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Tonight is different. It could have been like any other night, but tonight, he has chosen to escape. As he walks, a cold breeze slashes through the sweat trickling down his forehead. The night is chilly, yet he is almost fuming. His heart hammers against his ribs — its frantic rhythm could convince anyone he has just finished a sprint across th...

It is surprising that there is no single place1 that lists all of GitHub’s CodeQL queries in a nice, searchable format. So here it is as an Airtable so you can search, filter, sort, or do anything else you like with it. The script to generate this list is available as a Gist2. I hope this is useful for anyone who is looking for a specific query...

Imagine a country where only the rich have access to good healthcare. Or where only the top 1% of the population can obtain a quality education. Or where only the powerful have nutritious food and clean water. This used to be a reality in most of the world, and unfortunately, continues to be a reality for a significant part of the population. To...

While this post was being penned, Bengaluru1 had relentless rains. The period from May to June here is usually associated with summer, and now it seems that we are truly out of sync. But you see, unpredictability has its own essence — and my suitcases2 have been a pinnacle in promoting it. Before I move on to what exactly I mean, I think we mus...

I wasn’t following the AI hype before I joined college1, and while I had heard of GitHub Copilot2, I didn’t think much of it. I had been programming for several years by then, and couldn’t imagine how AI could help me write code. I was not the only one skeptical; in particular, most educators still saw AI as another tool for plagiarism and were ...

Note: Starting from this post, I will no longer be sharing any updates on Twitter or LinkedIn. All updates, like this one, will be posted here on this blog. My work at UIUC, AlphaTrans: A Neuro-Symbolic Compositional Approach for Repository-Level Code Translation and Validation, has been accepted to appear at the FSE 2025 conference in the Rese...

This blog is different from others in that it is in the format of a conversation. I really did have this conversation — with ChatGPT1. I have only lightly edited its responses and have left my own responses nearly verbatim. I think this is an interesting way to present my thoughts and I might try more of this in the future2. Host (ChatGPT): In ...

Today I successfully1 complete 21 years of my presence. Over these many years, I have developed a huge portfolio of short-lived hobbies and interests2 — and have repeatedly found myself most drawn to building things. The thing about things is that they are concrete — so no matter how good they seem in one’s imagination, their touch and feel alwa...

I am sure you have seen Venn diagrams before. Venn diagrams are amazing — they can represent complex relationships between sets in a rather intuitive way. And it does not matter what these sets represent. If you are working with sets, you will often find Venn diagrams to be a natural way to present your data. But it so happens that this is gener...

Academic integrity to university students1 is what the constitutional pledge is to elected politicians. We acknowledge it as a pious commitment to our identity in our institutions, but this acknowledgment is often riddled with dilemmas and contradictions. Transgressions are either justified by circumstances or dismissed as trivial, and while we ...

Not long ago, I realized I have been holding onto a tiny time machine. I realized this when I once accidentally turned it on! I do not have the user manual for this time machine, but from several instances of such accidental time travel, I now have some idea of how it works. This time machine is quite primitive — in the way that it does not all...

Two years ago on this day, I reported at the campus of the Indian Institute of Science — to begin my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computing. With this, I have completed somewhat half of my IISc time1. There’s a lot to say about these two years, including the things I have learnt and the people I have met. But I will save my time2 by s...

Deadlines have some sort of magic to them. A project can continue to drag on for months, but as soon as we decide to make a deadline1, usually one of two things happen. The entire universe conspires to make sure we meet the deadline with everything we want to do. We conspire to make sure we meet the deadline with everything we can (and sho...

I am always very excited about meeting students from other universities, especially undergrad students. And whenever I do meet students from other universities, I am most interested in listening about how things work at their school. The undergrad program at IISc is very new. If you talk about the B.Tech. program in particular, that is as new a...

I have lately been working with GraalVM to use Polyglot for embedding Python code in Java. In doing so I sometimes require a translation of Java objects to Python objects and vice versa, while passing them between the two languages. My research advisor recently pointed out that my translation will fall apart if he passed a self-referential objec...

Python is a very flexible language, and provides a lot of “magic” for developers to do nearly anything they want with the language and also the objects in the language. One interesting feature is the ability to override the so-called “dunder” methods (methods with double underscores on either side) on classes in order to provide custom behaviour...

I have been hearing from many experienced researchers that research is not like coursework and is by its very nature open-ended. There is no fixed path, and even your supervisor may not have concrete answers. In fact most likely, nobody in the entire world may have the answers to your questions. If you’re doing “cutting-edge” research, then this...

While preparing for my visit to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - my first time travelling to the United States - I remembered the first image of America that I had in my head when I was around four years old. The image was of a vast hilly landscape with lush greenery and neat concrete roads. These roads would be lined with severa...

CVXOPT is a popular Python library for convex optimization, which forms the basis of Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However converting mathematical expressions into the format required by CVXOPT can be non-trivial even for a binary-class SVM. Recently, I had to implement a multiclass SVM using CVXOPT for my Machine Learning course at the Indian...

I had been staring into the mirror and I didn’t seem quite right. I supposed I need to move nearer or maybe just turn on the tubelight. I realised the mirror is stained and so I better wipe it clean. Those spots however seemed ingrained and so I replaced it with one that was pristine. But now the mirror appeared warped as the reflection...