Anirudh Sharma

I usually cover my long distance travels by air- for it saves time, and is less tiring (and was affordable in the past).  Call it naivety or my callous attitude, but I completely forgot the fact that its hard to fetch a cheap ticket when your travel plans are made just a day in advance. Owing to recent price inflations and my last minute plans I decided to cover my return journey from Delhi to Hyderabad via train. The decision was taken a day before I wanted to return, i.e. 19th May, high time when there are summer holidays in India. The night before I stood in the train line, with my father and brother, to fetch tatkal tickets. The process is hard- the HTTP fetch request by IRCTC works like a lucky draw). Hence, my attempt ended up futile.  So I decided I'll jump on the train, painful decision-no tickets, no seats, just that. The beginning. I left my home at 7PM. Reached Kshitij's place. Had dinner there- met Surbhi, Sonia aunty and uncle there. Kshitij's mo...

This is the first time I am writing a personal experience that's not design/tech/tinker related on my blog. So bear with it :) I live alone in Hyderabad now unlike Bikaner and Bangalore where I had close to 10-15 friends around, anytime! I've recently become a social media aficionado both, on Twitter and Facebook. A behavior change that I saw happened in me when I quit my fulltime job at HP Labs and started dedicating fulltime on lechal(period after March 2012). The lowest spikes are the time when I was busy with Mozart project. I am busy now as well, probably starting-up makes you more expressive? Not sure. My interpretation- This is an in-house development stage and probably I am not meeting as many real people now as I used to. That's why I rant more, to the virtual world which is not real.    There is a fair relation between my work ethic and social media engagement and the relationship is mostly inversely proportional before Ducere...

Latest updates on development of Le-Chal shoe can be accessed here .

Here is an auto-rickshaw repair process I regularly notice during my visit to Kanakpura, Bangalore. An image of the interaction while the repair process is on: Image1 An image of the parts that are laid down during assembly and disassembly. The multimodal interaction of the repairguy with the engine above is natural, rich and can't get better and we're trying to replicate this through gestures and modalities such as touch/haptics etc. This is the holy grail as I feel. Image3 The interfaces around us are shifting hastily from CLI to more graphic and natural user interfaces. Where the graphic aspect helps bring the visual nature of the real world closer the the user's cognition, the NUI aspect makes the story fluid. We're surrounded by objects that are means of day-to-day interaction in our lives.  Image 3 (by Bret Victor )probably explains the importance of our interaction with them, and proves to be my inspiration for future work ...

The bumpy ride on the Bangalore streets triggered a thought the other day, why not log the data and analyse it later(whackily purposeless initially).  The desire to log is esp. a fallout of my recent stint with user studies dealing with data cleaning/analysis and deriving statistical results from it: formally two-way ANOVA tests, T-tests etc. and who doesn't love clean graphs telling a story :-) Without giving much thought, I tied my Macbook Pro equipped with SuddenMotionSensor(SMS) to the auto-rickshaw seat and used http://www.shiffman.net/p5/sms/ to log the X/Y/Z axis data in CSV format. I manually kept a record through a stopwatch about the potholes/pit occurrence during the 25 minute rick-ride. It was interesting to the see the outliers due to the sudden relative motion triggered jerks. Ankit and I plotted a few qualitative graphs out of the sampled CSV data(6731 datalogs). I matched the spikes with the manually recorded pothole/sudden-jerk data to s...

So the scratch bootcamp turned out to be fun during my 14 day break from regular research. We traveled 3 cities, 4 schools, and introduced Scratch Programming environment to 8-12 year old kids. Most kids were first time introduced to programming. The novel drag and drop based looping and the fact that other kids from around the world could re-mix, check out their projects,  excited them into coming up with their own ideas, and build them into something usable. The projects involved animations, adding interactivity, and using sprites. Tapan Sharma(student of class 3rd) volunteered and shared some of the projects online . I am highly confident of Scratch as a learning tool, and its induction in our education system, due to its learning-by-doing approach.

Thoughts after watching Final Destination series!