IEEE UK & Ireland Young Professionals participation in ICC 2020

 07 Jun 2020 04:00 PM to 10 Jun 2020 01:00 PM

The IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) is one of the IEEE Communications Society’s two flagship conferences dedicated to driving innovation in nearly every aspect of communications. In 2020, due to COVID-19, IEEE held its first-ever virtual ICC, originally scheduled to take place in Dublin, Ireland.

Initially, the IEEE YP UK and Ireland representatives were in charge of organising

• a session on Networks without borders, by Linda Doyle, Vice President for Research/Dean of Research in Trinity College Dublin
• a social event at Lansdowne Hotel, with local music by “The Irish House Party” 

Courtesy COVID-19, the participation of the affinity group was juggled to better serve the conference's needs.

On June 7, Daniel Martins, YP's South Ireland Representative, and Koushik Kumar Nundy, YP's Dublin representative were panelists in the "Volunteering for ComSoc" session, where they shared their experience with volunteering for IEEE, and how it has helped in both their professional growth, as well as the benefits it provides to the IEEE and STEM community.

On June 10, Koushik moderated a discussion with Lawrence Wong, Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, outlining the various tenets of "Writing Research Proposals".

Furthermore, Koushik and Daniel volunteered in the following session, to ensure smooth execution of the first-ever fully online IEEE ICC.

•  Fireside Chat with Andrea Goldsmith (Stanford) and Jeff Andrews (UT Austin)

Scare Quotes

Some statements simply are better if a certain famous person said them. ~ Gary Saul Morson

I have always been intrigued by quotes, despite their often half-baked oversimplifications of concepts, usually of life and love. The part that fascinates me most is the multitude of contradictions offered, usually by people on opposite sides of an argument, but not too rarely by comrades, or even occasionally by the same people.

Those that quote those that are quoted refer to such quotes that echo within their own thought chambers as a vindication of their already held opinion, where the quote's original intent may have been no more than a witty comeback.

Sometimes, more scarily, the quotee was trying to make quite the opposite point from the quoter.

Nowhere are these contradictions more on the nose than with famous quotations about quotations. Except for politics, maybe, but who wants to ramble about political wordplay!

Exhibit 1

(A) quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business. ~ A.A. Milne

Exhibit 2

I like a writer who is original enough to water his garden with quotations, without fear of being drowned out. ~ Henry Van Dyke

In retrospect, perhaps, this blog post was unnecessary, as the point has somewhat been made by a great author of our times.

Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting. ~ John Green

But then again, anything worth doing might just be worth overdoing!

Be careful--with quotations, you can damn anything. ~ Andre Malraux

The Home Depot Song

I have theorised that all songs are clandestine commercials.

Included here is a case study, outlining the hypothesis that Celine Dion's "Because you loved me..." is an insidious ad for Home Depot. I have outlined the first verse of the song with their corresponding merchandise here,

For all those times you stood by me
	For all the truth that you made me see
For all the joy you brought to my life
	For all the wrong that you made right

Just so there is no doubt that this is happenstance, here's a few more examples, because, SCIENCE!

You were my strength when I was weak
	You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
	Lifted me up when I couldn't reach

References: [1] http://www.homedepot.com [2] Because You Loved Me - Celine Dion - YouTube

"From Engineer to Entrepreneur" - Event Report

On September 11, 2017, a talk, titled "From Engineer to Entrepreneur" was organised by the Dublin chapter of Founder Institute and the UK and Ireland chapter of IEEE Young Professionals. The event was kindly hosted by Google at their European HQ in Dublin.
I was fortunate enough to accompany Matthew Ellis on behalf of IEEE YP UK&I.

The wonderful audience

The event started off with the wonderful Patricia Scanlon, CEO of Soapbox, who walked us through her journey as a researcher, an intra-preneur and then an entrepreneur.

Patricia discusses how she scours the earth for the best talent

Her definitive work on voice recognition in children sits at the core . She shared her stories about the trials and tribulations that come as oft-ignored baggage with the entrepreneurial journey. Her voice recognition work at Columbia University, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent(Bell Labs) and Trinity College Dublin provided for a compelling story, and prepared her for the road ahead, where her work at Soapbox has acquired several laurels, including a $1.2 million seed funding earlier this year.

The old adage that children are often seen, not heard, is brought back into harsh focus, when we realise that the vast array of voice-recognition and control platforms, from Google's Assistant to Amazon's Alexa, are so attuned to adult voices, but perform horrendously when presented with a child.

This is the founder you have been looking for...

We also got a peek into the investment opportunities and collaborations she was able to leverage, including support from Enterprise Ireland and the spinning-in of Soapbox Labs into the Learnovate Centre at Trinity College Dublin.

She spoke about the myriad relationships, amongst all of the stakeholders, the investors, the employees, the clients and collaborators and how it all comes together to solve anything from a customer pain point to core speech engineering issues, or to even ensure that there was always money in the bank for keeping the lights on. 

While I was writing this article, Patricia showed up on the news again for her talk at InspireFest2017!

Patricia was followed by the delightful Neal O' Gorman.

Having graduated from Electronic Engineering in University College Dublin, Neal has gone on to become a serial entrepreneur with Artomatix being the 3rd company he has founded – the first was acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2006. His second company was a social games company that had an acquisition offer from one of the top social games companies in the world.

Neal is also the Director of the Dublin Chapter of Founder Institute.

Neal spoke about the challenges faced by engineers, when they set off on an entrepreneurial path.

Neal talks about the Founder Institute

Some interesting misconceptions are widely observed when we look at why people want to get into the "start up game". They range anywhere from being a "get-rich-quickly" scheme, the ability to control your hours, to "being your own boss".

Neal stressed on the importance of perseverance, and abandoning your comfort zone. The zero salary periods, the work-life balance, and need to be planned and accounted for.

He mentioned how being away from home helped in his journey, as social and personal commitments and startup duties are always competing for the same scarce resource that is time.

He spoke about not getting too attached to an idea, identifying the right problem, building the right team, having that insane degree of commitment.

"Few startups succeed, and fewer ever turn a profit" - Neal

Once the speakers were done, the audience got a chance to mingle with each other and get 1-on-1s with the speakers.

Neal and Patricia comparing notes!

Regaling after!

Overall, the event was well received, and will hopefully prove valuable to the attendees planning to set upon their own entrepreneurial journeys.

About IEEE Young Professionals
IEEE UK & Ireland (UK&I) Young Professionals is an Affinity Group for electrical, electronics, software and computer systems engineers that have graduated in the last decade. IEEE UK&I YP is a professional network that assists with transitioning from university into the professional world.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community to innovate for a better tomorrow through its more than 423,000 members in over 160 countries, and its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. IEEE is the trusted “voice” for engineering, computing, and technology information around the globe.

About Founder Institute
The Founder Institute is the world's premier idea-stage accelerator and startup launch program.

Based in Silicon Valley and with chapters across 170 cities and 60 countries, the Founder Institute’s mission is to “Globalize Silicon Valley” and empower talented and motivated entrepreneurs to build companies that will create one million new jobs.

The Founder Institute was founded in 2009 by Adeo Ressi and Jonathan Greechan. It is operated out of Palo Alto, California.

10.43252003274489856000 reasons why "X reasons Y" lists are boring

The barrage of sites with mind-numbingly stupid content and clickbait titles is neither new nor exhilarating.

However, ad-mongering, for the lack of a better word, and short-shorter-shortest attention spans of people, when paired with the ubiquity of technological access has made them garishly visible and overwhelming, sometimes to the point of frustration, and oftentimes, far beyond.

Here's a list of reasons why these word-bundles posing as "articles" are a force of evil. Also, the mandatory "You won't believe number 7!"

1. Their titles offer little to no information about the actual content.
2. Their content is usually unnecessary at best.
3. Oversimplifications are not just made and brushed over, but celebrated.
4. They are mostly opinion-pieces, with the opinion being "I am better than you" or "Yoohoo, You get a stereotype, you get a stereotype, everybody gets a stereotype! There's enough for everyone."
5. The primary purpose of these articles is to entice with a title that tugs at heartstrings of potential readers, so that their clicks help earn ad revenue.
6. The secondary purpose is to reinforce biases, stereotypes and self-indulgence.
7. For some reason, a vast section of the populace believe other people share their biases and would love to read fluff pieces of no consequence.
8. Most use cringeworthy images/gifs they don't hold the rights to publish.
9. The authors are often deluded enough to think they have invested this new awesome format no one ever though of.
10. The grammar is, well, horrendous on most occasions.

Notable trivia:

• This post has the highest number of quotes I have ever had, scare or otherwise. If one chooses to be pedantic, yes, I mean quotation marks. There, there...
• The list is 0.43252003274489856000 items shorter than the title. So Sue Me.
• 43252003274489856000 is the total number of possible combinations on a standard Rubik's Cube.

P.S. I think "notable trivia" is an oxymoron, but I've been wrong before. 

Dynamite!

"What are men to rocks and mountains?", Jane Austen had once said. I wonder if she might've reconsidered her position, if Alfred Nobel and Julius Wilbrand had lived and worked while she was still around.

It wouldn't be a huge ask given how early she died. Most of her work has aged tremendously well, and we could have had more.

Well, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Not the cricket kind, though.

Wind of Change

As I was struggling to sleep today, I powered up my netbook to glimpse through the minds of a billion other countrymen through some of their blogs. I have always felt that any pilot survey can be more or less generalised if a respectable sample size is used. I thought of going through the blogs I have followed most diligently through the years.I was, however in for a surprise when I saw that any of those blogs(around 20 in number) had either  been ignored completely or given little attention in the past few months. Starting from classmates to engineers to scientists to people in the literary field, I thought I had a reading pool that could never quite dry up.Guess I was pretty wrong out there.

Although I had picked up a few new and interesting weblogs along the way(Sayesha, Twisha, Knotty knight, Soham, among others) with the spattering of a few FOSS blogs(cyberorg, zonker, o-reilly, helios, ...) but familiarity is a feeling which is very difficult to compromise with. On a somewhat disappointed note, I caught up on my reading using Brief, another of those RSS readers the guys came up with for FF3.5(FOSS rocks, again). Although there were beautiful pieces(both tech and linguistic), I felt myself yearning for writings I had grown up with in my cyberlife.

As I swept through Jua's blog, I found a promise for more stories somewhat hollow given the fact that no posts had come up in over three months. Shrink's quips seemed missing, with 2 months of abyssmal emptiness. The FOSSmeister  Debayan's post, rare as they were, had become too FOSSy for comfort, with his stories of college life lost in the misty travails of time. Roshan too, in this respect was too FOSSy, but thats what he's always done, so full marks for consistency, not to mention quality. The 'new bloggers' Shouvik , P*da & Jiten had self confessedly underfed blogs. Sherry never quite switched over from FOSS to VLSI, getting left strangled in between. That left me with the now defunct Abhi squared [Kelasis][Nash], who would find it difficult to remember when either last posted.

I dare not chastise any of the aforementioned people for their inactivity, for to be fair, they make better use of their time than I do, and I have myself blogged in grossly inadequate quantities over the course of this year. But the mind yearns for those eagerly awaited and diligently followed blogposts that never fail to bring a smile to my lips or a wrinkle of thoughtfulness to my forehead, as the situation might call for.

So, dear blogosphere of mine(both erstwhile and current), do not abandon me. Post for the sake of your readers, if not for your own.

P.S. The links/names included are suggestive, not exhaustive. Someday I will post a fuller list of what I read in cyberspace.