prasenjit is a native of the state of West Bengal, India. West Bengal is the only state in India which worships the sport of soccer so like all Bengalis he is an avid soccer fan and tries his best to play the game. He is a fan of Mohun Bagan F. C.He is one of the few Indian people I know who is a sports junkie. He also follows the sport of professional cricket and organizes a cricket club on weekends.

He is married and has one kid whom I have seen grow up. (I believe she was born 3 months before I first met him). Once every semester, he invites students from his research lab over for dinner. I think most of us look forward to those evenings as his wife is a super-duper cook. He is also very enthusiastic about Indian music which one can observe easily from his awesome music collection. Indian Oldies are one of his favorite  music genres and he loves music by the composer R. D. Burman.

My favorite food is the humble Indian dish: Chaat. Thinking of chaat, itself reminds me of home and the venerable yogurt mix beloved across all of India. Chaat is primarily composed of potato pieces, crispy fried dough, gram bean, spices, onions, corainder (to name a few) and last but not least yogurt. It tastes spicy and savory, sweet and sour and is the mixture is just plain old delicious. While, I am supposed to write about the flavor of IST, you might inquire how chaat enters the equation. The flavor of IST, I believe, is similar to chaat. There is no one objective way to solving problems of the Information Age, and IST attempts to do so by introducing the mixture of the IST triangle (Thanks to Louise's blog for this link). Rather than solve problems by only using either a technological solution, a information-centric solution or a people sided solution why not use all three at the same time to come up with a better one. As an example, digital libraries are attempting to provide a solution to the address the infomation needs for academics. A computer science view would be to provide better ranking solutions and large databases. The IST approach would introduce subtler questions such as:

1. How do I rank the articles subjectively such that rankings are dependent on the user?
2. How can we visualize this information such that the user is able to satisfy his information need better?

I have realized for a while (ever since my Bachelor's in Electronics and Communication Engineering), that research was a logical extension to my goals. At that time, my interest was "Processor Micro architecture". However, on starting my Master's in Electrical Engineering at Penn State, I was unhappy to find that no research group on this area existed. While, this period was one of unhappiness as I was unable to work on what I had thought would be an awesome career in designing super fast microprocessors, I was fortunate to come in contact with Dr. Mitra. My interactions with him made me realize that other research areas such as "Semantic Web", "Digital Libraries" and "Search Engines" were fields that I could contribute to. While, it can be argued that I could do the same research in Computer Science, I have over the course of my past research realized that computer scientists pay little attention to the true user when designing systems. Part of this learning can be attributed to my being present within the IST building during my Master's years, surrounded by I-School converts, interactions with whom effectively constituted towards my baptism to the IST school of thought. To pursue a PhD in IST at Penn State was thus the next logical evolution step.

I would like to point out that my stay at Penn State has been a great experience and it was during this stay that I experienced the shift of Web1.0 to Web 2.0. Further, from a system perspective, I have seen hard drive densities grow from Gigabytes to Terabytes and beyond, i.e., I have understood the shift towards the information age. It is this information explosion paradigm that we, at I-schools, are attempting to conquer. The problem is beyond the scope of a reductionist approach where we divide a problem into a simpler problem (most commonly by removing the subjective that causes chaos in the traditional computer science system). Information, Technology and People are cumulatively a single continuum that must be included together when solving the problem, a goal common among I-schools. This requires a interdisciplinary approach integrating the lessons learned across various departments and schools. For example, as an electrical engineer (an applied scientist believing in a positivist world), I never understood the implications of technology. However, the inclusion of people, for example, into the mix helped me understand technology better. My recent foray into policy design for ICT infrastructure for developing countries such as India, helped me clearly visualize the implications technology has on social change, gender inequality and the economy and required an inclusion of social science into the critical thought process. In my view, I-schools will help create the next generation of scholars ready to tackle new problems that will be identified as we transition to a completely network-centric world.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." Albert Einstein.

I think this statement probably sums up why I do what I do.