Startup Diaries – Hedcet

Many people have asked me about my startup interactions over the course of the years. I plan to briefly talk about the different ventures I had co-founded or helped out in this series of posts.

Why?

Apart from the reason I just stated above, there are mainly two reasons which motivate me to write this series of posts.

Learnings

Entrepreneurship is a space where there is a lot of Survivorship Bias (link). People mostly hear the stories of the ones who succeed whereas over 99% startups fail. I see that many startups still make those same mistakes that we went through. I would like to document our learnings so that others and (more importantly?) future-me can learn from these.

Remembrance

Having said that, I strongly believe we did many things right too. Some of the same ideas which we tried out were later validated by others (the stories of which I hope to touch upon in this series). But many a times, some of the variables that control the fate of a startup are beyond your control (right place at the right time?). This series is not just about calling out our mistakes, but telling our stories as it is. These were some of the best and most exciting moments in my life.

HedCet

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Team HedCet (early 2012)

The year was 2012. I had learned the basics of web development and was looking for an opportunity to use the skills. I came across CampusLAN – an SMS based facility through which students could get to know their attendance instantly. It got popular pretty fast as it let students take an informed decision about bunking classes. It was started by some of my seniors. I immediately got excited and decided to join the team.

At that time, HedCet was a 4 member team. During the course of the next year, we grew to over 10 members. The team composition was interesting in that it consisted of students doing undergrad in Mechanical, Industrial, Electronics, Civil etc along with one or two Computer Science students. Most of them were self-taught programmers. We were coding in PHP using CodeIgniter framework.

We were all heavily inspired by Mobme ( a tech company that was founded by our super seniors) and Startup Village, a non-profit startup incubator that they started. We actively participated and helped organize ’30 days to freedom’, a education policy change favoring entrepreneurship.

30days_to_freedom
One of the promotional posters for 30 days to freedom

And yes, the name ‘HedCet’ did not have any particular meaning to it apart from CET standing for our college (College of Engg., Trivandrum).

Up next, I will try to talk through some of the ideas that we tried out back then.

Avocado

Our plan was to expand campusLAN (rebranded as Avocado) into a full fledged campus management software, with break-through features like fingerprint based attendance marking, social networking features for sharing study materials (dubbed Resource Pool) etc.

Screen Shot 2017-09-27 at 7.07.40 AM
Our press release

We spent about 8 to 10 months developing the software before starting approaching colleges. I remember reaching out to and also traveling to multiple colleges across Kerala trying to talk to the Principals and Head of Departments and convince them to use our product.

We were woken up to a stark reality. All the colleges (including our own) declined our proposals siting various reasons (not feeling the need, opposition to transparency and sometimes even political). Interesting thing to note here was that not even a single college cited a technical reason or lack of some feature to be the reason for declining.

Learning: Test your assumptions early on.

We could have created an MVP fast (in a month or so) and got the same feedback without wasting 10 months of a 6 member development team.

TinyMail

Looking back, I feel that TinyMail was one of our most brilliant ideas. Even though none of us had smartphones or were aware of WhatsApp at that time, our idea was very similar to the modern day WhatsApp.

The idea was this – We already have everyone’s mobile number in our contacts. However email addresses of much fewer people. Why not make your mobile number your single point of communication (i.e. your email address?)

Kris Gopalakrishnan (founder Infosys) was our mentor and symbolic first customer
TinyMail banner
From our business plan

Instead of creating a chat server, we somehow stuck to email. Users need to sign up like normal email but by giving their mobile number. The email address will be <mobile-number>@tinymail.com (e.g. 1234567890@tinymail.com). We setup our SMTP server and had a working website and hybrid mobile app (albeit crappy).

We never really thought that a single easy ‘point of contact’ was in itself a complete product. In the subsequent iterations, instead of improving our UX, customer adoption etc., we tried to create a superior email product with features like an app-store (codenamed SuperMail). We never got any adoption and the product died.

Learning: Focus. Don’t try to do everything. Do one thing really well.

MovieAlerts

At that time, there were no movie booking websites or mobile apps. Considering the limited smartphone adoption in Kerala at that time, our idea was to create an SMS based movie booking platform.

Screen Shot 2017-09-27 at 7.13.04 AM
Yes, we rebranded to vCompile Innovations at one point

We approached the Kerala Film Distributors Association with a proposal to implement this across the various theaters in Kerala. We were met with a lot of bureaucracy and the project never took off.

The problem was eventually solved by BookMyShow across India. Its story is also inspiring in that the founders met similar failure in adoption early on but persisted for many years before becoming a multi-million dollar company and the single dominating movie-booking platform in India (read more here).

Learning: Don’t let a few rejections make you doubt the merit of your idea. Keep persisting.

Other Ideas

We tried out a bunch of other ideas also.

Near Field Communication – 2012 was predicted to be ‘The Year of NFC’. We got a few NFC chips and two BlackBerry smartphones from Startup Village. We made a few basic mobile apps using these. We approached some of the 5 star hotels in Kerala offering to make their hotels/resorts ‘smart’ using NFC.

Our proposal to a 5-star hotel
Within our proposal

NFC did not pick up. Our proposals were not accepted.

MediCol – Appointment scheduling and telemedicine services. These are probably still unsolved problems to some extend (at-least in India). We tried approaching some hospitals to adopt our appointment scheduling software. Here also, most of them sited non technical reasons for declining our proposal.

Smartphone games – We tried building some mobile games during that time (ScoreLoop, Tripped etc). We never really ended up releasing a fully functional game if I remember correctly.

Medicol logo
From Medicol BPlan
Self Goalie
Screenshot from one of our early game experiments (the only one I could find)

As I mentioned, some of these ideas had great potential. We were just in the wrong time, wrong place or didn’t have the right resources to execute these. It’s always easier to look back and identify your mistakes. Identifying the ones you’re yet to make is an all together different ball-game.

Nonetheless, I am sure the whole team learned a lot and moreover enjoyed a lot during this period. At the end of the day, probably that’s what matter?

Update: One technical learning that I forgot to mention was the importance of version control. As a five member dev team, we used to have five versions of our code base in a shared Dropbox folder. Substantial amount of time was wasted in keeping these in sync and merging changes together.

I strongly recommend version control (Git preferably) for even a one person single day project.

Introduction to Information Security – Experience

I did the Introduction to Information Security course (CS6035) as part OMSCS Summer 2017 semester.

The course was a good overview of various aspects of Information Security. It broadly covered topics like system security, network security, web security, cryptography, different types of malware etc. The course was lighter in terms of work load compared to the other subjects I’ve taken so far. I really liked the projects which were thoughtfully designed to give the students hands-on experience in each of these topics.

The four projects that we had to do were:

  1.  Implementing Buffer Overflow in a given vulnerable code. This required brushing up on C basics,  understanding how process memory allocation works internally and some playing around with gdb.
  2.  Analyzing provided malware samples using Cuckoo, an automatic malware analyzer and sandbox to identify behaviors such as registry updates, keyboard and mouse sniffing, remote access, privilege escalation etc.
  3. Understanding and implementing the RSA algorithm in python, identifying the weakness in using smaller length keys (64 bit) and decrypting an RSA encrypted message by exploiting this weakness.
  4. Exploiting vulnerabilities in a target (sample) website using Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF), Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.

Apart from the projects, there were 10 Quizzes to be completed, one per week throughout the course. The various exploits discussed in the course are fairly easy to be introduced in a codebase if you are not aware of these. Unfortunately, these are pretty common even now, many years after they were first discovered.

Hence, no matter the type of software development one is into (mobile, web, DB, relatively low level languages like C, embedded device programming, bare metal etc.), these exploits and their counter-measures are a must-know.

 

Reinforcement Learning – Experience

I completed the Reinforcement Learning course (link) as part of OMSCS Spring 2017 semester. It was one of the most rewarding courses I took as part of the program till date.

The course was taught by professors Charles Isbell and Michael Littman, the same Profs who had taken the Machine Learning course previously (blog link). The course was really challenging considering the closely packed and research oriented home works and projects as well as the math/theory heavy course material. We had

  • 6 home works which involved implementing different RL algorithms to solve given problems
  • 3 projects out of which two were the reproduction of experiment results from prominent RL research papers and one was solving an RL problem using OpenAI Gym

Summarizing my key learnings from RL below:

  • Reinforcement learning helps you train an AI agent to maximise some form of reward without prior understanding of the environment  -i.e. model-free.
  • E.g: Pacman. Here the agent (or player) can roam around the space using possible actions (left, right, up, down). When it consumes one of the small orbs, it gets points (+ve reward). When it eats the big orbs and then eats the enemy players, it again gets more points. However, if it’s eaten by one of the enemy players, it loses a life (-ve reward). If you let an RL agent play Pacman for some time, it will start playing randomly, but eventually, figure out the rules of the game and can potentially play better than a human player. All this without we injecting any domain knowledge (rules of the game, winning strategies etc.) beforehand! (crazy right?)
  • Screen Shot 2017-05-07 at 10.23.36 PM
  • Most RL research assumes all processes can be represented using MDPs (Markov Decision Processes). These are processes where the entire past can be represented using the current state of the agent.
  • Learned about different RL algorithms such as:
    • Value Iteration
    • Policy Iteration
    • Q-learning
    • TD-Lambda etc.
  • Generalization using function approximation – This seemed to me to be one of the most promising sections of RL. It can effectively take RL outside the confines of Grid world and into the big and continuous state spaces of the real world.
    • For one of our projects, we used DQN (Deep Q-Networks), one of the latest efforts in generalization using deep neural networks, published by DeepMind – a Google company.
  • Reward Shaping – a mechanism to accelerate the learnings of the agents and help them get to their goals faster.
  • POMDPs (Partially Observable MDPS) – These are closer to the processes which we see in real-life. We don’t get to know fully which state we are in. We have to work with a set of ‘belief states’ or probability distributions of possible states we might be in.
  • Game Theory – I found this to be the most fun part of the course. It deals with stochastic games where multiple agents try to maximise their collective/competing rewards. This is again closer to the situations which we face in real-life. Topics include:
    • Prisoners Dilemma
    • Nash Equilibrium
    • Folk theorem and sub-game perfect equilibrium
    • Tit-for-Tat, Grim trigger, Pavlov etc. game strategies
    • Coordinated equilibria, using side payments (Coco-Q) etc.

The course content was a bit too theoretic in some chapters (e.g.: AAA – Advanced Algorithm Analysis). I found lectures from David Silver, DeepMind to be a good supplementary course to build the required intuition for this course – link.

One of the really exciting moments in this course was when Prof. Richard Sutton, considered by many as the father of Reinforcement Learning, and the author of the primary textbook for RL (of our course and elsewhere) ‘Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction’ (second edition draft available from author’s website – link) appeared for one of our office hours as a special guest.

Screen Shot 2017-04-20 at 4.44.15 AM
Prof. Richard Sutton along with our TAs during an office hour

I found all the TAs for this course really knowledgeble and helpful. All the office hours were really useful and fun-filled at the same time. One of our TAs, Migual Morales has been featured in the OMSCS website recently – link.

In conclusion, this course has been one helluva ride that I enjoyed throughout! 🙂

Machine Learning – Experience

I recently completed CS 7641 – Machine Learning as part of my OMSCS coursework. The course was really enjoyable and informative.

The course was taught by Professors Charles Isbell and Micheal Littman. Both are really awesome. Contrary to most other courses on the topic, they have managed to make the course content easy to understand and interesting, without losing out on any of its essences. All videos are structured as conversations between the Profs where one acts as the teacher and other as the student – very effective.

All the course videos are available publicly on Youtube – link. Also, I would recommend watching this funny Capella on ML based on Thriller by the Profs – link. 🙂

The course was a literature survey and general introduction into the various areas in ML. It was primarily divided into 3 modules:

  • Supervised learning – where we are given a dataset with labels (emails classified as spam or not). You try to predict the labels for future data based on what you’ve already seen or ‘learned’.
    • Techniques include Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbours, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Neural Networks etc
  • Unsupervised learning – all about finding patterns in unlabeled data. Eg: Group similar products together (clustering) based on customer interactions. This can be really helpful in recommendations etc.
    • Randomized Optimization, clustering, feature selection and transformation etc.
  • Reinforcement learning – the most exciting one (IMHO). This overlays many concepts we usually consider as part of Artificial Intelligence. RL is about incentivizing machines to learn various tasks (such as playing chess) by providing different rewards.
    • Markov Decision Processes, Game Theory etc.
    • I found the concepts in GT such as the Prisoners Dilemma, Nash Equilibrium etc. and how they tie into RL interesting.

All of these are very vast subjects in themselves. The assignments were designed in such a way that we got to work with all of these techniques at least to some extent. The languages and libraries that we use were left to our choice, though guidance and recommendations were provided. Through that, got the opportunity to work with Weka, scikit-learn and BURLAP.

Overall, enjoyed the course really well. Hoping to take courses like Reinforcement Learning (link) to learn more about the topics in upcoming semesters.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

I recently completed reading The Art of Thinking Clearly (link) by Rolf Dobelli. I found the book an interesting, concise and useful read on the many biases of the human mind.

If you go through the reviews of the book on Goodreads (link) or anywhere else online, you are likely to end up with mixed reviews. The negative ones mostly criticizing the author of plagiarism. In fact, N.N. Taleb, the bestselling author of many books including The Black Swan (link) has gone ahead and written a detailed account of the instances where his ideas were plagiarized by Dobelli – link.

Interestingly, these happen to be the exact reasons why I ended up reading Dobelli’s book! Let me explain myself a bit here though that would mean slightly digressing from the subject of this post.

Reading Summary Books

On multiple accounts, I had considered buying books such as Taleb’s The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness (link) or Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (link) etc. to understand more about the human mind and it’s blind spots. Each time, the sheer size of these books have made me put off the task to a distant future.

It might very well be the case that these books (among others) were the first ones to discuss many of the ideas mentioned in Dobelli’s book and that they discuss these ideas with much more rigor. But for a casual reader like me who is looking for a high-level overview of the core essence of these books without taking the actual effort of reading these, books like Dobelli’s are the best options.

On a related note, I recently came across this extremely nice Youtube channel – link that takes this concept of reading summaries a step further by presenting 5-10 minute illustrative videos that summarise the essence of various famous self-help/philosophical books.

The Art of Thinking Clearly

Getting back to the book, there were two other negative points mentioned in the reviews that I was careful to watch out for while reading:

  1. In an effort to come up with ‘100‘ limitations of the human mind, Dobelli has added many somewhat obvious/insignificant ones also to the list. This can make the real insights hard to separate out for the casual reader esp. since they are given in no particular order.
  2.  Some of the anecdotes used are contextually inappropriate.

Keeping all these in mind, I’ve been able to get some good insights out of the book. A few of the ones that come to my mind include (not including bias definitions for brevity):

  • Confirmation bias (link) being the mother of all biases. This explains why you will never be able to convince someone in arguments where the topic has inherent uncertainties which are open to interpretations. Political discussions on the internet seem to be a good example.
  • Swimmer’s Body Illusion (link) – Also answers the question ‘Does Harvard make you smarter?’
  • Action Bias (link) – where we feel doing something is more productive than doing nothing, even though what we do might be counter-productive.
  • Effort Justification (link) – where we tend to value something acquired with more effort as more valuable rather than objectively valuing the utility of the item.
  • Illusion of Attention (link) – This one was an eye-opener. Particularly the observation that drivers talking on the phone are as susceptible to accidents as a drunken driver, even if you are on hands-free.
  • Survivorship Bias (link) – probably explains why people fail to understand the risks involved in starting startups and overestimate the chances of success.
  • Forer Bias (link) –  refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.

The entire list of biases can be found here – link.

 

The Pragmatic Programmer

After having it on my to-do and wish list for about a year, I finally ordered and read ‘The Pragmatic Programmer‘. It was a really interesting read. I was able to relate to many of the chapters in it. The book talks about how programmers can rise from journeymen to masters.

The book contains many (70 to be precise) one line nuggets of programming wisdom. The authors themselves have made these available online here. Coding Horror (Jeff Atwood) also has a handy quick reference to many of the ideas mentioned in the book – link.

Even though the tips by themselves are great, I would recommend reading the whole book rather than reading them in isolation. What makes the book great is the way the authors presents the ideas in easy-to-understand ways, often using small stories and analogies wherever applicable. Some of the interesting ones below:

The Broken Window Theory (wiki):

Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

This is how human psychology works. The same is applicable in terms of software quality. If we introduce entropy into the system (in the form of poor code, lack of unit or integration testing, poor review practices etc.), it will spread rapidly and destroy the system. The opposite can also happen where once we establish an immaculate system and great practices, individuals would try not to be the first to lower the standards.

The Stone Soup

The story can be read here. The authors have lessons from both sides of the story:

Tip: Be a Catalyst for Change

Like how the soldiers (or travellers as per the wiki) influenced and brought about change gradually, if we show people a glimpse of the future, they will be more willing to participate.

Tip: Remember the big picture

Villagers fall for the stone trick since they failed to notice gradual changes. This can happen to our software systems and projects as well. The next point is related.

The Boiled Frog

If a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is put in cold water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of threats that rise gradually. Gradual increases in CPU/memory utilisation or service latencies which eventually bring down systems come into mind here. Gradual feature-creep and/or project delays which eventually add up to failed projects are also examples.

Some of the programming pearls of wisdom that I found most compelling were:

The Requirement Pit 

Requirements are often unclear and mixed with current policies and implementation. We must capture the underlying semantic invariants as requirements and document the specific or current work practices as policy.

Tip: Abstractions live longer than details

The Law of Demeter for Functions (wiki)

An object’s method should call only methods belonging to:

  • Itself
  • Any parameters passed in
  • Objects it creates
  • Component objects

Following this law helps us write ‘shy’ code which minimises coupling between modules.

Listing other tips below:

  • DRY principle – Don’t Repeat Yourself. Avoid duplication of code or documentation.
  • Orthogonality – Decouple systems into independent components.
  • Always use version control (even for documents, memos, scripts – for everything)
  • Use Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and Code Generators to simply development
  • Ruthless testing – Test early, test often, test automatically
  • Use prototypes and tracer bullets wherever and whenever possible

 

AI for Robotics – Experience

I studied AI for Robotics class as part of the Summer’16, OMSCS program. It was a really interesting and challenging experience. It was taught by Prof. Sebastian Thrun who lead the self-driving car project in Google. It was his team from Stanford which won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 where they drove a car (Stanley) over 212 km of off-road course and came first. Incidentally Prof. Thrun is a co-founder at Udacity and was it’s CEO until recently.

The class consisted of two portions: 

  • a series of lectures combined with small programming tasks
  • two open-ended projects related to self-driving cars

The whole course centers around the use of probabilistic models to predict the various parameters involved such as the location of the robot car, the location of various landmarks, obstacles, moving targets such as other cars, pedestrians etc. The Prof also has an aptly titled text book ‘Probabilistic Robotics’ to go along with the course (though I couldn’t make much use of it).

The lectures covered the following topics:

Localization

Noise is an essential part of robotics.

There will be noise in the robot motion. Eg: If we instruct the robot to move 5 meters, the robot might end-up moving only 4.8 meters due to tire slipping or uneven surface.

There will be noise in sensor measurement. Eg: If the sensor readings tell us we are 3 meters from the car ahead, the actual distance might be 2.7 meters.

How can a robot car navigate the road safely given all these noises? That is exactly what localization addresses. The term refers to various techniques which help us ‘see-through’ the noise and identify the underlying motion model of the robot. The following localization techniques were taught in class:

  • Kalman filters: These work best for linear motions. The predictions are Gaussian distributions here and hence will be uni-modal i.e. the prediction will only tell which is the highest probability location of the robot (no info on 2nd or 3rd highest probability location etc). However, there are extension of the standard KF such as the Unscented KF and Extended KF which address the mentioned limitations.
  • Particle filters: These seem best suited for localization since they work for non-linear motions and support multi-modal distributions.
localizing
Localization in action: Hex bug path in black and localized particle in blue

Search

Self-driving cars need to find the optimal path to their destination as well. The technique used for finding the most optimal path without exploring the entire state space is A* algorithm. Those who have learned AI in under-grad might be familiar with the approach. It involves the use of a heuristic function which gives a score for all possible movements based on how far the new state is from the goal state.

Control Theory

Humans drive cars smoothly. If we ask a robot to move on a particular course, by default it will either over-shoot or under-shoot its goal and then correct itself. This is because of the inherent delay in the move-sense feedback cycle. This keeps repeating leading to a zig-zag motion and overall unpleasant (and potentially dangerous) driving experience. There is a whole domain of control systems on how to smoothen out the robot motion as it approaches it’s desired course.

The technique we learned is the PID controller. This controller adjusts the steering angle of the robot at all points of its motion based on various proportional, differential and integral terms computed in relation to its CTE or cross track error (the lateral distance between the robot and the reference trajectory). 

Screen Shot 2016-08-09 at 9.06.33 PM
Here A represents robot motion without any controller and B represents one with PID controller.

 

Runaway robot

The first project was a set of 4 interesting challenges (plus a bonus challenge for the extra smart ones) where we need to locate a robot (aptly named 404) which ran away from an assembly line and capture it using a hunter bot. This was an individual project. It requires some level of ingenuity to some up with a working solution since the lessons from class were not directly applicable here.

the_chase
Hunter bot (blue) chasing the runaway bot (black). The red dots are future predictions with which the hunter tries to capture the bot.

Hex bug motion prediction

The second project was a team project. Here we were given coordinates of random movements of a hex bug for 2 minutes at 30 fps (frames per second). We need to predict the last 2 seconds i.e. 60 frames of the bug’s motion. This was an open ended problem and we could use any technique from inside the class or outside. We were a team of 4 and explored various techniques including clustering trajectories, creating a markov model and finally ended up using PF to solve the same.

hexbot_predictions
Predictions of hex bug path using various approaches against actual bug path (in black)

Overall, enjoyed the class a lot!

Knowledge based AI – Experience

I enrolled for the Spring’16 batch of OMSCS program offered by Georgia Tech university and Udacity. As my first course as part of the program, I chose Knowledge base AI, taught by Prof. Ashok Goel and David Joyner. The video sessions of the course can be freely accessed through Udacity website here.

The class was very interesting and insightful. I thoroughly enjoyed the 3 main projects we had to do throughout the class. The overall class was focused on systematically studying human-level intelligence/cognition and seeing how we can build that using technology. As a measure of accessing human cognition, the class used Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM).

Our class came into the internet limelight after the course when Prof Ashok revealed that one of out TA – Jill Watson was actually a bot. Covered widely by press – Washington Post and WSJ.

With regard to the course content, we were introduced to the broad areas that come under human level AI research such as:

  • Semantic Networks, Frames and Scripts – useful knowledge representations
  • Generate & Test and Means-End Analysis – two popular problem solving techniques
  • Production systems – rule based systems which are useful in AI
  • Learning By Recording Cases and Case base reasoning – techniques to learn based on past examples and to adapt them as per requirement
  • Incremental concept learning – contrary to approaches like ML where we feed millions of examples to train models, human cognition deals with incremental data inputs. Incremental concept learning describes how we can use generalizations and specializations to make inferences from these inputs.
  • Classification – mapping percepts to concepts so that we can take actions
  • Formal Logic – techniques from predicate calculus such as resolution theorem proving are useful in some cases of reasoning. However human cognition is inductive and abductive in nature, whereas logic is deductive.
  • Understanding – Humans always deal with ambiguity. Eg: Same word can have different contextual meanings. Understanding is how we leveraging available constraints to resolve ambiguities.
  • Common sense reasoning – about modeling our world in terms of a set of primitive actions and their combination.
  • Explanation based learning and Analogical reasoning – deals with how we can extract ‘abstractions’ from prior knowledge and transfer these to new situations
  • Diagnosis and learning by correcting mistakes – Determining what is wrong with a malfunctioning device/system. Learning by correcting these mistakes.
  • Meta-reasoning – reasoning about our own reasoning process and applying all the above techniques to the same.

As part of the projects, we built small ‘AI agents’ that process RPM problem images and use various techniques to solve them. These were quite challenging and required fair amount of programming. For me, it was a good learning opportunity for building something non-trivial in Python. We used Python image processing library PIL and various image processing techniques like connected component labelling.

Considering the vastness of the topic – human level intelligence and that I intent to specialize in ‘Interactive Intelligence‘, I found the course really interesting and informative. Enjoyed it!

I’m adding a nice poster created by my classmate Eric on the high level topics we studied in this class.

kbaipostersmall

 

 

 

 

Google summer of code 2014 – Experience

This blog has been long pending. Infact, I took part in GSoC 2014 and GSoC 2015 application process has already started. But I’ll share my experience anyway.

I interned with Raxa. They are into building web and mobile applications to help small clinics and hospitals go online. Their applications are build on top of the OpenMRS platform. Raxa was fully open source earlier but have moved to a hybrid model presently. All the GSoC projects are open source and available through GitHub.

I started late in the application process. I didn’t have specific plans for applying to GSoC this time. The list of organizations had been announced and application deadline was pretty close. One fine day, I thought I’ll just glance over the organizations that have been accepted and see if there are any that meets my areas of expertise. Raxa was planning to enable patients without smart phones to access their medical services using phone calls via IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and via SMS. This required knowledge of an open source telephony server called Asterisk. I had spend a decent chunk of my third year working on a social initiative/startup called Dial Blood which was built on Asterisk. Much of my final year was spend working on Findauto which was an SMS based auto rickshaw booking startup. Hence it made a lot of sense for me to apply for this project.

My application emphasized on why I’m the right person to work on this project and contained a week-by-week systematic and clear breakdown of how I’ll go about completing the project. The key features I proposed to enable were:

  • Appointment scheduling via SMS or call
  • Calling/submitting queries to doctors

One feedback I got on my application was that there was scope for more to be done in three months. They wanted to make sure I was productivity engaged through out the three months with additional tasks to take up if I manage to finish these early. IVR can be at times seem complicated to the rural audience Raxa was primarily trying to appeal to. Hence instead of asking people to press digits (press 1 for English, 2 for Hindi..), I thought of using voice recognition and natural language processing to hear their response and act accordingly. The inclusion of this task made my application reasonably strong.

I applied only to Raxa and thankfully made it when the results came out. They had selected four interns – one girl from Srilanka, one IIT Delhi grad who had previously interned with them outside GSoC and another student who was pursuing his masters degree in computer science, apart from me. They all were working on really interesting projects which included mobile application development to machine learning. More details can be found here.

We also used to have weekly meetings with the whole Raxa team. Our progress was evaluated each week. I was assigned a mentor. I could reach out to him anytime for any assistance. My project was a continuation of last year’s GSoC project. I had some difficulty in the code ramp up because of limited documentation. Apart from that, Asterisk part went smoothly. For the voice recognition part, I was planning to use Google’s voice recognition APIs. But Google had deprecated the free version by then. Other popular alternatives like Spinx had limitations working with Asterisk because of some frequency mismatch issues. This was a blocker for me. My mentor helped me identify a NLP startup (Wit.AI) working in this domain. They had really powerful APIs available for free. I used those in my GSoC project and managed to implement the feature successfully.

Another main task that I did was research on what’s the best way to take the service into production. Various options including Amazon EC2, own servers and third party services were explored. I also contacted various telephony service providers to inquire about PRI lines and their pricing. We were not able to take the service into production because of some constraints Raxa had. But I was code complete and production ready by end of summer.

We had a final demo day where all 4 of us presented our projects. We all managed to complete GSoC successfully. It was a really good experience for me to work on such a big project end to end under strict time constraints. Not to mention the stipend and awesome goodies.. 🙂

My GSoC project code link – https://github.com/Raxa/voice/tree/master/Asterisk

Wiki link – https://raxaemr.atlassian.net/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=50724873

– Written using WordPress for Android

Where do I start (programming)?

One of the most common questions people new to programming face is “Where does one start?”
The number of programming languages and platforms out there has made it slightly overwhelming for newcomers to get started. I’ll try to answer this question with my (relatively small) experience of over 6 years dabbling in various technologies. My answer would be slightly biased to a particular platform/language (as you will notice soon). Latest trends have seen Atwood’s Law become a reality.

It says that any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

Everything got it’s Javascript equivalent including JS based servers such as Node.JS and MVC frameworks such as Sail.JS. The Javascript based MEAN (MongoDB, Express.JS, Angular.JS, Node.JS) stack is gaining popularity over WAMP/LAMP (Windows/Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python) stacks.

Over the last few years, the notion of app stores have caught up rapidly. Apart from the largest app stores from Apple (for iPhone) and Google (Android), almost all players such as Microsoft, Blackberry and Amazon have come up with their own app stores. We’ve also seen the inception of various new mobile platforms such as Ubuntu for Mobile, Firefox OS and Tizen (by the Linux community). They’ll have their own stores of course.
Now what does all these mean to a developer trying to commercialize a software product? You can’t simply develop for one major platform (read Windows desktops) and expect the money to flow in. That era is over. It would be a serious waste of development time to port your application to the native code for each of these platforms as well.
Web is THE only solution here. All platforms presently support Web apps natively i.e. we can run our web-based application on these OSes like native applications without the aid of any browser. The latest web standards like HTML5 specifically address such usage by facilitating direct access to various mobile hardware such as camera and GPS to web applications. In fact Firefox OS is specifically designed to support web apps.

The trends mentioned above must be apparent to anyone closely following the Tech industry. But I’ve seen many of my friends interested in learning programming sitting down with C/C++ only to lose interest soon afterwards and complaining how boring it is. A basic knowledge of these languages (from the 1980s) might be helpful in understanding the basic concepts of programming. But these are NOT a must have for a modern-day programmer. Nobody even uses these in the industry anymore (mostly). Similarly don’t think web development isn’t part of mainstream programming. Surprisingly a vast majority of people including computer science students have that incorrect notion. Most companies now predominantly work with web technologies. It’s our syllabus that has got it wrong.
If you are seriously interested in programming, here is what I suggest:

  • Learn basics of programming (C/C++, ideally don’t spend more that a few weeks)
  • Learn HTML and CSS => build static websites
  • Learn Javascript => build interactive websites
  • Learn a server-side language => build web applications (PHP, Python, JSP, ASP, Ruby Javascript etc)
  • Learn a server-side framework => build better and bigger web apps
  • Optionally learn mobile app development for a mobile platform (Java for Android, Objective C for iOS etc)
  • Optionally learn one industry standard core programming language like a Java or C# in-depth. This is esp. relevant for computer science students looking for jobs/internships.
  • Optionally learn to use a few CMSs ( Drupal, WordPress, Joomla etc.)

That’s it. You are good to go.
In the server-side, there are vast number of languages to choose from. If you choose to go with Javascript for server side as well, you get to avoid learning another language though you’ll be skipping over a major era in the evolution of web technologies.
There are various frameworks for most popular languages out there like Zend, CodeIgniter and Laravel for PHP,  Django for a Python, Ruby on Rails (ROR) for Ruby, Sail.JS for Javascript etc. Such frameworks take care of basic things needed by all web apps such as security so that developers can focus on their application logic.
You should choose a framework that suits the requirements of the product that you’re building.

My answer is mostly addressing students interested in learning programming for working on some idea that they have or for the fun of it. If you are a computer science student who’s looking to take your programming knowledge to the next level, I suggest you take a different path.
Hone your knowledge of various data structures (stacks, queries, linked lists) and algorithms (sorting, searching, recursion etc). I would recommend ‘Introduction to Algorithms‘ by Corman as a must-read and primary reference. In case of Kerala university, algorithm analysis and design is in S7. By the time you would have missed out on lot of good placement/internship/coding-competition opportunities.
So start as early as you can (atleast by early second year). Try to participate in monthly cookoffs at Codechef, do their practice questions, attempt problems in various websites like TopCoder, target and prepare for international coding competitions like ACM ICPC etc. Trying to attempt these one or two weeks before college placements isn’t going to get you the best results. Also sign up for some computer science oriented community like the IEEE Computer Society or ACM or Computer Society of India (CSI) to stay abreast of the latest developments in various domains and to stay connected to the industry.

I hope this will help students get a better idea on how to get started with programming.
The views expressed here are my personal opinion. Please feel free to share your suggestions in the comments. 🙂