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Welcome. Vanakam. Namaste. |
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Hiya there! My (full) name is Pradeepkumar Ravikumar. Since people start getting that morose glaze in their eye after the first few syllables of my full name, I generally introduce myself with a much more ergonomic 'Pradeep' or even 'pradeepr' [pradeep Aar] as many friends call me.
I am a PhD student in the Machine Learning Department [MLD], School of Computer Science [SCS] at Carnegie Mellon University [CMU]. I did my undergraduation from the Computer Science and Engineering Dept [CSE] at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay [IITB], wherein I worked in the Laboratory for Intelligent Internet Research [LAIIR]. Before you start muttering darkly about the excessive use of acronyms above and start thumbing through the yellow pages for the Association for Acronyms Abuse Anonymous [AAAA], allow me to steer your attention to other important matters - such as what is 'RESEARCH' the acronym for. I'm supposed to be doing this RESEARCH thing, but if only people could tell me what it is the acronym for...
I'll be graduating at the end of Summer 2007.
Artificial Intelligence [AI] is an extremely interesting field, not only because I'm working in it, but also because it intersects with many fields -- Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Philosophy...
We humans proudly talk about the difference
between consciousness and an automata mechanism, and how we are superior to
any machine. Are the concepts of 'free-will', 'art' et al antithetical
to the concept of a 'mechanism'? In this very interesting article, Prof.
Manuel Blum defines consciousness as follows:
An entity is conscious relative to a
given environment if
1. it has a model of that environment,
2. it has a
model of itself as a free agent capable of choosing from among a palette of
choices in that environment,
3. it can make predictions based on the actions
it (freely) chooses to make for itself in that environment, and
4. it can
learn from its mistakes -- to improve its predictions.
Activities
In spite of this, I have gone ahead and posted a few albums -
