Interview Shinterview contd....

Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I did not get shortlisted by IBM IRL. I spent the whole day wondering why I did not manage to get shortlisted by a company where I have enough research work in 3 different areas that I could easily fit into 3 different groups at their lab. I thought it might be GPA, but they shortlisted people with lower GPA's. Was it the level/quality of publications ? Was it the nature of my work ...what the bloody hell was it ? Chunni (aka Anshul )spent an hour calming me down and told me that it might be something as simple as them not having a vacancy in any of the groups that I can fit into !

I also kind of figured out that things like A+ and A are truly meaningless methods of classifying research work when it comes to placements (Many would feel that it's a stupid way of classifying work for any purpose !). One man's A+ is another mans F-. I will take this opportunity to welcome myself to the club of people wondering why they haven't been shortlisted or selected.

I was also happy that Bharat Joshi got his first interview today. The guy is smarter than most 9 pointers you would meet and a bumper job would be fair reward for some smooth work he has done over the years. I am also sure that the IBM people would have liked some nice lessons on secure multiparty computation from Hans :)

more to follow...

Interview shinterview

We have IBM IRL coming to campus 2moro. I did send my resume with 2 recos. It'll be interesting to see what they have to ask me. The only group that I could possibly fit into is their High Performance Computing group. Now, while I do have relevant research work(s) (in a conference titled IEEE-ACM High Performance Computing) I have no fracking idea about multi cores or parallel algorithms or anything remotely "high performance". If the state of my laptop is anything to go by, I barely manage to get any performance at all. They do not have a crypto group, so impressing them goes out the window. The only hope that remains is that they ask me something about distributed computing and preferably PRC :D

But whatever the outcome, I hope to meet a few people from IBM and see what they are up to. It is after all IBM. They have been great pioneers in electrical engineering and computing. I am sure that whoever they send would be somebody senior. I also hope they send a guy called Vijay Garg. He has a nice range of research work covering theoretical and applied distributed/parallel computing. It would be worth my while just meeting him.

My webpage is up.....

11 semesters late, but it's never too late is it :) Click here to visit my webpage. My thanks to Anuj Gupta and Prasant Gopal who allowed me to blatantly rip off the template. This is how a theoreticians web page should look like. In keeping with SIGACT's finest traditions(lame text only websites), mine is text only too.

Where is the Science in Computer Science??

I ask this question because Raina writes in her blog about people telling her that science has lost a "devout follower" when she joined IIIT. I wonder why people call us computer scientists. Elecrtical engineers are never call Electrical Scientists or neither are mechanical engineers. So what then have we Computer Scientists done to deserve this honor.

Kannan Srinathan once told me that it is the study of "Theory" that primarily gives computing the status of a science. No other discipline apart from perhaps Mathematics carries notions like "impossibility proofs". No discipline can give you unique insights on what can and cannot be determined(or rather computed) the way the theory of computation does. Theoreticians have given the world amazing results that have even bamboozled the best of mathematicians. It is this power to tell people what they can and cannot do (read as compute) is what is responsible for the word science and computers being spoken in the same breath.

No post of mine is complete unless I wind somebody up. So in the context of what is said above, does it mean that people engaged in pursuing improvements in other areas of computing are not doing science but merely engineering ?

PS. I heard about a rather interesting quote from Churchill. "The best argument against democracy is spending 5 minutes with the average voter".