What would you do?

A must listen, if not for you then for your children!

We have to listen ourselves and have to look inside of us to identify what we really want to do .... if money is not matter. Trust me, money will follow you!

Want to learn about ontology?

I found a very good page having some decent resources regarding ontologies. You can find at http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/Teaching.html

If you are not aware about ontologies then you can refer Wikipedia article here

Project Idea: Mining lecture resources

At PAF-KIET we have a shared network resource where each faculty place his/her lectures and other materials and probably each university has such kind of facility. What about text-mining of all such resources and giving a portal to students for searching any specific material over all resources. It might similar like installing Google Search on a machine but combining different DM techniques can help in order to identify the relationship of different courses to each other. For example, a graph showing link between two folders "OOP" and "DS" shows that content in both are relevant to each other ... such graph of all folders may give some interesting facts might a course of folder of CS linked with course folder of Engineering and etc.

Free Books and CDs/DVDs

Following books are available without any cost (FREE!) along with lot of CDs/ DVDs on first come basis. You can get books/CD/DVD from my office (PAF-KIET, Main Campus) from tomorrow and onwards

• Operating systems (William Stalling) 
• Windows 2000 Professional 
• Data Structure (Schaum Series)
• Developer / 2000: Build Reports
• Developer / 2000: Build Forms
• Let Us C
• HTML 3.2 Creating Cool Web Pages
• Vector Analysis (Schaum Series)
• Technology Leaders
• The Entrepreneurial Individual 

Please don't call/SMS/Email in this regard. I will be available in my office 

My two cents on "Cheating at Harvard, and in the "Real World"

Today I received an email from Dr. Irfan Hyder  having link of article "Cheating at Harvard, and in the "Real World"

Following are two paragraphs excerpted from article:

"In other words, focus less on the outcome and more on the process. A student who loves learning for learning's sake — for the challenge, for the fun of it — doesn't want to cheat. A student who has learned to love the process of learning will never be redundant, her labor never commoditized. It's the one skill that will serve us best in an economy that is uncertain, a world that is volatile, and a future that is anything but predictable. I don't know what hard skills I may need in 2030, 2020, or even 2013. But if I have learned to love to learn, I will be sure to acquire them."

And closing paragraph of article:

Yes, perhaps some of those 125 Harvard students cheated. But I would argue that the far bigger scandal is the way our nation's school system cheats our children of the education they need, every day, while too many adults stand by and do nothing.

Unfortunately in our case, for Pakistan and specially for Karachi, schools and universities both are corrupted and focusing on hard skills. In numerous discussion with Dr. Irfan I learned that one of the way to inculcate love of learning is encourage of doing by hand instead of just passing exams. But the other hands we also have deployed the tools to measure the efficiency of teachers instead of quality. Being a lover of processes, I believe having processes to measure the quality instead of efficiency may stimulate to change teaching methodologies of all educators.

At the other hand, I also observed that it is really difficult to separate "happiness" and "satisfaction" of a student. I believe a happy student will be happy until or unless can't feel any tangible loss (in terms of grade or marks) but a satisfied student must be one who understands importance and philosophy of being taught to him or her. Unfortunately, in my opinion, environment and culture promoting to go for "happiness" and become GRADE (not great) teachers or institutions.

Lastly, I have been using different methodologies to convey this to students but unfortunately still there are few which still prefer to go for marks and grades. It has been observed that in our culture where we follows the trends and most of admissions are due to influence instead of interest because of lack of career counseling opportunities. In result a teacher unable to develop his or her interest in subject because he or she is already convinced himself or herself that this is not his/her playground. I believe all those having wish for better students and quality education are obliged to do something at grass level and people in academia, specially associated with higher education institutions, are responsible to spread the words and force our education system to rely on quality instead of efficiency. 

Today's word: disgust

Disgust (noun): strong feeling of dislike
Disgust (verb): feelings of dislike

Ajmal kicks the ground in disgust (a line from commentary of CricInfo)

Today's word: Gutsy

Gutsy, gutsier, gutsiest (adjective) : Marked by courage or daring; plucky. [Source]

gutsiest move I ever saw [Dialogue from movie Top Gun]

Truth behind "Sesame Street Pakistan Loses $20 Million in U.S. Funding "

Recently a controversy triggered between USAID and Rafi Peer Theatre. Lot of things documented and published over the internet having lot of versions. There were no published or documented version from Rafi Peer Theatre until Talat did following program with them.

As this video is record in Urdu, for my foreign friends, Jawwad Fareed did a great job by summarizing this video in a blog post

Notes from Kough's presentation

Following notes are taken from a presentation "How to do good research, get it published in SIGKDD and get it cited" by Eamonn Kough

·         Must have a problem

·         Write before experiments (similar to literature review?)

·         Make sure you have real datasets (find the dataset available on internet or ask from peers / authors of other papers solving similar problem or generate dataset)

·         Start with simplest idea … convince yourself and then reviewer that this is simples idea

·         Don’t’ have solution? Try solutions from other fields …

·         Make problem simple by taking assumptions, publish early results and then comeback to original problem by removing assumptions one by one

·         Don’t believe everything written in literature is true … don’t trust until you test it

·         Make sure problem really exists

·         Paper must be written in self explanatory form with self explaining figures so reader should not be forced to think

·         Invest time on Title, abstract and introduction: a good introduction with good motivation is half of your success

·         Introduction must have following:

o   What is the problem? And why this problem is interesting (motivation)?

o   Comparison of your approach/methods with others in terms what other methods actually lacking?

o   Key components of your approach (basic idea how you got it) including basic assumptions and limitations

o   A final paragraph states structure of rest of paper

·         Ensure reproducibility, it will help to increase creditability of your work (and so more chances of getting acceptance) and more citation as well.

·         Don’t use phrase like attempt to, tries to, seems to …. Write in oblivious way

·         States why other approaches can’t work (related work) better is to apply other approaches as well.

·         Quote others’ paper:

·         Give mean or variance of results instead of actual values

·         Make good and clear figures: use direct labeling, color and thickness, minimize the details

·         Name columns of table appropriately instead of Method 1 etc. Also don’t use long significant digits

·         Always write your paper imagining the most cynical reviewer looking over your shoulder. This reviewer does not particularly like you, does not have a lot of time to spend on your paper, and does not think you are working in an interesting area. But he will listen to reason

Structure of Paper (division in sections is based on my understanding)

·         Title

o   Make a working title

·         Introduction

o    Introduce the topic and define (informally at this stage) terminology

o    Motivation: Emphasize why is the topic important

o    Relate to current knowledge: what’s been done

o    Indicate the gap: what need’s to be done?

o    Formally pose research questions

·         Related Work

o    Explain any necessary background material.

·         Proposed Algorithm/framework

o    Introduce formal definitions.

o   Introduce your novel algorithm/representation/data structure etc.

o    Describe experimental set-up, explain what the experiments will show

·         Evaluation and Results

o    Describe the datasets

o    Summarize results with figures/tables

o    Discuss results

o    Explain conflicting results, unexpected findings and discrepancies with other research

o    

·         Conclusion and Future Work

o   State limitations of the study

o    State importance of findings

o    Announce directions for further research

·          Acknowledgements

·          References

Imply value

The owner of a small company needed to get rid of an old boiler that his company had replaced with a shiny new one. Not wanting to pay disposal fees, and thinking that someone else could use it, he dragged it out onto the street and put a “Free” sign on it. To his dismay, a week later it was still there. He was about to call a disposal company when his foreman said “I can get rid of it in one day”.

The foreman replaced the “Free” sign with one that said “For Sale, $1,500”. That night, the boiler was stolen.

Found in presentation "How to do good research, get it published in SIGKDD and get it cited" by Eamonn Kough

Online (English) Writing Lab

Purdue university has a wonderful portal for students and instructors to access quality material related to English Language available at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/. The available material is in very simple form and aided with exercises as well.

As they mentioned on their site:

The Purdue University Writing Lab and Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) assist clients in their development as writers—no matter what their skill level—with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement. The Purdue Writing Lab serves the Purdue, West Lafayette, campus and coordinates with local literacy initiatives. The Purdue OWL offers global support through online reference materials and services.

I must recommend to all students and fellow, specially who has fear of incompetent writing skills like me :)

Project Idea: Windows 7 to-do gadget with sync

I have started using Windows 7 To-do list gadget once again and it is really useful to remind you to-do things immediately after you logged-in. But I lack a very important feature and unable to find any app that can accomplish this. I am curious to have a mobile app for to-do list that can sync with windows 7 widget and so I can set reminder on both side as well.

beware while quoting any Hadith

For simplicity, if Hadith is not quoted from Al-Sihah al-Sittah (six major hadith collections ) then I will not prefer to share or trust until discussed with scholar in person.

Please beware while sharing any hadith; having reference does not really mean authentic as much you assume.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Kutub_al-Sittah

Originally posted on Facebook

Yaar Ko Hamne Ja Baja Dekha (+ lyrics)

This is an excellent and heart touching song. I love the lyrics and voice of Abida Parveen made it unforgettable. I came to know this beautiful song by Ayesha Rafiq



You can lyrics at http://www.radioreloaded.com/tracks/?22557 but for convenience I am pasting lyrics here as well:

Manum Maanay Azmandi K Be Tonay Yaazdaanran
Ghum-e-choon To Naaz Ni NiGhum-e-choon To Naaz Ni Ni Behizaar Naaz-daranKohe-e- Afataab-e-chashman Wa Jamaal Toos To RoshanAger Astobazgeeram Bad Bay Chashm-e-raazgaaranYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Zahir Kahin Chupa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Momkin Hoa Kahin WajibKahin Momkin Hoa Kahin WajibKahin Fani Kahin Baqa DekhaKahin Fani Kahin Baqa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Zahir Kahin Chupa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Wo Baadshaah-e-takht NasheenKahin Wo Baadshaah-e-takht NasheenKahin Kaasa Liye Ghada DekhaKahin Kaasa Liye Ghada DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Zahir Kahin Chupa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Wo Der Leebaas-e-mashokaBer-ser-ray Naaz Aur Aada DekhaBer-ser-ray Naaz Aur Aada DekhaKahin Zahir Jahin Chupa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Aashiq Niyaz Ki SooratKahin Ashiq Niyaz Ki SooratKahin Ashiq Niyaz Ki SooratSeena Phir Yon Dil Jala DekhaSeena Phir Yon Dil Jala DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Zahir Kahin Chupa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaKahin Zahir Kahin Chupa DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja DekhaYaar Ko Humne Ja-ba-ja Dekha

Worst to identify how good one

In real life the definition of best is relative depending upon the maxima and minima defined for that problem. Like extreme points for pop musics could be different than art. But usually we compare with best in order to identify how good one thing like an art work may compare with work of Picasso to identify how good it is. I believe this is pessimistic approach as we always looking at only one extreme that is maxima. Why not we identify minima as well so we can say how not bad something .... and I believe this is optimistic approach.

I believe this could change our entire ranking systems. Why one should be termed as first or last. Why not we consider how not BAD instead of how good it is ... a thought for food