Comfortably Geek

Say you’re a Masters student studying distributed systems, and you just completed 3 major project checkpoints, and wrapped up some work with a research project. So what do you do during the Easter break that immediately follows the deadlines? You go on vacation of course!

So I just got back from a wonderful four day holiday split across the dreamy fields of Schwangau and the Bavarian captial, Munich. Schwangau is a must see for anyone who wants to swim in a sea of breathtaking views and experience the European countryside. It is the home to the famous Neuschwanstein castle, which was the main inspiration for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The village of Schwangau itself lies under the protective watch of the Alps, running through the border between Germany and Austria. I stayed with a good friend of mine, and had a wonderful Bavarian Easter with her family, sharing stories of our cultures and lifestyles. On Easter Sunday itself, we went hiking up the Alps, and I’m still surprised that I made it alive at the end of a 3 hour ordeal. After years of not having any physical exercise of any form, this was indeed rather taxing, but I guess all the muscle strain was definitely worth the experience, the views, and most importantly, the satisfaction that followed taking a hard path up a 1.708km high mountain for your first ever hike.

The latter half of the holiday involved a visit to old city of Munich. Culturally rich and with a Bavarian feel all over, it was a fun experience to walk through the city streets. One thing I found particularly funny was that the Maximilianeum building, which houses the Bavarian parliament, had no gates nor security guards on the outside, which is in absolute contrast to equivalent buildings back home in India, which can be aptly labelled mini fortresses. The last day of the visit was reserved for a trip around the Munich marketplace and of course, the one and only Allianz Arena, which I finally got the opportunity to visit as a long time Bayern Munich fan.

As is always the case with my travels, cuisine formed an important component of the visit too. Thanks to Eva’s help, I was able to compile a list of dishes/drinks I had: Apfelstrudel, Neuernberger Rostbratwuerste mit sauerkraut, Kaesspatzen, Leberkaes mit Kartoffelsalat und Spiegelei, Weisswuerst mit Suessem senf, Schweinsbraten mit Kartoffelknoedel, Schweinshaxen, Brezeln, Radler, Weissbier and Weizen. I particularly loved the German variety as far as beers are concerned. Radler from an altitude of 1.708km tastes heavenly by the way.

I would have loved to stay a little longer, but as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Now back in Lisbon, I’m finding it a little hard to shake off the vacation mood and get back to my projects, but I think I’ll pull that off sooner or later.

Last week’s Barcelona trip was the perfect weekend getaway from a hectic masters programme. After a not-so-enjoyable stint with changing hostels on Thursday, I met my colleagues from UPC, Barcelona for a nice round of drinks and tapas. I left for the Melia Barcelona early next day for WNS3 2011, and I was obviously excited about meeting the rest of the ns-3 developers for the first time. It’s been more than a year of my involvement with the project, and so far it’s been an amazing experience to work with the really awesome people that comprise of the ns-3 community. So meeting the faces behind the names from the mailing list was something I was looking forward to, and I did. A lot of hand shakes and introductions later, we got started with the programme. My talk went pretty well too.

After the talks, we  had a pre-meeting for next day’s ns-3 developers meeting in order to decide the agenda, the priorities, and the action items we planned to walk away with (note that beer is part of the schedule ). The day ended with an amazing dinner at a rather classy restaurant in the city.

The developers meeting took place at the CTTC demo center on Saturday and lasted around 7 hours in total including lunch, during which we discussed and planned ahead as far as solving a number of issues was concerned. We also came to a consensus on organising an NS-3 Summer of Code programme, for which I’ll be handling the reigns. All in all, it was an awesome experience to meet these guys, from whom I’ve been learning a lot over the past year.

So in short, life is good.

Political speeches, advertisements, newspaper articles, sales people; they’re all the same. Each of these scenarios involve one or more people trying to convince you about something. Politicians, who’re often good orators, have the ability to make anything seem like rainbows and sunshine with a cherry on top, and lead the emotions of their listeners (remember Obama?). The most hollow of advertisements lead to drones of poorly informed people queuing up in groves to spend money on a product that may not be of much use. Newspapers do a great job of directing the thoughts of those who rely on them excessively for being aware. This highlights a rather disturbing aspect of our society.

Why aren’t we skeptical about the information we’re being fed?

Interestingly enough, the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the form of publications also revolves around a similar scenario. To get a paper published, authors must manage to convince a set of reviewers that the authors’ work takes a step forward in expanding the horizon of human knowledge. But in the world of peer-review, a reviewer tries his very best to reject the work being presented with a thorough dissection of each and every sentence in the paper. From technical quality, to originality, to mere presentation, every little detail often matters when trying to publish a paper in a reasonably good conference or journal. When a reviewer feels that he/she couldn’t unearth enough flaws in the paper, the paper gets a green.

Why does this difference exist? Why do we let politicians hypnotise us with their words and lure us into a judgement we really shouldn’t make? One important factor I can attribute this to is education itself, but strangely enough, we are often am more skeptical about the papers we review than the news articles we read. Luckily, for the easily deceived, Web 2.0 has been the greatest blessing of them all. Every time we read a blog post or a news article online, all we need to do is scroll down to see what comments the article has received. This lets us see how different people perceive the same piece of writing, giving us different perspectives of the same content. Twitter and other social networks allow us to hear of voices from far and wide, further helping in this direction. Read the same articles from different news sources. Having a sense of different viewpoints puts us in the rather powerful position of being able to formulate an opinion. An opinion is something we hold dear to ourselves, it allows us to make a stand. It protects us from being puppets in the drama of deception. It protects us from being mislead. It allows us to convince ourselves of something, rather than letting someone else do that for us. This simple yet powerful ability to think, is what makes us stand apart from other species on the planet.

Don’t relegate yourself to an existence that merely accepts what you’re told. A big flaw in the educational system (at least in India), is where students are taught something in class, they nod their heads to what they’re told, and they write exactly that in an examination to get ‘marks’. Any deviance from what was explained in the lecture, even if it is a brilliant flash of creativity, is considered ‘incorrect’. This, rather preposterous incentive, is what makes students dumber. Students are thus discouraged from thinking and lead away from having an opinion and questioning the facts. Will this ever change? I don’t know.

So please; Think. Ponder. Question. Challenge. Not convinced? Reject.

Holding a glass of champagne in my hand, I watched as the night sky above me resonated with fireworks at the Palace Square in Lisbon, and with that, I had just stepped into 2011. I’m surprised at how much I’ve been able to do over the year and on how much of an improvement it is over 2009. 2010 felt like it was full of learning, good news and had quite a positive air around it.

With the last of my semester projects submitted, and a very rejuvenating trip to Porto, it feels like I’m walking into the new year afresh. Once my semester exams end on the 15th, I can hopefully find some time to work on getting ns-3-click merged for ns-3.11 and get back to working on Mia Vita with INESC-ID, both of which get the top spot in my immediate plans for the coming weeks. Beyond that, I need to prepare for the epic battle in the form of PhD applications. I can also sense a lot of travelling ahead in the coming semester, something I’m always ready for.

In short, 2011 looks like it’s going to be full of work, travel, and fun. Can’t be more perfect than this.

I came across something on my Facebook wall recently. A student from my former university was complaining about professors being incompetent and totally disconnected from research, about assignments being worthless, and the technologies covered in the curriculum to be out dated. The student feels this is the reason why many students end up opting for MBA related studies, and very few have the urge to continue with a Masters or PhD in engineering.

The problem here is two fold, and what is being raised here is just one half of the issue. I speak in the context of of my former university itself, because that’s what I’ve seen personally, but it shouldn’t be too different elsewhere (at least in India). The fact that students end up doing engineering and opt for streams they have absolutely no interest in, is a pivotal part of the problem (pretty much the stereotype highlighted by the movie, Three Idiots).

The problem in my opinion is, students spend such a huge deal of effort trying to get into institutions like the IITs and NITs, that they completely miss the bigger picture. This much of a pressure on students from their families and society itself to achieve such a short sighted goal? Three time repeaters aren’t a very rare sight in these institutions (to the readers who don’t know, a repeater is someone who spends a whole year after their schooling, to prepare for a bunch of competitive examinations that decide your admissions to the top brass of universities in India). So at this point, you have a whole legion of students, exhausted from running the hamster’s wheel of competitive examinations, with a near zero correlation between their choice of studies and their interests. The motivation levels drop to really low levels, and they pretty much _give up_. They expect to be spoon fed like they always were at their coaching centers, and any deviation from this is flagged as “poor teaching”. It isn’t rare to see students whine along the lines of, “Why does he expect us to do things which are not taught in class?”. A professor I knew didn’t want to raise the difficulty of the assignments because every time he took even the smallest of steps in that direction, it would end up with just one or two students actually submitting the assignments, and the rest complaining about the difficulty level.

About the technologies being outdated, I tend to disagree. In the field of Computer Science, classical theory is important because that’s what underlies a lot of real world implementations today. And the most important aspect is, learning about solutions to problems in one sphere helps give us a perspective of solving problems in other spheres as well, sometimes completely unrelated. For instance, pick up concepts taught under the “Operating Systems” tag like Synchronisation and IPC, and you’ve already learnt how to be careful when designing networking protocols and other distributed systems. With the sheer amount of knowledge encapsulated in the world of open source projects, knowing how these concepts apply to practical systems is only as far as a few clicks on the internet. I never learnt so much about computer networks from my coursework than I did through my involvement with the ns-3 project. The same orders of magnitude apply to my programming skills and systems design too. There are a lot of people out there who can help you, and this is precisely the kind of empowerment you get by leveraging the potential of open source and online communities in general. All you need is a few teaspoons of motivation, and you’re good to go. After all, _you_ would want to do something about the situation you’re in. Knowing a few such students who’re as keen on learning more about the technologies in their chosen areas of study is all you need to keep going ahead. You learn more from your peer groups than anywhere else. EMDC has given me a good taste of this, thankfully.

And lastly, the professors themselves. I personally agree that not all of them are perfect, they’re humans are after all. But some of them do good research, are excellent mentors, and their guidance can go a long way in shaping what you are. If you’ve got the drive, they can make you do wonders. But they really aren’t obligated to wake you up from sleep to enlighten you. In computer science terms, it’s more of ‘pull’ processing than ‘push’ processing. Approach these professors, ask them what their research areas are, see if you’d like to give these fields a shot, and go for it. At my previous university, the Computer Science and IT departments together had close to 120 students per batch of undergrads (a total of 360 for 3 years, excluding the first years), around 30 masters students per year (a total of 60 across two years), and a few PhD students as well. Now ask yourself if it’s possible for a handful of faculty members to ensure that all students are driven enough to be interested in their subjects.

I’m not defending the system. I totally agree that it is flawed. But I just feel that we are all to blame here. So what choices are we left with?

1) Either wait for the system to improve.
2) Try to change the system.
3) Try to not to care too much about the system, but strive to be competitive.

I personally prefer option 3).

To conclude, you _can_ work around the flaws of the university education system. But it’s you alone who should want to do so, don’t expect anyone to push you to.