Life is short; I wish I had more time – things that you hear all the time. I feel the same way and at my age there is an even more sense of urgency to attend to things that I want to do and learn. So, here are a few select items related to work. I have a long and unrealistic bucketlist for my personal life which shall remain where it is now…

Learn and use AI (Artificial Intelligence) – AI (Artificial Intelligence) is in the news a lot recently. Many of us will vividly remember IBM Watson winning Jeopardy in 2011. This was an awesome way in which the power of machine intelligence was demonstrated. I vividly remember the AI class I took in 1985 at the CUNY Graduate Center when I was doing my MA in computer science. It was the craze at that time. The language of choice for AI at that time (and it still continues to be) was LISP. Even though many programming languages are strange in their own ways, this is an extreme one, where the use of parentheses is so pervasive that they are annoying.

I remember that we used two operations primarily for our purposes, car and cdr. The biggest AI problem of the day at that time was machines that can recognize simple three dimensional objects. Something that the humans do so naturally and quickly, turned out to be an extremely hard problem for machines to solve. The types of surfaces, perspective, lighting and brightness etc. add a lot of complexity to this. If you are interested, you can read a research paper on this from 1985 here.

AI has had its ups and downs and you can read about the history of AI here and about 5 big predictions for AI in 2017. All these digressions aside, I think there are many ways in which we can use AI. I have a pretty good understanding of the tools of the trade such as the use of R and python. I just downloaded an open sourced version of a powerful AI tool from Google called Tensorflow. Some of the immediate problems I am interested in solving are: course selection suggestions for students, natural language based prerequisite handling, outlier detections in networks, and effective communication. At some point, I will be happy to elaborate more on each.

Learn more about ancient Tamil text – Ruth Rogers, our Curator of Special Collections, recently introduced me to some palm leaf manuscripts in Tamil (this is my mother tongue).  I was so excited to be able to touch and feel them and even recognize some of the writings. Of course, I couldn’t spend a lot of time there, so I used my phone to take a few photographs and left. Whenever time permits, I go back and look at them and I get so excited simply going through them even if I cannot decipher most of what is written. It takes a LOT of patience and time, both of which I don’t seem to have!

I want to learn more about the techniques and technologies used, when exactly the alphabets were invented and how they transformed over time, when the language began some of its sanskritization etc. beyond just Wikipedia. And, I should be able to teach an AI engine the patterns of the alphabet of a particular time and feed the images from the palm leaf manuscript. Through image recognition, have the AI engine give me the output which are possible words that it recognized. The writings I saw did not have word breaks because the authors seemed to want to use every available space.

Teach – I have taught before and I will be honest to admit that the results have been mixed. The CS classes I taught in Hunter College in the mid ’80s were my best. I loved them and most of my students loved them too. They ranged from IBM assembly language courses to data structures. However, when I moved to Wesleyan, it was a mixed result. The first and foremost problem was that no one mentored me on how to teach in the liberal arts setting and secondly, the CS department during that time was training the students in theory more than practice whereas my strength was the latter.

So, while I was trying to teach them how to write compilers and I had a decent understanding of formal languages, the students would ask me such deep theoretical questions about formal language theory that I did not have answers for. I quickly stopped teaching.

I now have a better sense of how learning takes place. I can think of a few subjects that I would like to teach. But I need a fair amount of time for preparing and teaching which I just don’t have now.

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time to write more! But quickly, I would like to learn about time travel so I can travel quickly into the future to avoid the nonsense that is going in our country right now!