Before the start of Frontiers in Optics – travel and lab visits

Before the conference started, I meant to post one more discussion about phase-space optics describing and simulating the notion of instantaneous frequency. But I will have to wait till my laptop agrees to the plan. I use LaTeX2WP (WP=WordPress) python script by Luca Trevisan for posting mathematical content, and somehow python refuses to get going on my laptop.  Apart from that minuscule disappointment, my time so far in the US has been fantastic!

I have been in the US since October 6 and done good deal of traveling. It is slightly unusual to travel before the conference but I need to return home just after the conference. I am recounting some of the exciting sights and university visits that I did. Hope someone traveling after the conference finds travel information useful.

Let’s go in reverse chronological order. I have  just returned half an hour earlier from a trip to lake Tahoe (right now it is 1.12 am of Oct 11). My friend working in the bay area drove me to this beautiful lake. You may already know that it is on the border of California and Nevada and is one of the most beautiful sights in the US. I learned that the emerald bay of the lake Tahoe is the second most photographed sight. It is a great place to enjoy water-scooter (which is called jetski here), motor boat, and para-sailing among other things. We reached there late in afternoon and wind had picked up (it is end of the summer season). So we were advised against para-sailing and jetski, but had great fun driving a motor-boat for an hour. If you plan to visit Tahoe, check with the people at rental business about the weather and what is possible. It is around 3.5 hours drive from San Jose/San Francisco and if you reach there before lunch, there are better chances of your being able to get more hands-on water experience than driving around a motor-boat.

Before Tahoe, I had the staple diet of tourists in San Francisco : Alcatraz prison, Golden gate bridge, Fisherman’s wharf, Segway tour, Exploratorium and Tactile dome. The first three sites I mentioned need no further mention.

I experienced the `personal transporter’ segway for the first time and I must say it is fantastic. The machine is designed to maintain balance – therefore if you lean forward, it goes forward to regain balance. This balance feedback loop is implemented very well and the machine seems to perceive driver’s intentions.

Tactile dome and the exploratorium were great fun too. Tactile dome is one of the exhibits of the exploratorium. It is a pitch-dark dome which you navigate using only your sense of touch. You pay 17 bucks to enter it (this fee includes entrance to the exploratorium). You have an hour to enter and exit this labyrinth as many times as you like. I found that if you are not scared of dark and just following your senses, you can enter and exit in 15 minutes flat. However, it is amazing that every time you go through it, you discover different structures inside it. I made two trips through the dome  and on my second trip, I discovered a place inside to seat and relax!

I had good brainstorming sessions at Stanford and UCSF. I visited Marc Levoy and Zhengyun Zhang at Stanford to take a peek at their light-field microscope. I found that they have another interesting project going on. It is dubbed Camera 2.0 and it is about designing an open-source camera with programmable hardware and software. Marc is presenting a talk about light-field microscope on Wednesday morning at FiO. We had a great discussion on phase-space representation of imaging systems (topic of my talk on Monday) and registration of gradient information measured through various methods (topic of my talk on Wednesday). Lab visits are great because they can add a lot of new perspective to your repertoire.

At UCSF, I was visiting Nico Stuurman and Arthur Edelstein at Ron Vale’s lab. My key reason for visiting them is their open-source acquisition software micro-manager. I have found this software useful for being able to construct useful automation for custom imaging systems and have contributed to a hardware driver for Olympus scopes. They are an enthusiastic bunch of people willing to make a positive impact in the microscopy world, where proprietary and closed acquisition software have failed to meet the needs of microscopy tinkerers. I shall be working with them to add support for the quantitative phase imaging method (AIDPC) – which we have developed.

An important note if you are visiting Stanford and want to catch some beautiful sights of the campus: make sure you DO NOT carry any heavy luggage (even 75% of the size of the typical cabin bag). Stanford has an arbitrary rule which prohibits even medium sized bags at places worth visiting (e.g. Hoover tower, Cantor arts center). That is not bad – what is bad is that they do not have any place for you to store it and even worse, they do not believe in verifying that you are not carrying anything dangerous.

That’s all for now. Tomorrow (sorry, today) morning is going to be an exciting day as the FiO kicks off . I plan to meet Milton Chang (a successful serial entrepreneur & venture capitalist and the keynote speaker at the OSA student chapter leadership meeting) to capture some of his views about entrepreneurship – especially in the area of open-source projects. Then there will be the ‘Hot in Optics’ summary from 4-6 pm at Fairmont. It’s going to be a busy day, so Good night.

Trip to Sentosa.

There is a small island of Singapore called Sentosa that Singapore government has ruined by building artificial theme parks. The most attractive feature of this place is its clean beach. The reason for our going there was Graduate Student Services annual Sentosa party. Here is the pic that we took while departing.

(from left to right: Suresh, Ajay, Prashant and me)

We reached there quite late in evening, so missed going around the place to see the natural beauty. We tried to explore as much as we could, and these pics are the result of that. By the way, Sentosa is the southern most point of the continental Asia and we have pics that will keep reminding us of that:

The theme of the party was to be dressed or painted in colours and design of one’s national flag. Guess what happened, Indians were the most enthusiatic lot about doing rang-de-basanti. See this:

(If you couldn’t recognize, from top to bottom: I, Suresh and Prashant)

(Can you read “Sentosa” in stone, it is cool!)

The full face painting on my and Prashant’s face was an excellent art-work by Suresh.

Well, having not much to do, we just roamed around and chilled out. Here are some pics:

We were promised free flow of drinks and food, but weren’t told that the queue would be so long that you would consider yourself lucky if you got them even once. Somehow, we had something to eat. The seafood didn’t do us good, I guess you can know that from this pic. (what do you say Suresh?

After roaming around a bit and taking some snaps it was time to go home. Well the guy on the extreme right is Laxmi Nayaran. Cool friend and great cook. He feeds all of his friends with a care of their mom.

courtesy to friends back home, we could have some decent food after reaching home.

Some of the readers may not be so impressed by so many pics but so few words. But I promise- it is going to be better. Check back next week.

Trip to Little India and tips on Shopping

As any Indian looking forward to coming to Singapore would know, we have a small region on this island that looks like India (Tamilnadu to be more precise.) We (7 Gillman Residents) had a great time at Little India on Satureday (12 Aug, 2006). If you get bored from normal calm of Singapore’s other regions, visit Little India and treat your senses to motley collection of sights, sounds, saliva-inducers and shops. Little India is a good place for shopping – especially if you are looking forward to Indian food, Indian spices and exchanging money. The right place to shop for all things Indian and exchange money is Mustafa Centre (close to Farrer Park MRT). There are few stores around Gillman Heights (home to new single graduate students of NUS). Mustafa is not the right place to buy furniture or utensils, especially if you are looking for reasonably priced ones that international students usually want. The right place for that is IKEA store. You should visit Fairprice and Cold Storage if you want to buy veggies and groceries. Take help of someone around to spot these stores.

There are plenty of places of worship in Little India, so they can be of help when you feel homesick. Here are some of the pics that I had taken during the trip.

Flight to Singapore

I have taken a new step in my life: of joining PhD program in bioengineering at Graduate Programme in Bioengineering (GPBE) at NUS (National University of Singapore). I flew via Singapore Airlines to Singapore. I think all airlines have something to learn from them. Even in economy class they had provided LCD screens for every passenger. That screen was multi-purpose – It displayed map of the region in which plane was flying, one could watch any movie from among 14, One could listen to many radio stations or get all information about Singapore and many other countries. Changi Airport is appropriately rated the best airport in the world. One can spend a whole day going around and appreciating the hi-tech but useful amenities at Airport. We had to check-in to our university provided accomodation, so we could not go around and have a look. Btw, here are some pics that I took while in flight.

Please look for my next post on useful tips for new comers to Singapore (especially those coming as students.)

From Bombay (Mumbai if u prefer so)

It has been exactly 20 days since I posted last blog, and 12 days since I joined IIT Bombay. Things moved really fast and luckily there were people to help me keep pace with events. Chirag and the gang of Hostel-12 B-wing landed a helping hand and made my naturalization at IITB appear very ‘natural’ to me. Hostel life at IITB is indeed different from other institutes… though not as much as I had thought before coming here.

At the same time, my project guide Prof. Preeti Rao invested a great deal of time and effort in getting me started with research. The work is indeed challenging and *REAL*.

Just to share, currently I am looking at a very low bit rate speech coding technique. The codec (coder-decoder system) can compress human speech to 1.5 kbps while maintaining good intelligibility. And this is really LOW. There is an effort in taking it even down may be by a factor of two. All these techniques rely on complex but realistic signal processing methods. It’s good to see such things implemented. Though, sometimes it is my gut feeling slightly simpler *techniques* (underlying ideas are robust- they don’t change with techniques) can be employed to achieve same results. Seems perfect material for research.

And there are so many (other) interesting things going on around me, there is definitely a lot for me to learn and explore.