Research Papers, Scholarship Money, Research Leads and My Addiction to Drugs

3 days since my last post and much has happened.

1. I got a message on the 28th that 3 research papers I co-authored (2 of them were my own and 1 had my contribution) were accepted in the ICON conference. ICON is short for International Conference On NLP (Natural Language Processing). Although named International this conference is famous for Indian Languages NLP. It does accept works on Indian Languages but the theme of the conference is "how to make do when resources are scarce". There is a decent emphasis on linguistics. That being said this is a rather medium level conference and I was more or less certain of my papers getting accepted since I had already had experiences in submitting to the top level (Rank 1 and 2) conferences in the past. I won't act all smug and to be honest I am sort of proud (after many people told me that I should be) that I managed to get 3 papers accepted in one go.

2. The very next day I received my scholarship money from the Japanese Government Scholarship Programme called MEXT or Monbukagakusho (see here for more details: MEXT Scholarship. It might be totally useful if you want to study in Japan's top Universities..... I am in Kyodai, by the way). Can you believe that they are giving me 146000 yen (or 83000 INR or 1460 $) per month? If you ask me, that's a buttload (Yes, I will use profanities) of money. In India IIT Bombay used to give me like 11000 INR per month this is roughly 7-8 times that. I will manage to save up to 20% of this scholarship and the resultant will be used for some awesome times. I sure am pleased with this development.

3. Having been on a Research Paper reading spree (one per day atleast) ideas (good and bad both) have been spewing out from my mind like crazy. I have been working on intermediate languages for machine translation but the main problem is the removal of useless phrases. So I got to know that my senior in the lab has made use of cognates equivalence between languages which will fit well in my problems framework. For now it is as good a start as any.

4. I realized that I am a drug addict. In fact most of us have been addicted to drugs which our parents have been giving us for all our lives since we were children. It is not their fault since they have been doing the same. And recently I had to give up regular consumption of this drug which lead to lethargic episodes followed by slight depression. It was then that I realized that I have an addiction problem. This drug is even more powerful than cocaine and LSD and crystal meth but it does not known physical harm. So before your brain starts thinking odd things the drug I am talking about is tannin (caffeine for many others and sometimes for myself). I have been consuming tea for all my life. It is not that I have to but I need to consume tea to be optimal. Else I get sluggish and sort of depressive. I think I am slowly being weaned but it is going to be tough to get rid of 25 years of ritual addiction. It was not the cloudy and rainy days that used to make me feel low but the lack of tea (and effectively tannin) that did so. Anyways that's all for now.

More stuff coming up.... stay tuned.

The first month in Kyoto (Once again)

Almost a month done in Kyoto... AGAIN!

I was living in Kyoto last year when I got a chance to work as an internship student in Kyoto University (henceforth Kyodai ~ Kyoto Daigaku). I used to live in a different location called as Kitashirakawa (North+White+River). The new dormitory I am in is a bit farther away than the one last year but is much better equipped leading to my life being the most comfortable compared to the time I spent in IIT Bombay. By the way the new dormitory is named Satsuki and is located in Kamigyo ward of Kyoto city. The pin code is 602-8047.

So far I've been able to get a decent head start into my work which by the way is machine translation ( using computers to translate from one language to another ). My professor seems to be happy with my current progress and has suggested new directions. My professor's name is Sadao Kurohashi and he is one of the coolest people I have had the honour of meeting and knowing. It was all thanks to him that I have managed to return back to Japan. I shall write more on him at a later point of time. I've been reading a ton of research papers and the amount of knowledge that I'm exposed to at this moment is quite unbelievable but quite astounding and awesome as well. New ideas just keep popping into my head. All in all I think that I'm going to be able to handle whatever comes along my way.

I have also been attending Japanese classes which is a mixture of a revision of the Japanese that I have already learned along with newer vocabulary, Japanese Kanji characters and  sentence patterns. There are still so many things that I need to learn which I shall and one day contribute to the big picture.

I have managed to reconnect with my old friends in the lab who had interacted with last year as well as made some new friends. One of them in particular is Eugene (or Yevgeiny) a Belarusian who is both a gentleman and a scholar. One other fellow whose name is Yuichiro Machida has been most kind and helpful since the past one month, assisting me in purchasing my bicycle and Sim card for my mobile phone. I've also managed to reconnect with Yumiko (the daughter of Kimiko the daughter of Sumiko) who is for all intents and purposes my sister in Japan. I will not neglect to mention Fabien was most kind to me last year when I had come to Japan for the first time.

Since coming here I have had the opportunity to try out many new different kinds of foods as well as some of the foods that I enjoyed last year. I also managed to do a bit of sightseeing the most notable instance being the time when I visited Ise shrine. It's getting quite cold here but for now I'm able to manage and I believe I shall continue to do so. I also will have opportunities to do more sightseeing and even if it gets colder but I shall not hold back.

I should've started noting all my daily activities since a month before but I think from this day on I shall try to make a note of my daily activities as much as possible.

On that note today was rather uneventful but I managed to get in a decent amount of paper reading along with managing in easy Japanese test followed by an interesting research paper reading session conducted by one of my Ph.D. seniors. I was also suggested a couple of ideas which I intend to try without fail.

That's all for now.
This is me signing off.
Stay tuned for more.