[Data Mining] New Contest in TunedIT: Prediction of Biological Properties of Molecules

TunedIT, a leading research platform in the area of data mining, encourages participation in the new competition “Prediction of Biological Properties of Molecules” launched at TunedIT Challenges platform. The competition, with a cash prize of 1,000 USD is organized by Simulations Plus, Inc., and affiliated with the top statistical and data mining conference, 2011 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.

The task is related to prediction of an important biological property of molecules from their chemical structures – a routine task in the domain of cheminformatics. The modeling dataset contains two classes of chemical molecules: one with and one without the said property. Using this dataset, contestants will have to build a binary classification model with the goal of classifying new molecules into the two classes. Prizes worth 1,000 USD in total will be awarded to the winners. After the contest, top solutions will be presented at the SIAM ICDM’11 Contest Workshop. The challenge has already started on Nov 16, 2010 and will last till Jan 24, 2011. More details can be found here.

Prev challenges: Road Traffic Prediction for Intelligent Navigation. Solution.

-- Varun

Google Tech Talk: Challenges and Learnings in Enterprise Search Quality

Google India is organizing yet another Tech talk on 19th Nov 2010. The topic for the same will be “Challenges and Learnings in Enterprise Search Quality”. Dr. Shailesh Kumar, Senior Software Engineer, Google is delivering the talk. The event is free and open to all in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology and related fields. Register here.

Talk abstract

Enterprises are growing in age, size, and diversity and so is their repository of internal documents e.g. e-mails, internal wikis, special pages for people, projects, and products, etc. Searching this ever growing corpus with high precision, recall, and scale is becoming increasingly important and difficult for Enterprises.

This talk will highlight some of the fundamental differences between web search and enterprise search problems and then a number of opportunities for improving Enterprise search in the light of these differences will be discussed.

Talk     : Challenges and Learnings in Enterprise Search Quality
Date    : Friday, Nov 19, 2010, 5:30 to 6:45 PM
Venue : Google India Campus, Hyderabad

-- Varun

Happy Diwali 2010!

May this light of happiness, light up your life. May this Diwali be the most sparkling and lightening. The sights and sounds filling up your heart with joy and happiness.

Wishing you and your family a very Happy Diwali! :)

-- Varun

Blog Action Day 2010!

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action. The topic for this year 2010 will be Water. The idea is to spread the awareness about making clean water available for all. Check out some of the interesting posts on this topic here.

In 2009, the topic of discussion was ‘Climate change’ and in 2008, it was ‘Poverty’

-- Varun

TEDxChennai, 2010

Series of short talks by achievers from various fields to inspire you with Ideas worth Spreading. After the tremendous success of the first edition in 2009, TEDxChennai 2010 is going to be a bigger and better one. An event to celebrate The Passion To ‘Do!’  Check out the list of speakers here. Also, a workshop about organizing TEDx events has been arranged on 09-10-10.

 Event Details

TEDx Workshop Date: 09-10-10 Time: 02:00 PM – 05:00 PM Venue: IC & SR auditorium, IIT Madras, Chennai

TEDx Event Date: 10-10-10 Time: 08:00 AM – 06:00 PM Venue: IC & SR auditorium, IIT Madras, Chennai

What are you waiting for? Register yourself and get a chance to network with some wonderful people. For registrations, please visit this page. For more details, visit the official website of TEDxChennai. I will be live blogging from the event. Follow my blog or follow me (@varunkumar) on  Twitter. You can also follow the official hash tag #TEDxChennai

-- Varun

Chennai Super Kings, the T20 champions

Congrats Chennai Super Kings for becoming the world’s No. 1 T20 team. The season turns to be an excellent one for CSK - IPL-1 runners, IPL-2 semi finalists, IPL-3 winners and now the winners of Champions League T20 as well. Congrats again!! :)

-- Varun

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities.

Past Grace Hopper Celebrations (in the United States) have resulted in collaborative proposals, networking, mentoring, and increased visibility for the contributions of women in computing. The Grace Hopper Celebration is a program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India

This is the first time the program is being held in India, especially for Indian women. It will be held at The Taj Residency, Bangalore Dec 7th – 9th 2010. As part of this event, a Poster Session has been organized to provide an opportunity for an informal discussion of one’s research with the conference attendees. Furthermore, it is a forum to convey any raw ideas and results not yet developed into a full paper. The last date for the submission of Poster abstract is 15-Sep-2010. More information can be found here.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [Sep 05, 2010]

In an effort to make the Twitter news available on a daily basis, I have created Varunkumar Nagarajan daily based on my tweets and the tweets of people whom I follow. I will continue to post the “This week on Twitter” series here.

Science & Technology

• Smallest Full Moon of 2010. Link.
• TEDxAmazonia. In the middle of world’s largest rain forest. Link.
• Eclipse day at GooglePlex 2010. Link.
• After Apple & Google, Yahoo jumps into TV. Link.
• Firefox 4 Beta 4 out. Link.
• MIT testing self-assembling solar cells. Link.

Industry News

• Kevin Rose steps down as CEO of digg. Link.
• Google acquires Angstro to compete with Facebook. Link.
• Google buys SocialDeck. Link.
• Google backs out of JavaOne. Link.

Social Networks

• Facebook testing “Subscribe” – its version of follow. Link.
• Twitter in Real Time. Link.

Google

• Call phones from Gmail. Link.
• Gmail gets priority inbox. Link.
• Blogger turned 11 and Google organized BloggerFiesta worldwide.
• Useful Gmail shortcuts. Link.
• Google releases Chrome 6 on its second birthday. Link.
• Google mobile gets a cool new YouTube channel. Link.
• Google can read SVG documents now. Link.
• Google reader gets full screen mode. Link.

Gadgets

• One-click rooting for Nexus One. Link.
• Unicode fonts on Android. Link.
• Apple Music event 2010. New iPod Touch, Nano announced. Link.
• Official page of Samsung Galaxy Tab. Link.
• The great big spreadsheet of all known Android devices. Link.

India

• Landline telephone number may soon sport a 10-digit number. Link.
• Book KSRTC bus tickets from your mobile. Link.

Programming

• Lazy loading of JavaScript. Link.
• Binding Python and Mozilla DOM. Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [August 15, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Street level imagery from Microsoft. Street Slide. Link.
• Sun eruptions spit plasma at Earth. Link.
• Eco-friendly USB rechargeable batteries. Link.
• Kindle games. Link.
• Helicopter game using HTML5. Link.
• Make your old add-ons work with Firefox 4. Link.
• Skype files for IPO. Link.
• Mathematical breakthroughs. Link.
• JQuery for mobile announced. Link.
• Amazon opens UK Kindle store. Link.

Social Media

• “Who to follow” is live on Twitter.
• Twitter’s short link service. Link.
• “You both follow” feature is live on Twitter.
• Twitter now even more Torrent friendly. Link.

Google

• Google launches multiple account sign-in. Link.
• Google discontinued Wave. Link.
• Google’s Ultimate demo system. Link.
• Google updates the Contacts in GMail. Link.
• Flipping for Gesture search. Link.
• Product development at Google. Link.
• Google unveils Voice actions for Android. Link.

Gadgets

• JailBreakMe, the first web based Jailbreak for iPhone. Link.
• RIM announces its first touch phone. Blackberry Torch. Link.
• Two new Android based smart phones from Moto. Link.
• HTC Wildifre available in India for 16K. Link.
• Nexus One officially became a developer phone. Link.

India

• Malaysia plans new Visa system (VFS) for India. Link.
• Indian Govt. forms programmers’ army to hack systems of hostile nations. Link.
• Mobile Number portability by Oct 31. Link.

Sports

• Stumpy is chosen as the mascot for the 2011 cricket world cup. Link.

Events

• Speakers announced for TEDxChennai. Link.

-- Varun

Happy Independence day!

From Struggle..

To Freedom.. To Progress…

India moves forward…

Celebrating with you the Pride of being part of a nation that’s eternal and ever-new.. Happy Independence day!! :-)

-- Varun

Microsoft Community Tech Days 2010

Event Date: 07-Aug-2010

Venue: Microsoft Campus, Gachibowli, Hyderabad

Mind-map of Microsoft Community Tech Days 2010. Click on it to enlarge.

-- Varun

Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google

Google Hyderabad Engineering is organizing a talk on “Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google”. Ashish Kumar, Google’s Engineering Manager, will be delivering the talk. Asish is responsible for steering and managing the 100+ Engineering Tools team that builds tools for most engineers at Google.  He will talk about some of the key infrastructure elements that enable more than 6000 developers distributed over 40 offices to work together on more than 2000 projects. Limited seats. Register here by 07-Aug-2010.

Talk     : Developing products at the Speed and Scale of Google.

Date    : Tuesday, August 10, 2010, 6:00 PM onwards.

Venue : Google Campus, DIvyaShree Omega, Hyderabad 

Update: The talk has been re-scheduled to Wednesday, August 11, 2010.

Update-1: Have pinged the organizers to arrange for live streaming (as requested by many of my readers). The organizers have replied back saying this option will be considered for the talks in future. For this time around, the video will be recorded and shared later.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [August 01, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Why People think computers can’t. Link.
• Yahoo! Japan to use the Google search in future. Link.
• Oracle rebrands Java. Breaks Eclipse. Link.
• Time saving auto hotkeys for windows. Link.
• Firefox 3.6.8 released. Link.

Social Media

• Twitter testing inline photos and videos. Link.
• Twitter begins user stream testing. Link.
• Facebook questions beta is out. Link.

Google

• Google’s CEO says there is no need for ‘Google Me’. Link.
• How to get a Google Nexus One. Link.
• Google docs to get a new file type “Punch”. Link.
• Google CEO announces Zynga partnership. Link.
• Upcoming GMail features. Link.
• YouTube launches a music video discovery page. Link.
• YouTube’s new embedding code supports HTML5. Link.
• Google places for Android gets Yelp like interface. Link.
• Play hidden snake game in YouTube. Link.
• YouTube increases the max video length to 15 mins. Link.

Gadgets

• Jailbreaking iPhone is legal now. Link.
• Apple announces new products on its store including Mac Pro and Magic Trackpad. Link.
• Froyo for Samsung Galaxy S leaked. Link.
• Froyo for HTC Incredible leaked. Link.
• Amazon reveals new Kindle. Link.
• Smartpen – a pen which records and playback what you wrote. Link.
• Android user interface stencil kit. Link.

India

• ISB iDiya 2010, a national social idea challenge announced. Link.
• IT dept has extended the last day for tax filing to 4-Aug-2010 due to technical issues on e-filing site.Link.

-- Varun

Happy friendship day!

Happy friendship day to all the readers of Varun’s Scratchpad! :-)

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 25, 2010]

Science & Technology

• OpenStack. Open source cloud computing software. Link.
• Nokia Siemens acquires Motorola wireless unit for 1.2Bn USD. Link.
• Deploy your own satellite for $8000. Link.
• Regular expression for finding prime numbers. Link.
• Windows 7 keyboard shortcut. Link.
• What the hack? Link.
• Yahoo! Open hack day Banagalore 2010 was a grand success with 430 hackers and 110 info geeks.
• Intel Capital invests in cloud-based game streaming service Gaiki. Link.
• Piezoelectric batteries. Link.

Social Media

• Yahoo! Pulse available for everyone. Link.
• Facebook officially crosses 500 million users. Link.
• Apple’s real problem with the white iPhone4. Link.

Google

• Google introduces user policy management for Google Apps. Link.
• Google re-designs its image search interface. Link.
• Screen capture extension for Google Chrome. Link.
• Google Chrome tells you when sites are down for other users. Link.

Gadgets

• Apple iPhone 4 coming to India in October. Link.
• Swype Input interface sneaks into Windows 7 demo. Link.
• Google Nexus One sold out. Link.
• 58.8% of Android handsets run a recent OS version. Link.

India

• How to use the Indian Rupee symbol on websites? Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 18, 2010]

Science & Technology

• The most important algorithms. Link.
• Space saving furniture. Link.
• Mouseless, the invisible computer mouse. Link.
• Amazon hooks students with a free year of Amazon Prime. Link.
• Amazon opens Super Computing service. Link.
• "SiteOnMobile" takes internet to the masses with low-end mobiles. Web access via SMS. Link.
• Which came first? Chicken or egg? Scientists say its chicken. Link.
• Apple buys Google Earth like product. Link.
• OpenSuse 11.3 released. Link.
• The world's only immortal animal. Link.
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 released. Link.
• Adobe Flash is going 3D. Link.

Social Media

• Employees challenged to crack Facebook security, succeed. Link.
• Twitter confirms analytics product. Link.
• Facebook's Open Graph going mobile. Link.

Google

• Google's URL shortener for your domain. Link.
• GMail gets rich text signatures. Link.
• Update on China. Link.
• Google Maps gets shortened URLs. Link.
• Google secretly invested in Zynga, preparing to launch Google Games? Link.
• Google's anagram easter egg. Link.
• App Inventor to ease application development on Android. Link.
• Picasa web integrates with Picnik. Link.
• Google Maps celebrated its fifth birthday. Link.
• YouTube hit by HTML vulnerability. Link.
• 4K videos coming to YouTube. Link.

Gadgets

• Android targets China and India for growth. Link.
• Browsing experience Android vs iPhone 4. Link.
• Apple iPhone 4 catches fire. Link.
• World's first mobile phone projector. Its Android based. Link.
• Apple to give away free cases to iPhone 4 users suffering from death grip. Link.
• Nexus One changes in availability. Link.

India

• New Delhi Traffic Police issuing notice to violators using photos on Facebook wall. Link.
• Indian Rupee gets a symbol. Link.
• Tatkal booking made easy for common man. Link.

Sports

• Spain won the FIFA World Cup 2010.
• World's best off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan to retire from Test cricket. Link.
• Tickets available for World Cup Cricket 2011. Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 04, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Firefox 3.6.4 released with crash protection. Link.
• HTML5 showcases of Google, Apple and Microsoft. Link.
• Firefox 3.6.6 released for patching the frequent Flash player crashes. Link.
• Cell phones as eye doctors. Link.

Social Media

• Facebook launches Hover-cards. Link.
• Twitter to publish shopping deals through @EarlyBird account. Link.
• Google Me social networking to take on Facebook. Link.
• Facebook unveils suggested interests list. Link.
• Facebook unleashes Open-Graph search engine. Link.

Google

• Google Spreadsheet adds format painter. Link.
• YouTube’s world cup Easter egg. Link.
• Google apps training and certification tools for teachers. Link.
• Google to use more HTML5 features in GMail. Link.
• Google’s update on China. Link.
• Google adds real-time web analytics to Blogger. Link.

Gadgets

• Infibeam, India has announced its Windows and Android based tablets named “Phi”. Link.
• The newly launced Apple iPhone 4 has reception issues. Link.
• Microsoft Kin discontinued after just 48 days. Link.
• Android Vs iPhone 4 multitasking compared. Link.
• Yahoo gets serious on Android development. Launches Y! Mail and Messenger for Android. Link.
• Android 2.2 Froyo rolled out to all the Nexus One users. Link.
• Amazon Kindle for Android released. Kindle for iPhone to have audio and video support. Link.

India

• Infibeam has launched its own brand of mobile phones in India. Link.
• Facebook, Hyderabad India is hiring 500 people. Link.
• Mukesh Ambani, D.E. Shaw close to Joint Venture. Link.
• Get address proof from Indian Postal department. Link.

Events

• TEDx events in India. Link.
• Dev Camp, Chennai on July 10. Link.
• Seth Godwin in India on July 07. Link.

Misc

• The next version of Eclipse IDE “Helios” is out. Link.

-- Varun