Dreaming again 3: Friends For Sale

We had an unexpected break this Thursday. The lecture got cancelled (quite an anomaly!). Medical problem, I guess. It’s one hell of a problem in this side of the world, more so, if you are an outsider. I myself took time adjusting to the local weather, had to be medicated a couple of times. This takes me back a couple of years, when I snubbed the CMO, IITG. God! What a prig I was.

“…how to compute the probability…given the…we try to uncover the hidden part of the model…”

The nodding goes on as usual. Lata is sitting right in front of me or as they say I just came and sat right on the back of her. I tell you, I am losing charm in her overtime; her being married hasn’t helped much either. I think it’s finally over.

The Friends For Sale (FFS) application on Facebook is really making me crazy. When I meet someone new, I often find myself guessing how much he is worth.

“…we try to use optimality criterion to solve this problem as best as possible…”

Here comes champu and jj. Pucchu is not here yet. Today champu and I went to Prof. Ketaki. She is the instructor for our humanities course. It was about our presentation that is due.

“…model parameter is called the training sequence…”

Oops! Sir tried to peak into my writing.

I had one of the most satisfying talks with her. She sensed a bit of political sense in me from my mid-sem answer scripts. She talked about how not to lose sense of what we believe in and how we feel about it. “The whole world will try and take it away from you…but it’s so divine that it must be protected”. Her words are still ringing in my ears.

“…let N be the size of the code book. So we get the seq of vectors out of M diff. indexes”

Why is the attendance so low today? I can hardly count 15.

Where was I? Yes, champu. He is the sort of guy who keeps the group going. “Never let the fun die out”. Champu tried to peek into my diary. I gave him the finger.

“…to segment each of the word training sequence into stages and study the prob. Of the spectral vectors.”

God! I feel sleepy. It’s been 2 days now, I guess.

JJ and I finished working on a term paper recently. It dealt with DNA cryptography, such a novel idea. We have worked really hard on it. Hope it materializes.

It’s the purple suit and a brown hair clip today. Can’t I leave it already?

“…once the w-HMM’s recognition of an uttered unknown word is done using a solution to problem.. each word is modeled based upon the given test observation sequence…”

The FFS is engulfing like hell. I was just napping about it. God it’s great. I heard a remark about me sitting in this particular seat. I got the hint.

Champu sneezed, kido yawned while ld enjoyed the usual nap. FFS once again crossed my thoughts. Don’t call me crazy. If you think you don’t get addicted that easily, try it once.

Dreaming again 2: Profs, admin and acads

It’s raining outside, mildly though. We are all here, attending the lecture. It’s just the rain but I often wonder if even a natural calamity would give you a day off here at IIT! Classes need to be at the prescheduled time come what may.

Here, most of the administrative work is handled by the faculty. And going by the general feeling, these academicians often find it too hot to handle. Their performance speaks for it! But when it comes to acads, they are right up there. Lectures take place on time. Exams are never postponed. Labs and presentations progress smoothly. This leads to the obvious question: Why? Why the performance of dean acads is bound to be far better than that of dean establishment (say)? Wait a sec, why am I treading this path anyway?

What’s the chit-chat between praji and jj? I guess it’s about some Sodhi girl. Don’t they have something else to talk about? Let me fool around a bit. Ha! I just gathered Kumar Sir’s attention by sneezing. Sitting beside me they both were caught in the act.

“…If you have 100’s of occurrences of the same word…its unlikely unless you put the same data…the next need for using vector quantization properly…”

What a disturbance. Kumar Sir just glared at me while I was trying hard not to chuckle. As he dictates a lemma let me gather my thoughts. By the way what the hell is a Markov model?

Let me put a few words about praji. As the name suggests he is a sardar. I tell you this coz there is a legend related to it. In the very first year, a quadruplet became very famous. “praji, gd, nappy and dinky. Theirs were an eat-drink-sleep together kind of a gang, nicknamed “Sardar Chaukdi”. The fun lie in the fact that dinky’s full name is rahul shetty. I just teased praji about that Sodhi girl. He is frowning quiet bad.

JJ requires a special mention for he has surprised us all once again. He flew back today morning. All this after he got us convinced that he won’t be back anytime before two weeks. Sometimes I think he likes to fool around with people and surprise them just for the fun of it.

“…obeying the standard stochastic constraints where probability…called an observable Markov model…”

Gullu just cracked one on me. It’s becoming increasingly hard to control the laughter.

That left me wondering as to why the row sum, in a stochastic matrix, should always be equal to one.