September 2008 Archives

I can't deny the fact that I enrolled at IST mainly because of my advisor, Dr. Prasenjit Mitra. I wasn't considering applying to Penn State University until I heard about the IST program from Dr. Prasenjit Mitra and consequently, had a discussion regarding the opportunities in information processing domain. Along came certain turn of events and the new chapter in my life ensued. Since then, I have come to learn more about interesting and inspiring aspects of his personality. Here are some excerpts:

Biography (taken from the personal web-page):

Dr. Prasenjit Mitra received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in 2004. Prior to that, he had received a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin in December,1994. His Bachelor of Technology (with Honours) degree in Computer Science and Engineering was from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in May, 1993.

From 1995, he worked for five years at Oracle Corporation in Redwood Shores, CA as a senior member of the technical staff at the Server Technologies division developing database software.  He also worked part-time as a senior engineer at Narus, and DBWizards.

As most Bengali personals in academics, Dr. Mitra is very active in cultural activities and Bengali community. He and his wife, Mrs. Rini Mitra, also like to celebrate numerous auspicious occasions with his students by inviting them to dinner. Last visit to Dr. Mitra's home still reminds me of a very affable welcome and delicious Indian food.

Apart from participation in the cultural activities that he enjoys, he is also very active in sports. He is a part of an informal cricket club (which includes me as well) that meets every Sunday to have practices and matches. His enthusiastic participation in sports activities is one thing that came as a surprise to me.

With this little non-academic introduction of my advisor to the rest of the IST community, I rest my blogging endeavors to put more academic introduction in the next entry.   

The different perspectives to look at information and their confluence towards making the consumption of information in various forms more "effective" is what characterizes I-Schools and help distinguish this movement from different classical departments of thoughts such as computer science, social science, library science etc. I began with the interest in technological/computational perspective towards information and grew up in this diverse, but with the same conceptual motive, facility of practices to appreciate their contribution. My initial curiosity was driven by basically two related factors: 1) my background in computer science 2) the fact that the technological advancements made this information age to happen and bestow its opportunities upon us.      

The journey of the boy named Saurabh Kataria, began in a very small town called Jind, 80 miles north of New Delhi, India, 24 years ago when a son was born in a middle class family. Instead of talking about the path taken for the journey by him, I would rather like to describe the tangible additions by the milieu of the voyage. The partially understood structure in the physical world intrigued him to be introduced to engineering formally. The boy graduated after 4 years of introduction to the basic components of science related to computers (I am afraid to put "computer science" as it is widely argued that it's not actually science) and worked for a software service provider. He did very well on the how part of the services but was very confused about the why part. Witnessing the obvious meaninglessness of the whole service providing industry to the people at the lower rungs of the ladder, the boy decided to quit in order to pursue more meaningful activities in life. As I happen to be a very intimate friend of him, the thoughtful nature of the boy helped him to go down the path of befuddlement deep enough to be of any good to the society any more, and then he decided to pursue the academics and be a student once again.

I started my profession as a student when I joined Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University situated at the bank of river Ganga in the eastern parts of India. I really did't know at the time what I wanted to do apart from a basic introduction to engineering. So I asked around  and came to decide in favor of the opportune future promised by different fields in computer engineering.
 
After graduating, I joined software industry which was a startup company in its second stage. Soon enough the more intellectual side of the problems posed by information processing techniques started surfacing in my mind and I decided to study further for a better understanding of the "information".

During two years of pondering, the automated processing of textual data widely available through the ECT (electronic communication technologies) has started seeming a challenging but fruit-bearing field to me. Machine learning algorithms and statistical techniques have already started looking fruitful for automated analysis of the textual data for various tasks. This interface of technology and information is most intriguing aspect of my graduate studies at this point.
    

"Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,
Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani" -- Sri-madbhagvat-gita

Above mentioned is the most insightful prose from the sacred texts named "Sri-madbhagvat-gita" which translates to-- "You have a right to perform your prescribed action,but you are not entitled to the fruits of your action.
Never consider yourself the cause of the results your activities,and never be associated to not doing your duty."

The philosophy exhibited by the above prose is the motivation in its most pristine form that I constantly seek within me. The prose may seem mystical and even misleading at first glance but when put together in the context provides meaning to actions. The reader might be wondering why I am getting spiritual all of a sudden. Well.... when I look at the question, I can't help but delve deep ("over analyze" as put by someone) into the philosophical aspect of it!

Now getting back to the physical world, making information more useful to the society through computational efforts is what has been keeping me intellectually alive in United States thus far. I will be talking more on the motivational part of my academic work in the next section......