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New Year... New resolutions

2010-01-26T16:51:00.000-08:00

Hi,

I am back :-)

I have been working on a lot of cool projects recently and have been a lot busy. Let me start from the very beginning here:

I started out as a hardcore programmer and now I am here learning about enriching human experiences through designing interactions that are much more valuable to users. I am learning about how to overcome the short-falls of the technology by designing systems which are extremely pleasurable to use so that the user doesn't even notice the missing pieces.

I did a lot of projects in my first term, in the winter and then the following fall terms. Even this semester I am involved 5 team projects... wow! I just realized, that they are so many.

I guess talking about my projects here would be boring, so you can go to my homepage to read about them... but as a second thought I might describe the awesomeness of some of them :-)

One of the most recent one was a mobile application I worked on which encourages people to walk. We researched a lot of human behavioral parameters and came up with a little avatar called "mibo". The application basically visualizes a persons walking habits through the health of this avatar.We progressed through each of the design stages for this project, i.e. from contextual inquiry to lo-fi and hi-fi prototyping to the usability testing stage. This app was developed using the App Inventor IDE which was given to us by Google along with a couple of android G1 phones.

I other two really exciting projects which I loved working on were clustering users based on patterns in their search queries. I used AOL search log queries and represented the users as vectors based on the search terms they used. The search terms were parsed into a hash and then based on the user vectors, I created a bipartite graph of the users and their queries and then performed random walks on them...phew...
The other one was even more exciting. I used the tagged brown corpus and used a JAVA API to implement a part-of-speech tagger. I could give it any sentence and it would tag that sentence quite accurately.

OK, now back to the present. I am working on a couple of really cool projects and I would soon update my online portfolio with the details, but as a sneak peek have a look at the below prototype for one of the projects which aims at recommending apps to it's users.

Well it seems this post has become all about my projects which I didn't want it to be but...

I forgot to mention about a really cool class I am taking at the Ross School of Business, its about how businesses should focus on enriching user experiences by involving their customers, partners, employees, etc. in co-creating value for everyone. That's what I have been talking about since I joined my first job... They never appreciated their employees, and those thousands of bad experiences I have had with so many vendors and organizations, WOW, only wish their leadership team could sit in this class and observe the industry big-shots (Apple, Dell, Nike, Starbucks, Amazon, the list goes on...) using these tricks to lead the world.

Fall 2009

2009-12-05T12:06:00.001-08:00

I have been working on my NLP project for tagging running text with their Parts-of-speech. Also got a chance to dabble with python's nltk to perform a word sense disambiguation using maxent.

My android application is coming along great, if you would like to have a look at the prototype just point your android phone camera at the barcodes above and download my app. It's open source :-)

Another new semester

2009-09-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

I am probably the worst blogger in history. My blogs a few and far between and they say nothing that can be useful... anyways, I have started a new semester here at Michigan, lot of good stuff and plenty of bad stuff happening here. Its become really cold in Ann Arbor now, but it reminds me of the weather in Musoorie.

Have been working on sharepoint a lot and also HTML and CSS.

1st Semester done !!!

2009-04-25T10:42:00.001-07:00

Finally, I am done with the first semester here at Michigan. I am right now in my hyper-drive mode searching for an internship and would soon be posting all about my projects and the my experience during this semester. So keep watching...

Places I have visited, found it from Dan's blog :-)

2009-03-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

visited 3 states (6%)

visited 18 states (51.4%)

A lot is happening !!!

2009-03-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

I have been really busy with my assignments where I am doing text classification of documents using perceptron and naive bayes algorithm - WOW ! thats a mouthful. I met with Paul Tarjan, the creator of search monkey (Yahoo!). I also visited a career fair today, about which I am hopeful that I would land an internship. I am doing the netflix prize competition as my final project for informational retrieval class. I hope we land an internship...

First blog for University of Michigan School of Information

2009-02-20T08:31:00.000-08:00

Wrote down my first blog as the school of information's assistant recruiting officer, it's on the following link, if someone is interested:

http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~malhar/

Managing the IT Organization 1st Class

2009-01-12T14:04:00.000-08:00

Sitting here in room number 412 West Hall building in the school of information. Waiting for the Prof to start class. Prof seems to be nice, he praised my tablet PC :-) Well I hope I get to contribute something innovative to this class and the project. Well till now the experience has been a bit hectic hopefully I will be able to harness these numerous opportunities that are here. I'll let you know...

2008-10-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Hi,
Was watching antitrust today, watching thismovie feels like you know anything is possible in this world. This world is binary, you are either a 1 or a 0, alive or dead, there is no second place and I know the secret of how to get there...

Blogging

2008-10-08T19:49:00.000-07:00

Well I started off on the wrong foot, so lets start again.
I am Malhar Gupta, from India, right now I am working in TCS as ASE on MatrixOne product. My client is EATON and I am working in the manufacturing ISU (thats what they call a vertical here in TCS).
Now let me come to the point why I am writing this blog.
I am embarking on a journey, that I believe will make me learn a lot of things, and at the end of this journey I see a world where people live to learn and grow, and not live to earn money and do anything for money.
So I want this blog to be a platform from where people can come and learn from my experiences and even help me in reaching my destination.
Right now the next step in my journey is going for MS. I have apped to most universities in my list, just one is left.
While waiting for the calls, I am preparing for GMAT and also working towards a JAVA certification.
At work I am building a tool that would generate monthly reports based on the tickets resolved by our team.
I will try and update this blog on a daily basis, but please do forgive me if I am not able to.

Thanks,

Writing My SOP

2008-05-27T11:30:00.000-07:00

I have come a long way already in writing my SOP, oh by the way I am applying for a Master's degree from USA and I would be going there in Spring 2009. I will be posting my experiences with Princeton Review's counselling service and my application process. For now bye... and good knight...