Showing posts with label COMPLEXITY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COMPLEXITY. Show all posts

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Magic and Reality....

It always has been the case that i put in my best efforts on things i love doing. Remarkably over the past eight months i have enjoyed each and every moment that i have spent at my workplace, having the privilege to interact with best of the brains that i have met. Though it's a different aspect that i never wanted be in this city as part of my assignment, mumbai still beckons me and hope i will be there one day.

Dreams are part of one's folklore, the struggles to achieve them and then aiming a tad higher. Perhaps I can never be satisfied in a state, transition is mandatory as in the case of automata theory :)... I dont have any hint regarding the decision with i have to take by April mid...but hell i am not worried about it at this juncture of life..because i have realised that i have never achieved my goals by thinking about them. I had the best time in my life when i stopped thinking about the outcomes of my decisions.

So whats fascinating about my work life, well i can go back to my home after work and read about child hood idols the poincare's, riemann's and abel's. Mathematics to me has been the essence of my survival over the most stormy passages that i have experienced. It took my concentration away from the troubles and problems that i had to face growing up. My parents are still worried about this wastage of my precious time, when i should be socializing and going out with my friends ...(i hardly have any in delhi)...In the hindsight this unnecessary reading about the great works have helped me to be more rational, and solve some of the toughest lemmas, conjectures and hypothesis in computer science. Theoretical CS is 99% maths to me. The magic of turning machines, P Space and PCP have always fascinated me, right from the time i had laid my hands on them.

As for the reality..... you can imagine that being lost in this world can have ramifications in other aspects of your life, perhaps none greater than expressing yourselves in front of others, socializing with them. Though i have never considered them to be that important but i have started to realize that its' essential for one to move out of his comfort zone and look at at the other side with open eyes. I have serious problems in speaking publicly in front of a bunch of people. I have tried to look into this aspect over the past few months but i always have a feeling that certain things are not necessary for your audience ...and a certain level of intelligence is expected...but perhaps the best speakers are the one that can take everyone along with them. It's very easy to speak in front of people whom you are comfortable with, but what counts is the first impression you leave on people that you don't know... It has always been easy for me to type pages and pages of what i wanted to express...but never had the confidence to express them in front of others... some thing or the other always ended my disastrous journey. Perhaps i am still overawed by the occasion.......

I guess being satisfied after reading and understanding roughly 200 pages of perelman's proof of poincare's conjecture it not that healthy..:)
rt

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

complexity of anonymity

i was working on a problem to reduce the complexity of anonymising structured data, to ensure the privacy of individuals and achieved a factor of O(n) an improvement over the previous best solution which promised a complexity of O(nlogn)....(for all the non-geeks ... i somehow promised to solve this problem in a shorter time...:))......

So you must all be wondering , why the hell i am boring you to death by telling this....well coz all of us at some stage in our life have try to suppress various "key attributes" of ours ... so that we can hide our past. We dont want others to let know ...about the events which took place in our lives...may be we all are scared ..of what ???..well we should ask ourselves , if hiding your problems and difficulties can solve them , then i don't think there would be any in this world , sadly it's not the case......

The mask which we wear keeps on changing ... in front of our parents,relatives and our friends...we always try to project a cool image of ours... the "james bond" type ... but when this mask is revealed ... we stand in front of them ... naked and not able to look straight into their eyes....so we ignore them ....but for how long ???...... we all wish that we are able to suppress some critical information of ours so that others don't know about us .... we wish that "anonymizing" oneself is as easy as the solution that i somehow have been able to arrive in theory of mining...

But life's no dataset or a corpora that than be tailored and clustered to our wishes, we can't bulit training sets that function according to our commands. Training sets normally put data in data into two "portions" left or right ... but the opinions of people and their thinking can't be binary .... its between o and 1 .... and not 0 and 1.... no matter how long one try to cover one self with the veil .... this veil will reval our true face..... so it's better we dont try all this crap in our life's ...coz emerging out it can take ages... we may try to present a happy face... but deep inside we know how this can slowly eat our happiness .... so it's better to be your true to one self.....

So anonmyzing our key attributes can suppress some of our characteristics... but we forget ...that combination of our other attributes .... the so called "quasi identifiers"...in the language of database can reveal the facts we have tried to hide .....it's like a cat and dog race... i may have promised to solve the theoretical problem in O(n) time.... but some day , others will reduce the complexity further .... bringing out ways where this anonymity can be "unmasked"... and then proposing another way to anonymizing ourselves... but in the end we all are running a race , where we know that we will eventually loose..... so live as u want ... to live ..... GTH everyone......

PS: i may have used some jargons ...which are used in computer science theory ... but i hope everyone gets the point....