Since it was summer time, you would expect me to be free and hence go on a flurry of blogs. But then, the god of Machine Learning does not believe in the existence of summer. Or atleast our idea of summer. His/her vision of summer is to work like a madman because you have no other distractions like classes. That is why the god of Machine Learning decided to put the submission deadline of one of the biggest conferences in machine learning smack in the middle of the summer (The conference is by the way NIPS). Not that I have anything against this conference, but it is just that it is not something you would expect.
That is one of the reasons why I have been a bit lazy about writing on this blog. I had an excuse that I was working towards publishing in this conference. Well as usual, I spent a lot of time trying to do something contributive to submit. Then after a month of hard (apparently not hard enough) work, it turned out that we couldn't accomplish what we set out for - this just means I was not able to submit.
But my summer didn't end there. I had something else in store for me. I had the opportunity to do an internship at Google, Bangalore for the summer, and the Google people were 'googly' enough to accommodate my schedule (since I had to work on a submission). So I flew the day after my submission deadline.
I should give a detailed description of the flight which was via Paris this time but I don't feel like. I'll just mention that my stop over time at Paris was just an hour, and my flight left Atlanta 30 minutes late. Eventually we reached Paris half an hour late, and I literally ran to get to the next flight. But the good thing was that there were a lot of people that were connecting to that flight, so the plane was delayed a bit for us, and we made it to the plane in good time. Other than that the flight was pretty uneventful, and I was lucky enough to have nice neighbors in the flight. I reached the Bangalore airport around 1 in the night. The airport did seem a lot different, but it didn't strike me until I was in the taxi 10 minutes later that I found out that this airport is some 30 - 40 km from the city. But I did reach my place in an hour or so, and so ended my journey from Atlanta to Bangalore.
And the next day I started at Google, and I must say, Google does care a lot for its employees. Not that I am rooting for Google or anything (because there is a rumor going around that the world is going to be ruled out Mountain View in a few years), but I give them credit for what they are doing. And as the reputation goes, they do have a really good kitchen.
Being in Bangalore is awesome in some other ways too. I get to meet a lot of friends here. It is good fun.
Frankly, other than the unsuccessful paper submission, I have a full opportunity to make a great summer out of this. I just need to work hard and party harder. Just wish me luck with that :-)
