Random musings

I got the chance to listen to Karan Bajaj, twice in a span of a week in the month of September. First at the IIM Bangalore, Alumni event, "Anusmaran" where the moderator Rahul Singh, introduced Bajaj as "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" in reverse. Unlike the protagonist of the book, Bajaj started as Yogi in an ashram and had now managed to sell his startup to BYJU's for an eye-popping $300 million USD. An equally interesting discussion at an "IIMChat" event moderated by Rahul Phondke & Deepika Deshpande left me very impressed and I almost signed up for the program. By the time I returned from India the WhiteHat Jr or SafedTopi had snowballed into a huge debate on the internet and I took some time to validate my very positive first impressions. I ended up talking to 7 parents, who had put their kids into the program. The feedback from the parents was overwhelmingly positive. However, given the very negative comments, I decided to do a trial class and

The day before yesterday I spend more than 2 hours, totally mesmerized by the memorial service of Padma Vikraman Nayar , organized by the Singapore Malayali Association (SMA) . I have met her only once, a few years ago, but the eulogies removed any sense of unfamiliarity about her. Padma Aunty as she was popularly called was more of a background person and the extent of eulogies was disproportionate to any of the formal positions, she held within the SMA committee. And most surprisingly, all but one of the speakers on stage were males, mostly past SMA Presidents, a reflection of the authority she commanded during her life. At a personal level, I really struggle with the Malayalam Language and often felt that I was more of a Delhite than a Malayali. Despite this rather distant view, I have been amazed at the SMA’s annual Onam Village celebrations. The scale and extent of the program is astonishing, with at least a few thousand people attending. I always wondered about the incred

On Friday, I heard Puneet Garg , the new Head of Data Science at Carousell give a very passionate AI 101 talk at the GA Data Science immersive program that I am part of. Puneet had spent 13 years at Microsoft before joining Carousell, and has over a decade of AI experience. He was part of the Bing team, where he worked on cutting edge technologies like Natural Language for Cortana, Speech Recognition and Language Translation for Indian languages, Human like Chat bots (Ruuh) for India etc. Talking about Data Science, he felt that a Data Scientist's key job is to e xtract insights and identify predictive models from large volumes of data. And in this job, Machine Learning is a key tool in the Data Scientist's arsenal. He used the following graphic to beautifully explain the difference between AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Image Source He highlighted how the Artificial Intelligence algorithms had been in existence for a long time, but they were infeasible

Listened to Setu Chokshi, the Head of Data Science at PropertyGuru Group at a talk organized at SUSS on AI and IoT by IoTSG, an IoT & Advanced technologies focused Special Interest Group . At any given time PropertyGuru has about 60000 live rental listings and Chokshi gave a brief overview of what’s happening inside PropertyGuru esp wrt AI.  Most of the action in the property business as it is structured today, happens in the discovery phase. This key step has traditionally been pivoted around the location factor and PropertyGuru is attempting to use AI to enhance the end buyer experience around this. He requested me to remove some of the details as those features were at a beta stage. An existing PropertyGuru feature that I really liked on the platform is the historical actual transaction values for each apartment complex in Singapore. Something like this helps all stakeholders make more informed choices and bring stability to the overall market. Compared this in India, th

Yesterday attended a conference organized by the  High Commission of India  about  "Doing business with Indian States: Opportunities and the way forward" .  In my circles I have met many people who are gung ho about the changes in the Indian Government's approach towards investors. They speak of the improved access to the decision makers and a certain sense of speed and urgency not seen before. I have heard some of the State Chief Ministers speaking in Singapore and the excitement is visible and generally I think these outreach efforts are steps in the right direction. Jawed Ashraf, the Indian High Commissioner's  welcome remark was an articulate summary of the India story. Beyond economics, he spoke of social sectors, which is a conspicuous addition to the usual economic focus of such events. Ashraf briefly commented on the Federal structure of India and highlighted the critical role of states wrt the execution of projects and how post liberalization, the S

My first brush with Quantum computing was yesterday thanks to an invitation by  Claus Nehmzow  to the BP event on Quantum Computing (QC). The event consisted of 3 presentations, followed by a panel discussion. Before the event my friend  Avishek Ghosh  gave a brief primer on what Quantum computing is. The key takeaways from that discussion was: 1.       QC is a new way of computing that relies on probabilistic determination and massive parallel computing.  2.       It moves away from the Binary states of the bits in the classical computers to the quantum states of qubits.  (This is something that I have not completely understood. The challenges of the cat being alive and the dead at the same time is still very perplexing for me :D) 3.       While the QC approach is a very new way to represent and compute data, the physical environment is very challenging and often require near absolute zero temperatures. Slight changes in the physical environments can impact the data and t