Monday, February 25, 2008

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!!!




Sunday, February 24, 2008

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....