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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...