Paid to play...

Love your work and you will never have to work again.

Fortunately I always get to work with what I love...computers/technology. For the past one year, I have been working under Dr Howard, Dept of Psychology. It is really fun working on computational neuroscience. Specifically, I am into cognitive modelling. The work is great and I enjoy the *umph* element that i get from people when I mention Cognitive Science. Currently I am putting together a simulation tester (model fitter for the leets) based on Genetic Algorithm. The only sensible library available for free is GAUL, which is unfortunately in C. Well... its truly a nightmare to develop a high level application on a low level language. Past one year I was almost exclusively using C++, the STL made life a lot easier. After using C++, using C is like using assembly language with just 4 registers to play with. Anyway it took me a damn day to get the C based XML parser (libXML2) to work satisfactorily with the rest of the scratch pad code. Hopefully I will get the thing running pretty soon.

On a related note, Dr Du offered me RA'ship(which I obviously accepted). This fall I am taking Internet Security course under him. I will be paid to discover, exploit and patch vulnerabilities (SQL injection attacks, buffer overflow attacks, integer overflow attacks etc etc)... the stuff i like to do in my free time!! (but grad school never gives much of that)..now I will be paid for it. Since I cannot accept two employments, I will be doing an independent study under Dr Howard... so I will still be working with him, but as a student not an employee.

So this fall (and hopefully spring), I will be a Research Assistant... working on computer security and doing a study on cognitive science simulacra... and be paid for it.
Can life get any better??

Tags:Life, Technology