Just. Awesome.
Posted by: Sunayana on: October 9, 2009
- In: CHSBism| feminism| women
- Leave a Comment
Update+vacation
Posted by: Sunayana on: July 24, 2009
So, it looks like I’m going to be in Hyderabad till mid-October at least, I’ve decided to continue working here. I’ll take a one month break later to apply to grad school.
I’m heading off to Bangalore tomorrow for a week, mainly to meet my lovely cousin Madhuri, who is going to the UK for a masters. This trip couldn’t have come at a better time, I really need a break.
After coming back, I’m going to be insanely busy, so I’m going to stay away from Twitter, Facebook, GTalk and the blog for a while. Will be back in a month or so.
Book Wishlist
Posted by: Sunayana on: July 17, 2009
I’ve decided to gift myself a couple of books every month.
To read:
Bonk by Mary Roach Done! 
Code Craft by Pete Goodliffe
Quirkology by Richard Wiseman
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow Awesome. Highly recommend this one too.
Genome: The Autobiography Of A Species by Matt Ridley (I’ve wanted this one for years!) Still to read.
To collect:
Animal Farm by George Orwell
1984 by George Orwell
The Best Of Satyajit Ray by Satyajit Ray
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham
Sweet Valley
Posted by: Sunayana on: July 14, 2009
Sweet Valley High, along with the less popular Baby Sitters Club were my favorite series of books back in middle school. I was never a big fan of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but they were definitely less damaging than SVH. Some of the Baby Sitters Club books were alright, although in hindsight most of them were really, really dumb.
Sweet Valley had its own variants – Sweet Valley Twins (which were about two identical blonde twins in 6th grade), Sweet Valley High (the twins and their friends in high school) – for which the recommended reading age was 12+ and Sweet Valley University – recommended reading age 14+ (yeah, like we followed that!). All of my friends in school read Sweet Valley (it seems to be more popular among girls who grew up in Ahmedabad, probably because Crossword had shelves full of them) and you weren’t considered cool if you didn’t.
The SV High series was basically about boys, popularity, cheerleading, cliques, stupid mysteries, accidents leading to comas and amnesia, kidnapping etc. The plotlines (?) were very badly written, with the ghostwriters not seeming to have read the other books in the series, but then, I admit, I read the books for the romance. I hadn’t discovered Harlequin then 
What is disturbing is that the new SVH, released in 2008, seems to be even worse than the crap we read in school. Here’s an excerpt. The entire series was re-written to make it more up-to-date (mobile phones, Internet etc.).
Jessica, the twin who is interested in boys, clothes, cheerleading etc. seems to have become even more bitchy and manipulative. And now the twins have perfect size 4 figures, instead of the size 6 figures they had in the older versions. The number of times they use the word ‘perfect’ in the excerpt itself is scary.
I’ve been hearing a lot about Gossip Girl, which is supposed to be much edgier than SVH or SV University, but I haven’t read any of the books. For anyone between ages 13-15, I would recommend Judy Blume novels instead of trash like Sweet Valley. The Dairi Burger is one of my favorite blogs where the extremely talented author is doing a hilarious recap of SVH books and other Young Adult novels.
Update
Posted by: Sunayana on: June 22, 2009
So, just over a month for my internship to get over. After that, I plan get back to Gujarat to finish a couple of half-done projects, which should keep me busy for at least three months. Then, it will be time to apply for grad school. Scary!
I’m happy here because I’m being productive, at work and during my free time. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to read for a long time. I’m surrounded by bright people who like their work, which is always fun.
I’m also doing a few things that I don’t usually do, like charcoal drawings
For all the stationery lovers out there (Riddhi!), if you ever come to Hyderabad, go to Himalaya Book World at Panjagutta. Highly, highly recommend. Panjagutta is a nice place, if you like what I like (clothes, jewelery, books, stationery, wandering around).
Being 22
Posted by: Sunayana on: June 5, 2009
I really miss my family and friends today. I think this is the first time I’m not at home for my birthday.
Thank you for the lovely surprise party on 5th May. Can’t believe it has only been a month! I miss you all like crazy.
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Update: I had a lovely birthday, thank you everyone 
:)
Posted by: Sunayana on: June 2, 2009
This is just a quick post to say that I am extremely proud of my cousin, Darshan, who has managed to get excellent results (80%) in his Class X Board exams.
Darshan is soon going to be one of the best cricketers India has produced . He spends most of his time attending cricket camp and playing matches. He has a very busy schedule, so kudos to him for managing to balance cricket and academics so well.
Of course, a lot of credit must go to his parents as well, who have encouraged him to continue playing cricket and not fallen for the marks-are-everything trap that most parents do, especially when it comes to the X and XII Board exams.
Congrats to all of you!
TED India
Posted by: Sunayana on: June 1, 2009
The Zigglebottom effect
Posted by: Sunayana on: May 27, 2009
- In: Speech/NLP| ai| computers| work
- 2 Comments
Over the past few days, I’ve been working on creating a (fairly) new kind of Text-to-Speech system which should work well with Indian languages. This has been done in the past, and we are trying to re-implement it and see how it works for a commercial-quality system.
Now a couple of very well known and respected Indian universities (you know which ones they are) have created this kind of TTS system and have published a bunch of papers about it. However, they have not released their code anywhere. The papers do not really elaborate enough about the algorithms they have used and some of the assumptions they have made for a person who is very knowledgeable about TTS systems (not me) to be able to re-implement this kind of system.
Now I’m not saying that these universities are lying about having created this kind of system, but I wish they had gone into more details in their papers about how exactly they implemented it (note that everyone is using the same framework so there isn’t really that much detail needed). If I could see the actual code, even better. Unfortunately, all I have is a bunch of papers which essentially say the same thing, and do not help me re-implement their system.
I even resorted to trying to hear the voice they have built to try and guess how they are doing certain things. Unfortunately, the online interface for that does not work, and all I have is a few sample sentences that they have (probably) hand-picked, which are of no use.
This reminded me of an excellent article by Prof. Ted Pedersen in Computational Linguistics titled ‘Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith’ (warning: PDF). Go read it.
