Correlation and causation are two concepts that people often mixup in their minds. I must admit that I myself have been guilty about this, and it unlikely that I would ever entirely grow out of it as it is wired deeply into our psychology. Let me use this article to briefly emphasise what the concepts of correlation and causation means, some interesting stories that have emerged from people misunderstanding these concepts and an algorithm that attempts to find causal relationship using correlation information. Here is a story that I heard a professor of mine, Prof. Dr. Ernst-Jan Camiel Wit, tell us during a lecture. There was a school that was involved in a study to see if providing free mid-day meals to students, which they could choose to be subscribed to this or not. At the end of the study, both the students who subscribed to it and did not where tested for different health indicators. It was observed that the students who chose to have meals from the programme had poorer health...

Recently, I wrote a paper based on my master thesis project, which I had attempted to submit to AAAI conference. However, the attempt was futile as the reviewers did not really like it. It was quite interesting to see that at least some of the comments by the reviewers are contradictory with each other; it looks like I am not the only one who is lazy to read. Anyway, I decided to make it available for the public via arXiv and viXra. The following are the links to the same. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15191 https://vixra.org/abs/2310.0118 Originally, I had only planned on submitting this to arXiv. When I checked the submission portal a couple of hours after the scheduled publishing time, I saw that the article was put "On Hold" from being published. I searched for the reasons for the same, and I read in a few places that sometimes arXiv takes a lot of time to publish them once put on hold, and sometimes they just don't publish them at all. Therefore, I decided to submit it ...

I think it is for the best to start a separate blog under HexHoot. This will help me promote the project by making lots of content related to it, which could eventually drive traffic into the page. I really am betting on HexHoot taking off. I see a lot of potential in the project. Check it out:  https://blog.hexhoot.com/

A few days ago, I decided to make version release for HexHoot on GitHub, as I think it is important to differentiate something that is more stable and something that is under development. Having versions that people can download seem to be the best move to do the same. Following the same, I shared it with people over LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. One of the feedbacks I received over private messages was asking me to provide more information on what it exactly is and how to use it. Although all these information are written in the documentation and the website, it appears to be that people like to watch videos explaining the same. Therefore, in the past couple of days, I have been performing screen recording and doing voice overs. Interestingly, during this process, I found a couple of issues with the software, and I fixed those. The following is the video. Please do provide your feedback on this project. It would be lovely if any of you are interested in contributing to the same. Y...

I find that the domain name that I purchased on an impulse, hexhoot.com, would be the ideal name for the p2p social network; both of which I described in some of my previous posts. I have been working on it during my pasttime for about a month now, and I decided to make it opensource. You can have a look at the project using the following link: https://github.com/zenineasa/hexhoot I have attempted to follow all the best development practices as much as I can. I have written tests, and, enabled continuous integration feature in GitHub to run all the tests, lint and copyright checks for the code changes that is being made. I also have captured all the foreseeable tasks in a Trello dashboard. This helps me keep track of all the bugs that I have detected and all the important tasks that need to be completed. There are quite a lot of tasks left to make this bug-free and feature-rich. I hope I will find enough time and motivation to do the same in the coming days.

It has been a while since I made a blog post. I have been occupied by my academic work and I found using my past time on non-blogging related activities more rewarding. However, since it is summer break now, and I have mostly run out of things to do, I decided to get back to being creative and work on some project. Recently, I have been floating an idea about creating a social network that practically eliminates the requirement to have servers and databses. From a high-level, the idea is that users can host their profile on their phones and their connections can query data about the profile, send messages, form groups, and make wall post which can be viewed by anyone who is connected to the profile. I have seen a research paper summarising quite a few projects that has attempted to create something similar. However, I observed that these would at least have a server for authenticate a user; to tell confirm if the user is who he says he is. I believe this can be eliminated by allowing u...

I went into the university for the first time today. It is less than a kilometer from the apartment. I had to go there to finalize certain documents regarding my accomodation. I arrived at the university during the lunch time and hence I had to wait for a couple of hours for the office staffs to return. During the time, I roamed around the campus. The place is aesthetically pleasing, however, it is pretty small, especially since where I did my bachelor's, IIT Patna, had a campus spread across over 500 acres. I also went to the nearby Lidl to get a few frozen pizzas. I had that for lunch, evening snack and dinner. I had thought about cooking something for dinner, but I felt a bit lazy to do the same. However, I did modify the last frozen pizza by adding some mushrooms, pizza sauce and pepper. I think this could be a good trick moving forward - buy a few frozen pizzas and chopped vegetables from Lidl and fuse them. I think this would make the pizzas a bit more healthier and the effor...

I started off from Zurich at around 7.30 in the morning. There was a direct train to Lugano from Zurich HB. I vaguely remember my internet searches on the cost to travel from Zurich to Lugano via train to be about 30 CHF, but in reality, taking the ticket from the station, it costed me double of that. I don't know if the tickets have surge prices or something. Anyway, the journey was nice as I was able to see some beautiful places along the way and I think I had a chance to go through Gotthard Base Tunnel, which is the longest tunnel in the world. Getting down at Lugano station and looking out, I saw one of the most beatiful scene that I have ever seen. I am not sure if I could describe that properly in words, nor do I think the following photograph that I took justifies how it looked to me in person. I had to walk down a lot of stairs from here with the heavy bags that I had, only to realize that I made a wrong turn at some point. I was informed that instead of going back up, it w...

I started my journey last night at around 11 PM IST from India and reached Zurich at around 2 PM CET today. The journey in itself was a bit hectic as I have been carrying four different bags that weight abotu 43 kilograms in total. However, I find Doha and Zurich airports to be nice. Furthermore, I like the concept of the 24 hour pass that one could use to travel anywhere withtin the city via any mode of public transportation - trains, busses, boats! Tonight, I am staying at Aswin's place tonight. Aswin was my Junior at IIT Patna and he is doing his master's at ETH now. I shall be going to Lugano tomorrow as I wouldn't be able to collect the keys to my apartment if I reach in the night. I have also contact Anupam, my batchmate from IIT Patna, who is working at Google Zurich office. We may go out a bit to explore the city.