Mumbai Blasts- Any Solutions??

Yet again there were blasts in Mumbai yesterday, many dead, many more injured and today life in Mumbai gets back to 'normal'. Having people very close to me in Mumbai, I know the whirlwind of emotions any heart having loved ones in Mumbai goes through, whenever a new terror attack surfaces. Resilience of Mumbai has been a quality often admired but is this resilience bordering towards nonchalance? Should we just sit back?

Who is to be blamed? Maybe, the government or maybe the people themselves, I do not know.....

What can be done?

Maybe one of the feasible solutions to reduce the terror attacks is to reduce the commotion and chaos in the crowded areas. Is it not possible to have better organization? For example have organized queues instead or unorganized crowds? Organization would lead to easier detection of aberration and suspicious activity. This is something, we as people can contribute to. This would also help probably to detect aberrations/suspicious things and activities automatically; because frankly, even if we have CCTVs in crowded areas, given the sheer density of these crowds makes manual detection of suspicious activity prior to a impending mishap well nigh impossible.

The bombs have to be hidden and whenever there is clutter, things (read bombs) can be easily hidden.
Therefore probably reducing the litter and clutter would also help, making the detection of suspicious things easier. Also, a rule can be enforced , something like 'everyone must keep his/her belongings close to himself/herself' , so that unattended things can easily be detected and handed to officials. Reduction of clutter, increase of cleanliness and clear association of what belongs to whom would lead to lesser scope to hide things (read bomb). Maybe government should take littering more seriously and maybe even impose a serious fine like Singapore.

We know places which are targeted- places which are epicenters of business or tourist activities and are crowded, places which when affected would have reverberations and repercussions felt in the entire country and the world at large.
Therefore another solution to possibly reduce these attacks is to have checkpoints through which every person has to go before entering these crowded areas something like what happens in airports. If we can have it in airports, why not in markets? Also having randomized checkpoints might help, some like what a group at USC has been helping the security officials at LAX with.

The disturbing timeline of terror attacks in Mumbai (and Pune) reads something like:
12 March 1993 - Series of 13 bombs go off, killing 257
6 December 2002 - Bomb goes off in a bus in Ghatkopar, killing 2
27 January 2003 - Bomb goes off on a bicycle in Vile Parle, killing 1
14 March 2003 - Bomb goes off in a train in Mulund, killing 10
28 July 2003 - Bomb goes off in a bus in Ghatkopar, killing 4
25 August 2003 - Two Bombs go off in cars near the Gateway of India and Zaveri Bazaar, killing 50
11 July 2006 - Series of seven bombs go off in trains, killing 209
26 November 2008 to 29 November 2008 - Coordinated series of attacks, killing at least 172.
13 February 2010- A bomb explosion at the German Bakery in Pune killed fourteen people, and injured at least 60 more.
13 July 2011 - 13 July 2011 Mumbai bombings

It is time we should stop blaming others and maybe do something about it ourselves- collectively. As the maxim goes "United we stand....."!!

Jai Hind!

Why G+ may die a gradual death....

Well after the initial gold ruch for g+ invites, the buzz seems to die down.
Why g+ might not sustain?
1) One of the coolest features of g+ was group chat and now with FB aping that with the help of Skype , g+ loses a crucial brownie point.
2) FB already has a user base of over 750 million users, creating such a huge base for g+ is difficult and takes time. In the meantime, if FB incorporates the coolest features in g+, then shifting to g+ would not be worth the effort.
3) Another cool feature in g+ are the circles. But creating circles manually is time consuming. Also, friendships and communities are not discrete but have a gradation. For example, my sister might belong to my family circle. Since she went to the same school as I did, she would also belong to my school friend's circle and would also belong to a sub-circle of school friends who I am particularly close to. Would'nt adding the same person to different groups be a lot of unnecessary hard work? Instead of having circles, if we could create a hierarchy of overlapping circles, that might solve this problem.

These are some of the things that google needs to look into for g+ to grow as big as Facebook.

Musings on SOCS2011

SOCS doctorial consortium and the workshop thereafter have been interesting learning experiences for me. With this enormous influx of interesting ideas, I needed sometime to collect my thoughts.


I am a Ph.D student working on social computational systems. Though I am in my fourth year, I still am a baby in this area of research. I would not go into the details of my research, except that YES! social media plays an important part in it. I was kind of disillusioned seeing Senator Coburn's take on social media. Mind you, every grad student thinks that his or her is THE groundbreaking research that is going to change the world. So the obvious question in my mind was "Is this how the world thinks what I am doing?" I should add that I belong to the computer science community, and I should say that computer researchers (esp. the young grad students (read: my friends)) have been a bit cynical of social computation during
"intellectual" computer sc. grad student conversations (ref: PhD comics), and this report just added fuel to this heated debate.



This workshop has helped me to collect my thoughts and maybe understand social computation better.
It just struck me that during the panel for inter-disciplinary research, Prof. Dey pointed out that one of the main problems in interdisciplinary research was the language barrier- people from medical science did not understand the language of the people from computer science. Is it possible that people dealing with social computational systems, though inter-disciplinary, are already developing into a community of their own? In this process, they might be developing a culture and language of their own. In the culture of this community, we realize the complexity of games like WoW or Farmville. However, we must remember that the people outside this community are just getting a glimpse into the community. I can almost imagine a cynic as a child peeking into this community through a window and catching words like "Farmvile", a word which he knows and associates with frivolity and through associative learning, attaches this attribute to the community studying "Farmville". I feel that some of us are still so blinded by the sheer complexity of machines that man has created that we tend to underestimate the power of the man that created the machine (add thousands of these and hola! you have a complex 'crowd' computing system more complex that any cloud computing system).

What are your thoughts?