this and that

The annual Progress Prize for the Netflix contest has been announced. The prize was won by Team BellKor, two researchers from AT&T Research who “blend[ed] 107 individual results” to come up with their 8.5% improvement over Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm (Thanks to Dan and Sujan dai for the pointers).

This contest was part of my senior project at college, where we looked at a number of algorithms to try to predict movie ratings using Netflix’s data (and use them to generate movie recommendations), and also generate recommendation of courses for students at Carleton, using historical transcript data.

(On the phone) “…Yeah, mom. This is the big deal, mom. Comps. Pass or fail. Thousands of dollars down the drain…”

I spent last summer (summer 2006) in New York working as a programmer (Java, some scripting, a cool templating language called Velocity, HTML, CSS) for a big investment bank. It was a very good experience: the work was interesting, I love New York, I met some very interesting people, and the monies were pretty decent. So much so that I am very likely to keep doing it, at least in the short run, after I graduate.

I am now a senior® !!! And I am actually doing comps®. For those unfamiliar with Carleton parlance, “comps” is short for “comprehensive exercise.” It is a big project undertaken by seniors in all majors: what one might call a “senior thesis.” The actual details vary from major to major. In my major Computer Science, comps takes the form of a group project in which we work on an interesting Computer Science problem. More information on Computer Science comps can be found here. I am part of the Recommender System For Choosing Courses group, though our project has somewhat changed direction: more on that later, hopefully.

I am also taking Artificial Intelligence and Elementary Number Theory, and I am doing an independent study called Human-Computer Interaction. They are all keeping me pretty busy, but I have also been making some time for table tennis, Mortar board and Yahoo! crosswords.

I usually prefer cold weather to hot weather; my usual argument is that while there is a limit to how much you can take off, there is no limit to how much you can put on (well, maybe there is a practical limit, but most of the time, it’s beyond what is sufficient). Besides, I sweat really easily.

Nevertheless, I doubt if there was anyone who didn’t welcome the warm clear weather here in Northfield during the past week. Here are some pictures I have taken around the campus; they are also at the gallery, where I will post more as I take them:

Tree and top of Skinner Chapel

Tai-chi in the sun: People in Prof. Qiquang Zhao’s tai-chi class

Close-up of a bench that didn’t fare so well through the winter

A plane and its contrails against the clear Midwestern sky. If you look at the actual size, you will see how surreal the plane looks.

Rosie with Canoe House’s canoes

New flowers growing among dead foliage in the Canoe House lawn

Very nice.

Last Thursday (May 5), bestselling writer Broughton Coburn came to Carleton to give a very popular picture-accompanied lecture on his book Aama in America: A Pilgrimage of the Heart. The book is about how Mr. Coburn brought an 84-year-old Gurung woman (”Aama”) to America in 1992 as what she called a “pilgrimage”—a woman that he had met and befriended as a Peace Corps volunteer in the hills of Nepal in the 1970s. In the lecture, he showed pictures from various parts of this journey, that he called an “odyssey,” and recounted events reflecting “Aama”’s view of America.

I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture, though it had a different theme from what I had expected it to have. I had thought the lecture would be about the woman who came to America, but it was more about America. Mr. Coburn’s main point was how “Aama” saw spiritual significance in almost everything in America—from Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park to a Mickey Mouse figure at Disneyland—things that American seem to take for granted. Various anecdotes and the beautiful pictures from both Nepal and America kept the mostly American audience amused and entertained.

Although it is always heart-warming for me to see foreigners passionately involved with Nepal—in this Nepali Times article, he says “[t]his is where I belong, Nepal is where I feel most at home”—I did feel a little uneasy at the whole presentation. It had a significant commercial flavor to it, as if in the many years in lecture circuit that Mr. Coburn has spent with this lecture, it had lost some of the personal significance it had for him. Not once did the lecturer, for example, mention the old woman’s name: she was the easy, typical “Aama” or “mother.” (Her name was Vishu Maya Gurung, as I found out later online, and she passed away some time after she went back to Nepal). And the tone was the superficial myth-like tone that well-meaning Western discourses on Nepal often end up using. In a way, such a picture is useful in kindling interest in Nepal and in helping the ailing tourism industry, but probably isn’t entirely honest.

All in all though, I was enthralled to see the hills of Nepal and familiar scenes from Kathmandu on a big screen at Carleton, and I am thankful to Mr. Coburn for doing all he has done for Nepal. And, I couldn’t help weeping a little inside when an audio piece of Mrs. Gurung singing a bhajan was played: it took me back home in one fell swoop.

More links:

• Broughton Coburn’s official website
• Other books by Broughton Coburn at Amazon.com, including Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman, his first book on Aama
• Broughton Coburn as a speaker, and reviews of his lectures

midterm blues

This past week was the 5th week of Carleton’s 10-week spring term, infamous as the “midterm” time when exams and papers reign supreme. For me, it actually started during 4th week, and was made worse by a toothache. Here’s a sampling of what I had to do and suffer:

• 21 April: Presentation for History of Mathematics (MATH216) on the Bernoullis. My part of the presentation was specifically on Jacob Bernoulli’s first exposition of the Bernoulli Numbers and his work on harmonic series, while Lisseth talked about Johann Bernoulli’s Brachistochrone problem, and I think it went rather well.
• 21 April: Paper due for Philosophy of Language (PHIL220) on the relation of various theories of meaning and a naturalist view of the evolution of language. It was kind of short (1-2 pages double-spaced), but I enjoyed writing it and I think I did well.
• 23 April: Toothache starts. I woke up this morning with pain in my lower jaw, evidently because of the keen-to-erupt third molars, otherwise known as wisdom teeth or buddhi bangara in Nepali. I spent the next four or five days on Ibuprofen, which sadly had the additional effect of putting me to sleep in the most inconvenient of places (viz class).
• 25 April: In-class Exam I for Math Structures (MATH236). It wasn’t too bad, and although I haven’t got it back yet, I think I did okay.
• 28 April: Implementation of Earley parser for Natural Language Processing (CS357) due at 11:59 pm. I submitted it at 11:40 pm. Enough said. Actually, no. I was using Perl and having not used Perl before made it kind of harder, but I have to admit that certain aspects of Perl made the process easier. I mean, in what other language could one write things like $filename = $ARGV[0] or die; and chomp; ?

At the end of it all, this is what I looked like:

Amrit during 5th week

But then when last Friday (April 29) finally came and I got to shave etc., this is what I looked like:

TGIF !

site updates

Finally, some updates. I now have an album on Gridley gallery. There aren’t many pictures there yet, but they willl be coming soon. There is now also a slightly unattractive links page where you are bound to find something useless. You can get to both places by clicking on the links at the top of this page. Also forthcoming are pages for my courses at Carleton and some software.

other

On other news, I learnt last week that I have been accepted to work next year as a writing tutor for the Academic Support Center at Carleton. I will be a writing tutor for four hours a week and for the remaining six hours of my work-study, I will be an ACA at ITS.

And yes, I am now the top amrit tuladhar on Google’s search for “amrit tuladhar”.

As of 8th April 2005, I am officially a CS major. The Buddha, however, said that change is the only unchanging thing, so who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Earlier this afternoon, I participated in a fundraiser spelling bee held by the Carleton Equestrian team held with its member Emily Stagg, a former national spelling bee contestant. By the end of only two rounds (there were seven contestants in total), only Emily and I remained, when I misspelled bergschrund (I had no idea either…). Even though it was short and I got to spell only two words correctly, it was a lot of fun; and the Equestrian team got to keep all the money raised from the contestants (a whopping $35).

After months of hard work, Carleton sophomores George Kachergis, Jamie Olson, AJ Reiter and freshman Adam Steege of the Carleton Robotics Club are traveling today to Connecticut to participate in the 12th Annual International Fire Fighting Robot Contest with their trusty robot, tentatively called Warren Peace for various internal reasons. I wish them all the best.