Thanks to the Government of India for approaching IIITD to be part of a four member delegation from India to attend the “First meeting of the Joint Committee on Science and Technology Peru-India” in Lima. It was a 3 day meeting from April 7 – 9, 2014. This was my first trip to Peru and first experience in being part of such a delegation from the Government of India, so, I had a lot of excitement, curiosity and anxiety about the trip. With all my travel hassles (ask me, if you are interested in knowing more about it!), I reached Lima on 6th late evening. The Indian Embassy in Lima…

It is close to 5 years (in July 2014) since I moved to IIIT Delhi; many of you would have seen me refer to IIITD as a startup, which is gaining momentum as we move forward. The thing I want to highlight through this blog is the new dimension to this gaining momentum – student start-up culture at IIITD. You have seen me blog about “The Art of The Start” by Guy Kawasaki, talk about issues / challenges / fun related to start-ups. I will also co-organize Innovate Delhi Entrepreneurship Academy in collaboration with Stanford Business School in June 2014. My growing interest in technology-based start-ups is quite evident from all of…

The next book I picked up for reading during the month of Dec was Malcom Gladwell’s “David & Goliath”. I have already read Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. People who are close to me know that I refer to Gladwell’s writing in relevant places. B: “He [David’s king Saul] doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well — in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength.” B: “The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.” B: “The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Sae famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence’s troops were all legs.”…

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…

BlackBerry officially released BBM for Android and iOS on 22nd Oct, 2013. And within 24 hours, the net download of the BBM app had hit 10m. People are crazily sharing there BBM PINs all over the Internet, most popular places being Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Several hashtags related to BBM have been trending on Twitter at various locations and this is what caught our eye – people sharing their PINs recklessly, seeking for friends, bragging about getting a PIN finally before the others or after a long wait! Do you think there is no harm in posting your PIN publicly? Then go through several posts on BlackBerry forums about users…

Well, it’s been 2 months since I returned from the United States of America but it all still looks fresh as I sit down to put it in words! 🙂 It was about a year back that I learnt my plausible visit to the University at Buffalo (UB), NY and the news left me all afluttered! As much as I was excited for my first international travel to this beautiful country, my parents were equally nervous as I am known to be an over-pampered and not-so-independent girl (yea, majority including my parents think so :(). The most important thing for my travel was to get a passport! (I didn’t have…