Monday, August 21, 2006

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??

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4 comments:

  1. Congratulations on the RA!

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  2. Firstly, congrats on the RA man. Academic life can be so much fun and believe me you have no clue how routine a professional life can get. Good.

    And I always wanted to mention it to for a long time. I have a very close friend of mine (a PU friend from NCJ B'lore) who did his BE (Telecom) from BMS. He is currently doing his Phd. in National Brain Research Institute, Gurgoan. In case you are interested I will get you both in touch so that you can share a wealth of Brainy knowledge :). Let me know.

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  3. Sure.. if he's into cognitive model fitting and is into mathematical/computational aspect of brain then that would be great.

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