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GMe
Originally uploaded by _Shriram.

Exciting, Exciting, Exciting news. I went to Google in California for a final interview! Sorry for keeping this news secret. The process started a month ago with a bunch of telephone interviews. The final interview went very well and I expect to hear a positive reply very soon.

Unfortunately, I can not speak a lot about my interview. However, my impression of Google's campus and Silicon Valley in general is that its breath-taking, and picture perfect! I loved being there and I expect to hear back pretty soon from them. You would hear about their final decision here pretty soon!

On tuesday, I flew to San Francisco. San Fran is an awesome, awesome place. I always wanted to see the golden gate bride. When I was finally there, I had a sort of unbelievable feeling; Imagine this, in the morning I was driving my old car on the rural interstates of Iowa (I drove to Cedar Rapids to take the flight), and in the evening I was taking a stroll on the Golden Gate Bridge. I will post the pictures in a couple of days here thru flickr.

There is more news: I presented and defended my thesis on Friday. The presentation was super successful. I didnt expect it to go that well :) Anyhow, later that day the International Student Office at UNI had the Spring Farewell party to departing students. I loved being there at that party. It is however sad to know that I am going to miss a whole bunch of people that became so close to me. Pictures of this party came out awesome and I will post them here pretty soon.

I will post more news and details about all the exciting news in the next couple of days.

Until the next blog,
Au Revoir!

"San-Tonyo"

I was in San Antonio, Texas on Wednesday and Thursday. Great city, nice weather, and great food. Food: I loved the "Tex-Mex" stuff. Tex-Mex, as you can guess, is a mix of Texan and Mexican cuisines. Pretty darned interesting, as a texan would say! Weather-wise, the people over there described a 85-degree weather as "mild" spring weather! Huh, it felt good to feel some warmth in the wind - a thing that I long forgot after leaving India :-) I did not get a chance to visit anything although I wanted to visit The Alamo and downtown. I could just get a glimpse of these places from my car and I cared enough to click some pictures. I will post the pictures here in a couple of days.

I was there in San-tonyo (I found locals pronouncing the city's name this way) to visit the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). They are a research organization affiliated to Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the Texas A&M University. The purpose of my visit is an interview for a Programmer/Analyst position. This was the final interview after a couple of telephone interviews. They flew me down there, paid for my air tickets, rental car, hotel, and food. Not bad, ha! The interview was rigourus, very rigorous. Also, during the day, I presented my thesis. This was sort of a full dress rehearsal for my thesis defense, scheduled for next Friday (29th April 2005). It was a great opportunity to dicuss a number of things, solve interesting problems, and talk to great people working for TTI.

Overall, I had a great feeling that the interview went well. I could say it from the way they were suggesting me to start looking for apartment there, they way they were showing me "my" office space, etc. This afternoon, I got a call from them informing me that I got selected for the job. This is surely a great news considering that I will be done with my master's in a week's time! I will get the official offer letter in mail next week.

I have another exciting offer from "another" place. I will write more about it toward the weekend. I will then have to decide whether to take this job or not, even though at this point I am definitely inclined to take the job with TTI - a texas state government job, with good benefits, and an OK pay. What say you ?

Until the next blog,
Au Revoir!

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Tiger Countdown: A Week!

Author Me!

Continuing the trend of a flurry of our paper acceptances for various publications, today I have got much sweeter news! Yup...Our proposal for a book chapter has been accepted!! As I mentioned earlier, this would be my first major publication. Our contribution to the book is a broad discussion on spatial decision support environments and examining a case study of developing a Web-based Intelligent Spatial Decision Support system. Boy, I am very excited about this opportunity. And so, Author-Me will be busy the next few weeks preparing the chapter, alongside the other research papers that I need to finish.

Until the next Blog,
Au Revoir!

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Tiger Countdown: 12 days

AMCIS

Last month, we presented a paper for Americas Conference on Information Systems, to be held in Omaha, NE. Got informed today that our paper has been accepted. Sweet! I think we might need some minor improvements on the paper that was submitted. (This is generally usual; the papers are normally edited/changed based on the reviewer panel's comments). One more thing to add to my to-do list, and of course to my resume :-) The paper that we presented is about the lessons that we learned during our research of developing a Web-based spatial decision support system. We combined AI (Expert Systems), GIS (Internet Mapping), and Web technologies (RSS, XML, WSDL, etc). My thesis is based on this research.

I am planning to post some information about my thesis along with an abstract on a separate blog entry. It should be out in the next couple of days, I assure. Hope you are having a great rainy weekend!

Until the next blog,
Au Revoir!

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Tiger Countdown: 13 days

De Fence

And finally, here comes my thesis defense. I am scheduled to defend my thesis on April 29th (2005, of course!) at 2:15 in Sabin 23. I still have to write my abstract. I will put it up here once it is ready.

Lots and lots of work is stacked up. I finished writing proposal for a book chapter this evening. We are expecting to hear back a positive response from the editor. In that case, this would become my first "major" publication! My other paper abstract presented to Mid-Continent Transportation Symposium is accepted. I have to start drafting that paper (full version) soon. One more major task for me in the next couple of weeks is to finish the final report for Iowa DOT on my research project. Not to mention, I still have my thesis document to edit the drafts!

I am almost done with my final chapter just now. I am ready to pack em and send em off to Dr.Sugu and Dr.Wallingford for review. The graduate college then strictly checks for the APA compliance before I can finally get my Master's diploma. I will be traveling twice in the next two weeks. Next Wednesday, I will be off to San Antonio, TX. I will be visiting the Texas Transporation Research Institute. The week after, on Tuesday, I will be going to San Francisco, CA. The very next day I return from SF, I have to defend my thesis.

It is going to be a crazy couple of weeks ahead. I will try to put my abstract on this space very soon. Hope you guys are having fun!

Until the next blog,
Au Revoir!

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Tiger Countdown: 15 days

Tiger's Coming!

Apple has finally announced the release date for the next version of Mac OS, called Tiger. I have been waiting for this thingey for atleast 6 months now. Guess what he next step would be, buying that beautiful snow iBook with Tiger on it! Even my advisor, Dr.Wallingford, told me that he is waiting for Tiger to buy his iBook!

17 more days more for Tiger's arrival and I am all excited about it ! If you are interested in Mac stuff, please check out Apple's Tiger Website. Even if you are NOT interested, I assure you that you would fall in love with this baby!

Until next blog,
Au Revoir!

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Tiger Countdown: 17 Days

Pictures Added

Finally, Finally! I added some pictures from the Denver trip. Scroll down and you will see some to the right. Service provider: Flickr. These are just a very few, i mean a VERY few, considering the fact that we took 1200 + pictures! I will put some more pictures very soon. Hope you'll like these pics.

Until the next blog,
Au Revoir!

AAG@Denver

Last week, I was in Denver attending the conference of Association of American Geographers. The conference was a blast. It was a great example of the sheer breadth of Geography and its applications in almost every walk of life. I was mostly interested in GIS-based application architectures, Agent-based Solutions, Distributed & Internet GIS Architectures. A few of the interesting presentations were: Automated Graph-based path generation algorithm for routing UAVs, Schedule-based dynamic path finding algorithm for transit networks, Wavelet-based image retrieval techniques, and a couple of other agent-based GIS applications.

I also got a chance to attend several sessions on India. Here are some of the interesting ones: Annapurna Shaw from the Indian Institute of Management discussed the Metropolitan Restructuring in Post liberalized India. Andrew Harris spoke about how Bombay mills are being replaced by Mumbai Malls. Sanjukta Mukherjee of Syracuse University had an interesting presentation about the emergence of software industry in India. Kate Edwards spokes about the "Global Indian" and the Cosmopolindianism in contemporary India.

I presented my work on Friday. Got lots of feedback and even a suggestion that I should copyright the product and make money out of it! :) I will post a bunch of pictures from Denver here in a couple of days. Speaking of Denver, I throughly enjoyed the week-long stay there. We stayed right in the heart of downtown and so we had a chance to walk around and enjoy the sights. We also checked out Boulder and the Rockies. All through the week, the temperature stayed in the 70s. Even in the mountains, it was around 65s the day we visited. I kind of enjoyed snow with the temps in the upper 60s!

I had really good time out there with my buddies Andre and Sasha (They even made me go to the "Russian Speciality Group" meetings. HAHA). Andre and I shared the driving space; On the way up, Andre "took" Iowa and Colorado, and I drove Nebraska. On the way back, we took more turns. I have some enjoyable pictures all throughout the trip and I am excited to share them with you.

Back in Iowa, while watching news I learned that Denver was hit by a Blizzard on Sunday (today). All interstates were closed and flights cancelled. Huh, what a contrast to the "70 degree +" Denver that I saw yesterday to the "2 feet snow" Denver today. Quite lucky to make it back before the snow struck!

Until the next Blog,

Au Revoir!

Gambling and Iowans

Howdy! Well, its been quite a while that I had a chance to write one of these! Life's all occupied with school and work. One change here: I am back to Blogger. Update your links. I have deleted all the previous posts on this page to start afresh. Let us see if I can shed my percious lethargy and get this blog going!

This week, the preliminary results of a research project that I am involved are out. The project is for Iowa State Legislature. We studied the socio-economic impacts of gambling on Iowans. Iowa already has got about thirteen casinos and plans are afoot for planning more. There has been some discussion in the State legislature about approving these new casions. For more information, try to call/email/fax Iowa State Legislature. The preliminary presentation is available (as a PDF) here and the source page is here. The final report will also appear on this page. So if you care, keep tabs on it.

If you get a 404 or similar error, you can visit the Iowa Legislature's main page and click on "Committees" to your left, and then scroll 2/3 way down, and click on "Socio-economic Effects of Gambling on Iowans", and click on "Additional Information" halfway through.

It has been a wonderful experience working on this project along with my colleague Matt Voss. We provided the GIS part for the project and now he and I are masters of numbers (demographics and other statistics) related to Iowa. Want to know the neonatal death rate ? or K-12 dropout rate ? Sure, email me or Matt!

I will be off to Denver tomorrow for a conference. I will try to put some pictures here and make this blog look better than the dull dud it was before.
Until the next blog,
Au Revoir!