Those wonderful days.......

Oh man why did I do this? ...... this hiatus in updating the blogosphere with the adventures of a lifetime could cost me so many memories. The months ensuing my previous post have been the most wonderful of my life, in every sense. The very thought of loosing reminiscences of this past gaiety, is keeping me awake at night(quarter to 5 right now!).

One and a half months have passed since returning from Germany ..... yeah that's true, I was out of India, for the first time in my life, and now hankering to go back. The reason for an abstinence in filling these pages are mystifying to me, because I really wanted to. I remember telling myself everyday that today is the day I start blogging again, but alas I never did.

Over the next few days I will try to recollect and picturize each and every moment during those, the most astonishing days my life.

Arijit Das on "The Net"

Finally after months of excuses and delays, I uploaded my web-page last week. From now on Arijit Das has a new official home on "The Net".... http://home.iitk.ac.in/~arijitd Even though it is still being modified on a daily basis, hopefully by the end of the month it would be good enough to be shown to the world. In the meanwhile the relative obscurity of this blog will save from any embarrassment of any sort whatsoever.

The month gone by.......

March materialized to be one of the most fruitful months, in terms of extra-curricular adventures that I enrolled myself into. First of all, I got this internship opportunity under Prof Friedrich Leisch from The R project for Statistical Computing at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich where the project is related to the use of Finite Mixture Modeling in marketing research to cluster consumers into market segments, for which I am extremely excited about.

Further I got another call to work under Prof Bimal Roy, the current dean of academic affairs at ISI Kolkata to work on Cryptography. These days I am also a reporter for Bulla Scientifique, a monthly science magazine supposed to start from next semester, covering the various research activities at our campus.....and supposed to write an article about the recently concluded Open House 08, so basically I have enough on my plate to gobble...for the next few months atleast.

In the meanwhile the end semester examinations are nearing and it seems I need to mask my love affair with Munich for a couple of weeks, as that is something, which is devouring most of my conscious thoughts.....

Some concurrent events.....

In concurrence to the vulgar race for survival and success, there were a few fun events in the offing over the passed month. Initially Techkriti'08 provided an opportunity to interact and listen to people like Dr Kevin Warwick, the first Human Cyborg and Dr Peter Grunberg, Nobel Prize winner in Physics 2007. The game super-pong was also pretty enjoyable during the event.

During the same weekend a lecture series on Cryptography started. It lasted over 20 hours spread over 8 days, covering basics of cryptologic protocols, most popular cryptographic schemes and some cryptanalytic methods. For the first 10 hours Professor P Sarkar, discussed stream ciphers, block ciphers, hash functions and the very definition of security relevant in the digital age. The second half of the series taken by Professor R Barua, was quite mathematical in nature covering introductory number theory, some algorithms in primality testing and factoring for large numbers. On the final day, that is today, the concept of elliptic curves were introduced and some of its uses were suggested in cryptographic schemes.

Thus ended a pretty absorbing week where I learned so much more applicable mathematics and got inspired by a some of the living greats........hopefully something good will come out of this!!!

The days that have passed.......

Thanks to my indolent nature i have again missed filling this space. In any case, the last few months have been rather busy for me.......initially for end semester exams and then busy wasting time in front of the TV during the winter break. Further a weird bacteria named Staphylococcus epidermis had made my index finger (right hand) its friendly abode for over a month, which meant I couldn't really participate in many fun activities which my friends were up to.

The new semester started with new hope and aspirations, on the last day of 2007. After messing up the end-sems I wanted to stay on track from beginning, but alas like all new year resolutions this lasted for not more than a week. In the meanwhile our Regression Analysis professor had announced an internship opportunity for those with experience in MatLab. I eagerly had raised my hand, and enthusiastically sent all my previous project work etc to her though she was rather reluctant at my application as I had completed messed up in her class in the last semester. I knew this was time for damage control!!

Over the next month I eagerly attended all her classes, showed my true inquisitive nature and did the data analysis assignment pretty well. During one such meetings I further got to know that the internship opportunity was moreover in University of Vienna, Austria!!! and this really turned me on...

The mid term results proved to be pretty decent and finally my professor was ready to recommend me...hurray!!! I tried to make my CV as attractive as possible, obviously without diluting any facts and submitted it to the respective site.

This was a fortnight back and hoping to receive a reply any time this week.....fingers crossed :-).......In my next blog I would talk more about other concurrently occurring events....