Getting a spam call in the middle of the day is not a new problem most of us face in our day-to-day life. One often wonders on the name of the caller and to why that person is calling you. Further, getting to know “who” is calling you is good (Truecaller), but the important question still remains. “Why” the other person is calling? Might be, getting to know the name of the caller is insufficient to allow the receiver of the call to make the decision whether to attend to the call or not. Now, how do we know why the other person is calling? Well, one good medium to…

After finishing the last book “The Art of The Start” by Guy Kawasaki I wanted to read more, so went and picked “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande Thanks to Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla for recommending this book in their recommendations. It was a completely different experience reading this book, this is probably the first book that I ever read written by a Medical Surgeon. Below are some notes / takeaways from the book. B: “necessary fallibility” — Some things that we want to do and simply beyond our capacityB: But sometime over the last several decades — and it is only over the last several decades — science has filled in…

It all began with an interview with two PhD students and I in PK’s office in April’2013. I was being interviewed for the position of a summer intern at Precog, a research group at my institute IIITD. I had no clue of what I was going to do the coming summer being a part of the group. Being  the youngest member, I often had to be guided.  But the best part about working under PK is that you are never told what to do, you are just shown ways which makes your work so much more exciting and challenging. Having read all the papers published by the PhDs working at…

Thanks to Mr. Hemant Kumar, Visiting Faculty at IIITD for suggesting me to read the book “The Art of The Start” by Guy Kawasaki. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, cover-to-cover. You can blame it on my recent excitement and curiosity about startups (in various forms, research labs / enterprises / academic institutes). Even though the book is all about startups in the enterprise sense, I took away a lot of points from the academic / non-enterprise point of view too. While reading the book, I was scribbling some thoughts and making notes from the book, just putting them here for my own purpose. This may help you (if you…

Recently, we got to get our hands dirty on some URL data from bitly which comprised of suspected URLs that have been clicked by Internet users in October. We thank bitly and particularly Brian David Eoff (senior data scientist) and Mark Josephson (CEO) for sharing this data with us. We analysed about 269,973 URLs marked “suspicious” by bitly to understand how these links are posted and clicked. Figure 1 shows a graph of some of the most common domains for which multiple suspicious URLs were shortened using bitly. Domains like coupons4more.net , 123direct.info , lucinda34drejka.com and apprillss.info had more that 1,000 URLs each which were marked suspicious by bitly. bitly uses real-time spam detection…