Confusion Art

While the stock markets were collapsing, I was building relationship with eminent multimedia researchers at the Fourth Annual IBM Watson Workshop Emerging Leaders in Multimedia. Yes, somehow they felt that I am an “Emerging Leader in Multimedia”. One among the 12 students selected from world over (Although, the distribution is like 8 Chinese, 2 Indians, 1 Switz, 1 Greek) .

It has been an informative and entertaining experience. The first day was filled with student presentations, with me being the first one to present. Now, this might occur to you as a mere outcome of the pervasive randomness in the universe, but I have reasons to believe this was not the case. The problems I work on and the way I attack them is very similar to the approach adopted here at IBM. Researchers from the Multimedia Group, were present to attend my talk, and a couple of interesting points emerged out of the post-talk discussion. Primary of them being, how do we measure the confidence score of the classifiers (sorry for the jargon, but that would serve me as a reminder). There were some other interesting talks, but since this was a multimedia workshop, it brought people from sound (and video) analysis together. My ignorance in sound processing, took the worst of me, putting me into the “why am I here” mode. Anyways, post talk we went out for dinner. As usually with any multicultural dinner, the topics ranged from food to culture to weather to language, from India to America to China to Greece to Serbia. I enjoyed it. Finally the end of first day was in my istyle :). Our hotel was a good three miles away from the dinner spot, with most of the way back passing through isolated wooded areas, surrounding a beautiful lake. I decided to explore the village of Tarrytown (were we had our dinner), and walked back to our hotel. Saw two deer on the way. Tarrytown is also famous for being the place in “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Infact, the northern parts of this village renamed itself to “Sleepy Hollow” in 1996.

Today, the second day of the workshop, we were taken on the tour of the IBM’s Industry Solution Lab, were the newest IBM technologies were displayed for customers. However,  most of the technologies they showed did not seem to be the next generation technologies, probably because they were meant for customers and not for “Emerging Leaders in Multimedia”. In the afternoon we had a small group discussion on “Multimedia”, a part of which I missed, as I was supposed to meet one of the researchers one-on-one. I met Jelena Tesic, who walked me through her life at IBM, and the kind of vision related activities done here. Post lunch I met another two researchers, Nalini and John, who were working in biometrics. They had missed my presentation, so I gave them a quick tour of what I do. It was interesting to see John actually being able to understand every word that came out of my mouth. In short he understood what I was doing, which is rare, and his comments here and there gave me some ideas on how to improve upon the presentation. Again, for my benefit, I should have a slide that clearly shows that at the first level the semantic classes are learned based on their appearance model, where as at the second level, on their contextual attributes. He also told me that the notion of polysemy is also known as Perceptual Aliasing (a cool term to use in the papers).

In all, I think it was a fruitful endeavor.  I would be spending the rest of the weekend at Roti’s place with Bhatele, Ul and sardar giving company. Interesingly, Aman is also in New York, and this would be the second time I would be mixing school friends and IITK friends together. I just hate that :).

http://confusionart.com/photoblog/index.php?x=trips

http://confusionart.com/photoblog/alaska

Quick Facts

• Route: Denali National Park - Valdez, Alaska (Denali Hwy - Richardson Hwy)
• Distance: 350 miles (270 miles/430 kms on bicycle, 80 miles/130 kms hitchhiking),
• Duration: 7 days/6 nights
• Daily Average: 40 miles, 6-7 miles per hour, 6-7 hours of riding per day
• Road Condition: 135 miles gravel, rest paved road.
• Terrain: Hilly
• Elevation: start-2000ft, max-4000ft, end-sea level (max elevation gain at a stretch-1000ft)
• Lodging: 5 nights tent pitching, 1 night at a lodge.
• Food: Cooking along the way / packed snacks / at lodges.
• Bicycle: Cannondale Silk Path 24″

Overall Route

Detailed Route

• Day1: Denali National Park - Cantwell (A->B), 30 miles
• Day2: Cantwell - Gracious House (B->C), 52 miles
• Day3: Gracious House - Mc Lauren Lodge (C->D), 40 miles
• Day4: McLauren Lodge - Paxson (D->E), 42 miles
• Day5: 45 miles
  • Paxson - near Hogan -Hill (E->F), 20 miles
  • (Hitchhike)  Hogan Hill - Glennallen (F->G), 50 miles
  • Glennallen - Willow Creek (G->H), 25 miles
• Day6: 30 miles
  • Willow Creek - Pump Station 12 (H->I), 25 miles
  • (Hitchhike) Pump Station 12 - Ptarmigan (I->J), 30 miles
  • Ptarmigan - Worthington Glacier (J->K), 5 miles
• Day7: Worthington Glacier - Valdez (K->L), 35 miles
• Day8: (Ferry) Valdez - Whittier (L->M)

Currently I am at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, held at the Egan Convention Center in Anchorage. I have been here for about 4 days and every day has been a joyful experience. Being a researcher in vision, working on image classification problem, has trained my brain to apply classification in every domain of life, hence my experience at CVPR itself I am classifying into three categories - the experience of being in Alaska, the experience of the conference itself and the experience of meeting people at the conference.

Alaska is a land of big proportions - biggest state, highest peak, gigantic vegetable, largest fishes… What has made a real impact on my experience is the length of a day. Being at Anchorage during the summer solstice means that you practically live in daylight, day and night. The sun sets at around 11:55 pm, thats 5 minutes before midnight and rises at about 4:15 in the morning. Thats 20 hours of sunlight, and 4 hours of twilight. No no-light. It all started with the flight from Phoenix, taking off 15 minutes after sunset, and landing at Anchorage 30 minutes after sunset. The total flight time being six hours. Anchorage in itself is not extraordinarily unique a city, its beautiful, no doubt - surrounded by snow clad mountains on three sides and a river on the fourth. Its pleasant, no doubt - the temperatures ranging between 50-70 F (10-22C), mild sunlight throughout the day. Its tourist friendly, no doubt - scores of activities in and around from biking, hiking, fishing, water sports, food, drinks, shopping etc. Nevertheless it still lacks a cultural heartbeat. You an find Home Depot, JC Penny, Costco, Walmart, Subway and the likes of culture eroders anywhere you go. Hopefully my next week of travel in Alaska would be a more satisfying cultural experience.

Saw a coder group with the following profile.

Area of Expertise:

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Being one of the organizers of Holi at UCSD I went out to buy some Holi colors in San Diego. Alas, the ‘pukka’ water based colors was not available anywhere, and the ones that were available were Gulal which were selling at Rs 500/kg ($5.99 per pound). Heck thats even more expensive than buying Almonds. This got me thinking. A sign for the world that something is coming up. I wanted it to make it cheap, and what could be more cheaper than making them myself

I needed both dry ‘gulal’ type color and the wet ‘pukka’ colors. These were my constraints

1. They had to be cheap
2. They also _had_ to be non-toxic.
3. The ingredients should be commonly available in America.
4. This one was my self imposed constrain - they need to be ‘interesting’

A brief online search revealed that plagiarism is quite popular on the internet. All the pages had the _exact_ same content. This is the page that tops google search. These pages do have some ideas, but most of them do not satisfy Constrain-3. Like where do you get Delonix regia (Gulmohar) in America? Or where do you find “The Flame of the Forest (Butea monosperma), known as Tesu, Palash or Dhak” even in India?. They have some more suggestions to use various flowers - Buras (Rhododendron arboreum) for Red, Jacaranda for blue, “Amaltas (Cassia fistula), Marigold / Gainda (Tagetus erecta), Yellow Chrysanthemums, Black Babul” for yellow etc. But I am sure it will not satisfied the Constrain-1. I did not even try to see if they passed Constrain-3. However everything was not a waste and I did get some ideas from these pages.

Being in America is both a bane and a boon. Bane because many commonly available stuff in India is hard to find in America, or at the very least too expensive. I had some knowledge that Arrowroot is used to make the base for Gulal, but it was a tough time finding it. Also my dad told me (yes I had to involve my family too to get some ideas, and they were much better than the internet), to find talc(um) powder in bulk, but I was not able to. I am not saying that they are not available in America, only that they are not easily accessible. However, America gave me the benefit to trying to find something new altogether. Something that is not thought of when playing Holi in India. The rescue came from the various homemade recipes for Face Painting colors. These introduced me to non-toxic colors, and did satisfy all constrains.

So this is what I tried, along with the cost details, and interestingness quotient (IQ ). I got most of the things from North Park Produce(NPP), Henrys(HNY) and Micheals Art Store(MAS). (Conversion factor - 16oz = 1 pound = 450 gms)

1. Dry Yellow (IQ 4/5)

This is the easiest to make. Very fragrant, Good for skin, cheap. The idea is to use Turmeric Powder ($2.49/14oz/NPP) along with some talcum powder($3.49/22oz/Walmart) which makes it fragrant. These two are sufficient to get a nice ‘gulal’ type of color. To make it still more cheaper, one can add any finely ground flour. I used Corn Flour ($0.49/16oz/HNY). Final Cost ~($2/16oz). People loved the smell of Turmeric and Talcum Powder.

2. Tempera Paint (IQ 4/5)

Tempera paints are non-toxic paint used by artists. They are really cheap, available in lots of different colors, which is an additional point. I also found a ‘finger-paint’ for kids, that was supposed to be applied using fingers (that made me sure that they are not harmful to the skin). I got ample quantities of these paints from MAS. A 200ml bottle (thick paint) was $2.00

3. Food Colors (IQ 3/5)

There are two types of food colors. Dry and Wet. I’d highly recommend for the dry food colors, but they are more difficult to find than the wet ones. I got some dry food colors from NPP at $2.20 for a small box (2 oz). These work like magic. A pinch of food color is enough to color 5 liters of water. We had a running source of water which was continuously filling large trash cans. A small amount of food color was added to this to make is colorful.

I also used food colors to make a gooey paste (read below). My mom told me to try making some dry gulal based colors from them. I did not make them, but now with some experience with food colors I am sure that the process would work - Take a pinch of food colors, add a drop of water to it and mix it with corn floor/corn starch/arrowroot/gram floor etc.

4. Colorful Gooey Paste (IQ 5/5)

The idea is simple, take some flour and water to make a gooey paste. Add some food colors. Simple. Cost - really really cheap. You can play with the consistency of the paste. More viscose paste is good for directly smearing on the face. A slightly less viscose is great for pouring on the head. They start to harden as they dry, which makes the prey wonder what was it. Of course its easy to remove by making it wet again.

5. Vegetables (Wet) (IQ 2/5)

It sounds great, its epitome of non-toxic and edible, but they did not create a stir among the rowdy public. I tried few different vegetables. The best were grated beetroot and red cabbage. What did not work was spinach. Beetroot gives a deep red color, and red cabbage a dark violet. These can be used to make colored water. Colored water can be then used to color more water (instead of food color) or make a gooey paste (again, instead of using food color). All organic and edible colors.

6. Vegetables (Dry) - Did not use

I also tried to make some dry colors from vegetables. Finely grated beet root was baked in an oven for some time to remove the moisture. The hope was that on re-application of water they should yield some nice colors. They did, but the colors were too light to be interesting. So I dropped the idea.

7. Henna (IQ 2/5)

Similar to the Turmeric process, Green color can be made from mixing henna and talcum powder. I was not successful in making it green. The henna I had was not green enough to turn the whole concoction green. So I also added some spirulina powder to it. Note that spirulina is quite expensive. I just used it as I had some at my home. But on the whole this was not appreciated a lot. The idea of using Henna did excite people, but it failed to stand up to the excitement.

8. Spray Colors (IQ 1/5)

I found some Hair spray colors from Walmart ($2 for a small bottle). But these were bad. They smelled bad and did not look like they would be safe (although the spray was meant for application on hair). I suggest to stay away from these.

9. Eggs (IQ 5/5)

Eggs are always a nice option. Got it for $2.5o for 12 eggs. Just make sure you release them at the right time - when people start to get bored of the normal colors.

10. Tomato Ketchup (IQ 4/5)

It creates a sticky feeling. Good to end the Holi with. You can get ketchup pouches from any fast food joint for free.

The only thing that missing in all these is something that can substitute the toxic ‘pukka’ colors available in India. Food colors are close to that, but they are easy to wash off. Nevertheless, it was a great Holi celebration. Some pictures from Ameet’s Album.

Photos from the Climb

Three people having never met before, just respond to one random call on the internet and come together to climb this 14,179 foot (4322 mt) giant. Choosing the strenuous non-technical Clear Creek route, with an elevation gain of 7700 feet (2300 mt), a vertical distance that would take you to from New Delhi to Shimla, still leaving few hundred meters to spare, it was indeed a tough climb.

India-Germany-USA-Taiwan-Malaysia-India

India-Malaysia-Taiwan-USA-Germany-India

India-Germany-USA

That completes my around the world journey twice, once clockwise and once counter-clockwise :). I think not many people would have had this opportunity so I take a moment to feel blessed :P.

Having done this, an interesting observation also pops up in my mind. Consider a situation where someone is destined to live for just 10 days, where one day is defined as the time interval between two sunrises. Assuming that he is a kind of a person who loves life and wants to live more, is it possible that he can extend the number of hours of his life? In normal circumstances, he would live for 240 hours, that is a 24 hour normal day times ten. But he can extend his life by atleast another 240 hours, by spending all his life on a Boeing 747 flying westwards. Flying westwards slows the time, for example if I start in India at 6′o clock in the morning, I would reach San Diego at 6′o clock in the evening, that 12 hours according to sun, but on earth I have spend 24 hours. How about that?

Its been almost two years now. Two years away from the land of self realization, onto the   land of opportunities. Two years away from the land of fakirs and elephants, onto the land of materialism. Two years of constant critical evaluation of the two worlds. Constant comparison of the difference between the two giants. One where everything sprouts from order and system, other were chaos is all that works. Almost 21 years of living in “chaos”, and then two years of understanding the “systematic” ideology.  System, so efficient, that it gives life new possibilities. System, so rigid, that it sucks out all life from life. Chaos, so random, that life finds itself. Chaos, so frustrating, that it renders life powerless.

For the first time I step back and see chaos from a distance. And now it amazes me. And now it attracts me all the more. For the first time I consciously step in. And now it troubles me. And now I think of determinism.