Citation We know through countless books and media material that good habits are important. We are told this from our childhoods and we know of examples of good habits and the bad ones from all our readings. New Year is stereotypically the time when we have to resolve to make some of the first and […]
Category: Short Takes
Short Take: Continuous Computer Vision on Mobiles
The area of continuous computer vision algorithms that can run on mobile or embedded or edge or take your pick of resource-constrained platform, has seen a great outpouring of work. This post is a look at how this field has been marching along, seen from the eyes of a computer systems person, as opposed to […]
Short Take: Review Paper or Next New Idea?
Should you concentrate on writing a review article on an area of study that you know well or move on to the next new idea of yours, perhaps even a small new idea? The allure of going on to the next new shiny toy … errrr idea, is strong. To me there is a valued […]
Big Tech, Big Brother, and the Virus: A Toast
This is the second of a two part series. One form of information that can help us with the CV quarantine is data about crowding at the grocery stores. There are many companies that provide video surveillance at retail stores and if only they would aggregate and anonymize such information and share publicly. We can […]
Big Tech, Big Brother, and the Virus: The Cautionary Tale
This is part one of a two-part series. Big tech can provide surveillance, we know that by now. It can provide the surveillance at as fine a level as you want — at our individual level and at minute-level precision. The cell phone and the credit card, the two indispensable parts of our daily lives, […]
Short Take: Policy Issues to Beat the Autocracy of Autonomous Systems
In a previous post, I discussed, through a dystopian scenario, how autonomous systems can reduce our lives to one of hapless destiny. And in the last post, I discussed some design and development principles that we as technologists can follow that can help us avoid plunging into such dystopian scenarios. In this article, I will […]
Short Take: Beating the Autocracy of Autonomous Systems
In the previous post, I discussed through a dystopian scenario, a manifestation of how autonomous systems can reduce our lives to one of hapless destiny. I believe that we as technologists can develop technologies with some guiding principles that can help us avoid plunging into such dystopian scenarios, under most cases. I also believe that […]
Short Take: The Autocracy of Autonomous Systems
Autonomous systems are all around us. To large parts of the population, they are like the mythical creatures of yore of great power, great knowledge, and great control over us. Some in the wide world ask with growing consternation: “Are we still going to be in charge? Are we still the driver at the wheels, […]
Short Take: Big Data and IoT in Practice
Citation Beyond the tremendous level of activity around big data (data science, machine learning, data analytics, … take your pick of the term) in research circles, I wanted to peek into some of the use cases for its adoption in the industries that deal with physical things, as opposed to digital objects. And draw some […]
Short Take: Summer Travel
Citation For many academic researchers in the science and engineering disciplines, summer offers the chance to travel far and wide, for rejuvenating research contacts with colleagues and for conferences. It does help when the venue for the travel is a off-the-beaten-path old university town in Europe, rather than … just to pick a place at […]
Distant Whispers from an Academic Engineer's World 