---August Rush---

Day 27- " The month of myriad changes " (Monthstone reading: 11 months)

It is only when I write things down I realize that I have been making progress; slow yet steady.

I guess its alright to become impatient once in a while when so many things pile up in the 'to-do' list. It becomes extremely difficult (and impossible) to focus on only one task at a time without raising red alerts for other tasks. So you choose the good old round-robin scheduling for task management; Giving time to each task, and making all progress equally (though slowly) without raising concern for any task. The bad part is that the results of this 'slow and steady' progress do not reveal quickly at all. But the better part is, as long as you are being consistent, they do get revealed, and that too in all areas. So where am I leading you to?

Perhaps to better appreciate my situation, or empathize or to get a better understanding of your own situation...whatever may be the apt case.

August Rush...wonder if you have seen this wonderful movie showcasing the musical genius of a kid.? If not, let me recommend this to you. However, I have kept the name of the post more to do with the month and the sudden addition of innumerable things in my to-do list. Time seems to be slipping away and still so much needs to be done. However, there is one musical aspect to it as well; This month I was taught by Adit (my brother in law and guitar mentor) how to play 'One Man's dream' on the guitar. Though the piece is far from perfection, but I can play the piece in slow tempo with a good level of accuracy. That apart I have been getting my daily dose of action at the Olympics. It's such a thrill to watch even when your own country is not participating. Athletics, swimming, sync swimming, boxing, badminton, diving and a lot many more I was able to catch up on the telly. Seems like August would be a pot-pourri of sorts for me.

Anyways, before I sum up the past few days, let me briefly discuss the road-map and time-line to get you synced  with my progress:

Road-Map:

1. GRE (done)
2. University Selections 
3. TOEFL (Taken date for 19th)
4. SOP (one para done...expecting progress soon)
5. LOR's (Recommender's almost finalized)
6. Transcripts (waiting for the 1st one from college...should be there in a week)
7. Financial Documents
8. Visa Interview

Time-line:

• 31st July - small 2-day trip to Chandigarh. It was time to celebrate DD's (Deepak Dawar) masters admission in US; as he was scheduled to fly on 2nd Aug, the day was perfect!
• 1st week of Aug- Rakshabandhan celebrations@ Ghaziabad, A daily dose of London Olympics 2012 and a new and extremely important site I found out- courseera (brilliant initiative..it has immense potentials to revolutionize the education system)

Ok , now that we are in sync, let me discuss the relevant bits. This post I would be discussing about  my 'university selections' and a brief overview of 'online education'@ courseera.

Lets start with the 'University Selections'. These are the universities that I have identified which offer good courses in computer vision and also have professors with 'computational photography' as their research interest:

1) MIT
2) Stanford
3) Univ of Washington
4) ETH Zurich (switzerland)
5) Univ of Toronto (Canada)
6) UC Berkeley
7) Carnegie Mellon Univ
8) Geogia Tech
9) Columbia Univ
10) UC Irvine

My criteria for choosing a colleges is: 1) College has a well established Vision Lab; 2) College has a faculty who is actively teaching courses in the field of computer vision and computational photography. I believe that there are some good colleges in Netherlands, Germany and France as well which offer excellent options for computational photography, but I am still to explore those. For the other colleges, I generally write to the students and professors for guidance. That really helps in my decision-making.

While I was searching for info on computational photography and professors associated with that, I discovered an extraordinary site called coursera. This is a revolutionary venture by Stanford Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. The site offers online educational courses by the top professors from the top universities all over the world at an incredible price. What price you ask?? Well for FREE!!! Isnt that incredible?...I had my a-ha moment when I found and registered myself for the online course for 'Computational Photography' by Irfan Essa (GATech) and 'computer vision' by Jitendra Malik (UCB). The courses are generally around 5-8 weeks long. There are 160 online courses from which a person can choose. There are video lectures, weekly assignments and a final exam associated with each course and the successful completion of a course can also get you a certificate from the college/ prof.. This is something which I had always been looking for. If you are a student by aptitude, this site would be nothing less than 'wonderland' for you. With some refinements, this would definitely revolutionize (not that it has not already) the education system all around the world!

One last addition before I close this post. There are two technical blogs that I have started following (visible in my list) by the name of 'Onionesque Reality' and 'Computational photography'. The former is a tech-blog by a person called 'Shubhendu Trivedi' with a lot of handy information on a lot of technical topics, including a few on computer vision. For computer vision enthusiasts, I would recommend 'face-recognition using eigen vectors' and 'face-recognition in bees' from the blog. The other blog is relatively new with around 13 posts as of now, but seems very promising. Do check it out!

I will be back in another week or two to update here again. Till then, keep exploring! 

Thought cloud:  'Before leaving for USA, DD gave me some food for thought which I found very relevant, so sharing it here. He told me that the only university that truly mattered resides in the head and nowhere else; we can't seek the best outside because it lies within us.'