September 2008 Archives

My mentor

By Neela Sawant on September 26, 2008 11:58 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
One of the major attractions that IST building holds is a great collection of photographs on the second floor, often mistaken as professional wall papers downloaded from the web. But then, next to these photos is a short bio and a picture of the photographer himself. The photographer is James Wang, a researcher and professor at IST and also my adviser. James is an excellent photographer who happens to be doing fundamental research in the aesthetics and analysis of photographs. Check out some of his amazing collections clicked over the last ten years. Its truly great that his research is driven by one of his greatest passions.

Apart from photography, his other passions include traveling. He has traveled to more than 25 countries from Tunisia to Finland to India and so many others. He loves listening to classical music, collecting stamps and coins and also playing with high performance super computers. He currently guides the image analysis research at the Intelligent Information Systems lab  with his wife Jia Li who is a professor of Statistics at the Pennsylvania state university. Its really good fun interacting with him because of all the diversity.

IST

By Neela Sawant on September 19, 2008 9:46 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is Penn state's I-school and now a leading member of the I-school caucus. IST was established in 1999 as a conscious move to bring together the three founding aspects of a successful information system: the people, the technology and the information itself.

IST offers two bachelors degree (B.S.) programs - information sciences and technology and security and risk analysis. At graduate level, there are 5 major tracks which are more or less like guidelines. These tracks are computational informatics, AI and cognitive science, human-computer interaction, social and enterprise informatics and security informatics. Check out the centers and laboratories for more information.

IST is multi-disciplinary in nature. It provides a great platform for students as well as faculties from diverse backgrounds to interact. IST members come from many different cultures and countries like US, China, India, Korea, Thailand, just to name a few. There are seventeen formally listed research areas including AI and informatics, community informatics, crisis management and emergency response, globalization, health and bio informatics, information policy, social network analysis, etc. Faculty members specialize in many areas such as computer science, engineering, psychology, chemistry, statistics. Its absolutely wonderful to talk with them, to learn about something from broader and new angles than just one narrow aspect. I joined IST not knowing the meaning of an I-school. I joined here to be able to work in a specific research group, as I am sure many of my friends have. But the more I interact with different faculty and students, the more convinced I become of stumbling upon something rather amazing. Coming from a focused background of computer science, understanding problems from these other angles really has become "thinking out of the box".

build_reflect02.jpgHere is a picture of the IST building (taken from IST site) that became operational in 2004. The architecture of this 199000 square foot building is inspired by the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. IST building currently hosts the IST as well as the Computer Science department. In the words of the former IST Dean James B. Thomas, this building is "an intellectual bridge linking education and research to the new needs of society". How appropriate!

I-Schools

By Neela Sawant on September 12, 2008 10:08 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
The 21st century will always be hailed as the era of information explosion. A significant portion of our every day life is spent surfing the web, reading news, articles, blogs as well as writing mails, blog posts and playing games. Online communities are being formed to cater to specific interests. Academic institutions as well as libraries are providing online material. Even the most common people are speedily creating and sharing information. It has become important like never before, to understand the technology enabled role of information in the lives of people.

A wonderful emergent movement to systematically study the interaction between information, people and technology has been initiated in the form of I-schools or the schools of Information. The I-school caucus consists of 21 I-schools across US and Europe with multi-disciplinary programs focusing on diverse fields like information sciences, computer science, human computer interaction, library sciences, policy, economics, etc. I-schools bring together people from different fields and encourage the interaction for building tomorrow's information systems. Please follow this wikipedia entry for more information and links on i-schools.

I feel that we can no longer escape the need for the confluence of information, people and technology. To create useful information we need to understand the users of information.  To create useful systems we need to understand  modeling of information with technology. I am really glad that I am a part of this movement as a student of IST, an i-school dedicated to this cause.



I, a Montague! (alt: Coming Out of the Closet ;))

By Neela Sawant on September 5, 2008 4:50 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
It was not until a very recent class of IST 501 (Integration of IST), that I found my niche. We were assigned a paper titled "The Montagues and the Capulets" that talks about the conflicting interests of computer scientists and social scientists resulting in complications with information systems development. Computers scientists are the "Montagues" or the theorists and social scientists are the "Capulets"  or the pragmatists. As I read this paper, it seemed to me that the authors of this paper were truly anti-computer scientists (or rather anti-all-the-theorists). Let me quote a few points from this paper along with my immediate reactions marked in color:

  • "In the last four decades the Montagues have developed a startling and confusing number of languages" (evil laugh .. Muhahahahaha)
  • "Whereas the Montagues see knowledge representation as an end in itself, the Capulets see it as a means to an end, and that end is Science". (How could you! Sure we like to create generic and well-behaved theories! We need to worry about `n' disciplines, and `n' can be really large! We have to make something that works for all kinds and even provide plug-ins for new requirements. And this is the thanks that we get in return? Are we expected to hard code domain-specific inputs in our model and spoon-feed? Oh, I am heart-broken :(( )
  • "The operating timescale of the Capulets is immediate unlike the Motagues" (Now I am just plain angry!)

I have never read a paper that made my blood boil, but this one did a perfect job at that, at least initially. But the paper does raise some valid points regarding the necessity for better interaction between the pragmatists and the theorists. And not to forget, it also talks about a number of ways a Montague can frustrate a Capulet :D (and vice a versa).  I highly recommend this paper to everyone in the concerned fields. Truly an awesome read!

This paper got me thinking about what I am truly passionate about. I used to think it would be music or reading. But now I know what I love to do the most! I love to solve puzzles and problems. I like devising efficient algorithms and well-behaved theories that can be generically applied, and I would just love to be able to do some ground-breaking theoretical research. I know now that I am ... I am... a GEEK! I can't identify more with Cecilia from the PhDComics. Is it sad? Is it good? I don't know! 

Geeks Anonymous

The I in Academ"I"cs

By Neela Sawant on September 5, 2008 3:32 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
I believe that a person remains a student all his/her life. Each person is unique. Each person has to offer something new, something that we can learn. What I am today is largely because of the people who touched my life, most of them being my teachers from previous academic institutions.

I completed my schooling from Paranjape Vidyalaya, a small school in Mumbai, that still does not have a web site. It was  this school that  transformed a brat like me into a sensitive person. It was here that I participated in my first play, first dance, first elocution competition, first science exhibition and also the first nation-wide scholarship exam. This school aroused in me an interest in mathematics and sciences as well as the love for social and cultural activities. I then entered the Sardar Patel Institute of Technology for a Bachelors degree in Information Technology. I wrote my first "Hello World" program there :)

But perhaps what I am today is largely because of the Computer Science department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India. I received a Master of Technology degree from IIT Bombay. At IIT, I got to interact with brilliant students and faculty members. I learned a lot not only academically, but also otherwise. I learned how to deal with time and stress management issues. Learned the confidence to try out anything out of the ordinary. IIT does make students ready to take on the world. It also gave me a vision and an idea of what I want to do with my life.

As part of my Masters thesis at IIT, I worked on automatically retrieving similar images based on the actual content of the images. (Check out this Google Video to understand the process of image retrieval.) The problem of retrieval was pretty exciting because I could relate it to the next generation image search mechanism for giants like Google, Yahoo, etc. and also because it is a boon for the Internet users. This is what also brings me to the IST at Penn State. My adviser, James Wang, is a great researcher in the field of multimedia analysis. With his guidance I want to be able to understand the syntactic and semantic nature of images and videos. Fingers crossed :)

The I in Academics continues to meet new teachers and learn from them. Amen!

Introduction

By Neela Sawant on September 3, 2008 5:27 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks
Hello! I am Neela, a first year Ph.D. student in the department of Information Sciences and Technology of the Pennsylvania State University. Prior to joining Penn State, I worked as a research engineer in the Yahoo! Labs, India for two years. I  also have a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India.

neela.jpgI was born and brought up in Mumbai, the mega city in India. My father is a chartered accountant who has now taken up full-time software development, specializing in financial softwares. My mom's a home-maker, and in my opinion one of the true philanthropists. I have a younger sister, Uma, who has just completed her M. Tech. in Computer Science from the same institute as mine and now joined the Yahoo! labs as a research engineer :D. Many people are jokingly predicting that she will be an addition to the Penn State's graduate force next year :)

Living in a city like Mumbai that is always bustling with art and science exhibitions, cultural activities and other social events, it is quite natural to develop a flavor for cultural activities. I was a very active member of the school and college drama group, became the editor of the school magazine for a year, participated in science exhibitions and even tried my hand at some painting competitions. Now although I am not so involved with these activities, I do occasionally paint and sing. But my favorite recreation has always been reading novels - both fiction and non-fiction. Just give me a book and a soda, and I will be good to go for a few hours :). I also like theater and am looking forward to attending plays and broadway shows.

Here is a list of things that I would like to do in near future:
  1. Meet people from different cultures, perhaps learn their cuisines and/or their languages.
  2. Learn to play guitar, tennis and chess.
  3. Fight the fear of what scares me (read: linear algebra, statistics and public speaking).
  4. Travel the world (or at least attend many many conferences for which I can get funding)

Ideally I would like to do what Matt is doing!!

Blogs are truly a wonderful platform to know people, their culture, to keep in touch with friends and to share one's thoughts with the entire world. I intend to keep a record of the major events and minor happenings in my life with this blog. Lets see what the next four years bring to me :)

Cheers!

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