The Cost of Privacy

UPDATE 4/24/2018 I am pleased to say that our paper was selected as a Meritorious Winner (one of the top 10%)!

Every year, the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP) hosts an international contest for high school students and college undergraduates where the participants get to work in teams of upto 3 to analyze, and propose solutions to open ended problems. COMAP releases 6 problems (3 of which are mathematical, and the other 3 incorporate interdisciplinary ideas) at the beginning of the contest. The contest itself takes place over 4 days, and at the end, the teams submit a 20 page report on their work.

The Number Guessing Game

Let’s play a game. I think of 5 numbers from 1 to 100. A friend, who has no idea what my 5 numbers are, then tells that you can pick a number from 31 to 60. You win the game if the number you picked is one of the 5 numbers I thought of. Assume that I had no idea that you were going to be restricted to guessing only a number from 31 to 60 (otherwise it wouldn’t fair!). What are the odds of you winning the game?

2018 Goals

Last year (2017), I had set three long term goals. It focused entirely on computer science. It didn’t entirely go well. Perhaps that could be attributed to the naiveness of the goals. This year, I will once again set three goals for the year. But, this time, I want to make sure that these are not focused only on computer science.

2017: A Retrospective

2017 was a long year, good nonetheless. I want to take a moment to look back at the highlights of 2017. Some of the things I cover here are the goals I set out at the beginning; some of my favorite books; the good stuff – research; and other miscellaneous things.

My Philosophy of Education

If you had asked me why I want to go to university, and why I am studying what I am studying, a few months ago, I would have replied with superficial answers like, “Get a job” and “I love mathematics”. But after taking the class Critical Encounters, my answer is completely different. This class made me rethink several aspects of life, and question who I wanted to be.

Feature Tracking and Optical Navigation

This article is a simplified version of the research report that aims at identifying and tracking craters in images for optical navigation in space. We first survey at existing image processing techniques. We then proceed to bootstrapping a deep neural network classifier with the help of TensorFlow Object Detection API and images from NASA’s Detecting Crater Impact Challenge. We then implement a preliminary tracking algorithm that stores images and computes mean squared error to detect if the crater has already been seen before.

Neural Networks on House Prices

In the previous article, we used linear regression to predict the price of houses. Then, we saw that this model does not find any non-linear correlations. The most fascinating thing about neural networks is that they automatically model any non-linearities present in the phenomenon. In this article, we will use neural networks to overcome that shortcoming.