Avinash Rajput

So its been a while since the last post, its been pretty busy, but I expect to start posting more regularly. For now, just an update on the Autoplug project I talked about earlier. Its going pretty well, we’ve started to move along in its development. Now that we’ve finished with generation 1 (Renesas Microcontroller, Arada Systems Router, iPhone control platform, etc.), we’re moving towards generation 2( Gumstix Overo, any control platform).

We are using XMPP to manage the communications and presence notifications between different devices, and currently using ejabberd as our XMPP server. We’re currently exploring different libraries for the XMPP clients but are leaning towards using the Twisted Words and wokkel libraries built using Python. More updates coming later…

This post, about the Autoplug project Sunil and I are working on at the Real Time and Embedded Systems lab in the University of Pennsylvania, is long overdue. Its partially about current car control systems, partially about where we wish Car control systems were, and partially about the work Sunil and I have done. This content will also be on the Autoplug website that Sunil will be developing.

Until recently, cars had no integrated, universal system to monitor and control all of the various subsystems of the car. As of 1996, all cars manufactured must have an OBD II port, which provided a universal interface for owners and mechanics to extract important information from their cars. However, each car manufacturer used a different messaging protocol to communicate on the OBD port. So it was difficult to produce a system that was generalizable to multiple cars. Finally, it was stipulated that all cars produced after 2007 must communicate using the Controller Area Network standard.

Despite these advances in communication and information sharing, cars are still a black-box to most of the major stakeholders in the industry. Manufacturers have no idea how the car is being used. Owners don’t have a clue as to what is going on inside their car beyond what is displayed on the dashboard (if that…). And 3rd party parts vendors have no idea how to design interactions with the various parts of a car in advance of its release as the information for each model is different. Furthermore, this information is held secret and needs to be bought to be discovered. Not only that, but if an owner wants to add an upgrade to the car (a rear view proximity sensor), or program a new way to unlock their car (via their phone), they have to pay exorbitant costs to 3rd parties, and that is only if the changes they request are possible.

This is a travesty. How is that the rest of the technological world is innovating on the ideals of the PC(customization, extension, programmability) and the internet (information sharing, application sharing) while the automobile is stuck in the seventies?

That question can be best left answered by others, but suffice it to say that this is low hanging fruit that is the next logical step in the development of the automobile.

The next question to ask is, “Is developing the automobile to fulfill all of the ideals of the PC and internet worth it?”

We believe that the potential capabilities are pretty exciting. For example, let’s say your friend or family member just got their driver’s license, and will be driving in your car. You know your family member is not good at parallel parking, and you wanted to help th em out so that they don’t wreck your car when they drive into the city. So you buy a proximity sensor from Target, attach it to the front and rear bumpers, have it wirelessly interface with the rest of your car, and display the results on your lcd dashboard. Your worries of your little sister scratching your bumpers may not be completely gone, but they certainly are alleviated. That is how easy it should be to make changes to your car. If you want to control your car with your cellphone, there should be a free and open market that facilitates this change to your car. That’s why part of this vision that Professor Mangharam shared with us involves an application store, where 3rd party developers can create new devices or software to update your car. Like the IPhone commercials, there should be an app for that.

The difference is that with the automobile industry, there are already millions of dollars being spent on cars inefficiently and ineffectively. While the money would be pretty cool, that’s honestly for other peopl to think about. As Professor Mangharam said, “Let’s just make something cool.”

We’ll be releasing everything to open source so others can retrace the project, and I’ll post a link to the autoplug website as soon as its up.

“Live every week like its shark week. And nothing is impossible except dinosaurs.” -Tracy Morgan to Kenneth on 30 Rock

One of my favorite books is the four hour work week. At the risk of oversimplification, the point of the book is that time is your most valuable asset. The author, Tim Ferriss, has a blog, and a while ago he posted a really cool essay entitled The Shortness of Life by Seneca the Younger. Seneca the Younger was one of the fathers of the essay as a literary form and was a very opinionated man. Its a bit of a read, but if you’re in a bit of a time rush or only want to read the good stuff, Tim bolded the portions that he thought were most important and you could scan through it in less than five minutes. In this essay, Seneca refers to preoccupied people as people who have unnecessary worries and fears over the past and future and are unable to live in the present as a result.

“Life is divided into three periods—that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present time is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain… The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.”

I agree to an extent with the above quote. But I think the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to live in the moment by changing what you’re doing, but by changing how you’re thinking about what you’re doing. Circumstances can prevent you from being free to do what you wish. But I think its rational to believe that you can be free to feel whatever you want whenever you want. Of course, its also important not do something out of fear or anxiety, but out of love or duty. Motivations should be positive, and if you can be free to feel or think however you want, then you can set a positive motivation for whatever you are doing.

Viktor Frankl was a great champion of this philosophy. An Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist, he was a Holocaust survivor and went on to publish many influential papers and books in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, and neurology. One of his most famous books was a review of his experiences living in a concentration camp, entitled Man’s Search for Meaning.

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I think the most popular and influential quotation from this book was the following:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I haven’t read the book myself, so I hope I’m not misrepresenting what he wrote, but a lecture I had heard had the same summary of his material, so this is hopefully correct.

There are really many parallels between these philosophies on life and the traditional Eastern philosophies on life. Its just that in the Eastern traditions, there really isn’t one person that these ideas can be traced to.

I guess the point I wanted to make was twofold. First, time is a gift, and its important to make sure that we don’t squander it with meaningless preoccupations of the mind because they are a waste of the gift of life. Second, while we may not really have control of our surroundings, our freedom lies in our response, and its important that we at least make the mental responses that we truly want to make.

According to Mazlish the third discontinuity was located in our heads. Freud began the on-going process of overcoming the specialism we attribute to the idea of “I.” Psychology and neurology discovered that the “I” is a handy fantasy constructed to facilitate daily life, but that there is no central decider at home; rather there are many “i”s operating in our mind, and those parts are not distinguishable from our physical body, or even at times from other minds. Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks. Within sentience, we are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

- Kevin Kelly’s “The Technium”

This will (hopefully) be the first post in a series examining the idea that we are free. Are we free to choose what we like? Do we choose how we act? Is there a way for us to be more free? Should we care? … The tone sounds like the end of Lupe’s album Food & Liquor… This was initially motivated by a BBC documentary I watched entitled, “How Art Made the World”. This series won’t be regular, but hopefully within a few short articles, there’ll be some interesting, thought provoking information

The first episode discussed the first human works of art. The first human figurine/statuette, entitled Venus of Willendorf, clearly has very exaggerated features.

One of the first discovered human made figurines

The question that the documentarians asked when seeing this was, “Why would the first recreations of the human body not look like a typical human body?” To find the answer, anthropologists looked towards neuroscience research done with herring gulls. The relationship between the two disparate fields was actually by pointed out by Professor VS Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience at UCSD. He has a pretty interesting TED talk that’s worth it if you have a spare twenty-five minutes.

Scientist Niko Tinbergen discovered that Herring gull chicks habitually tap the red-striped beak of their mother to be fed. He further realized that the tapping response of the chicks could be triggered without any beak at all.

In place of the beak, the chicks responded to a yellow colored stick with a red strip painted on its side. Further, if the number of stripes were increased, from one strip to three stripes, the chick’s enthusiasm for tapping the stick and demanding food increased proportionally.

- How Art Made the World
So the idea that Ramachandran had was that as people gained the power to create, they created what they liked the most. And in doing so, they created what stimulated them the most. The artist in Willendorf made his beak with three stripes. But the relevant question for us is whether the artist chose what stimulated him the most, or whether it was a result of his nature or environment.
It seems as if the word “stimulated” is loaded with a connotation that seems a contrary to our traditional view of “liking” something. Almost mechanistic, like putting an electric current to a dead frog’s leg and watching it kick. Going to back to the blurb by Kevin Kelly, Bruce Mazlish believed that Freud started the collapse of the idea of “I”. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but his belief that most of adult personality could be traced back to childhood experiences would really appear to limit the freedom that individuals had to change their own personalities.

The traditional idea of the Self (no idea if this is really the traditional idea) seems to be rooted in some type of freedom of thought by an individual. And if the choice of what one likes, a freedom that is so central to our sense of Self, is not actually a choice at all, then what does that say about our self-view. Are we really capable of making “free” choices”? Maybe “the most important parts are the one that are unseen” and Lupe couldn’t help but like his Gold Watch, Guilty Brotherhood polos, and goyard bags. Sometimes it seems as if such airtight explanations of our nature leave no space for any personal choice. The explanations do make sense though. And if we don’t choose what we think, its conceivable that we might not choose how we act, or anything else. Maybe its true, “Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks.”

Kind of a pointless discussion, because i guess it wouldn’t necessarily change how you live. But it seems important to know. Not sure what I believe.

Game 2 of the finals is on tomorrow, and I have to say I loved the new vitamin water commercial during game 1. Everyone thought that the finals were going to be between the Cavs and the Lakers, and Vitamin Water tried to cash in by having tons of Lebron vs. Kobe commercials:

But when the Magic beat the Cavs, Vitamin Water recovered nicely. I love that Dwight Howard has such a good sense of humor about this kind of stuff, hilarious commercial. Filthy! Vicious! Ridiculous!

A few days ago, Google Wave was announced at the Google I/O conference. To summarize it in a sentence, Wave is supposed to be a new communication interface that unifies all of your interactions(email, text messaging, instant messaging, twitter, etc.) into streams that can be edited in real time. At first, I didn’t think Google Wave would be a big deal, but after thinking about it a bit, it seems Wave could be a huge thing. Because it is open source and seems to be easy to interface with (one can make twitter plug in data to Wave) it would be able to act as a platform for conceivably all electronic communication (Google has and continues to do extensive research into voice recognition… I don’t think text conversions of phone calls are that far away). Needless to say, it would be pretty convenient because you could search for anything you might have forgot and it centralizes all of your communications. Also, companies could run their own private instances of Wave to enable greater employee collaboration. On the other side of the interaction, Google gets to create a real-time search engine of trends and events. Maybe even with enough data, it would be possible to predict societal changes and shifts, revolutions and election results in the same way we predict the weather. Its kind of scary how important Google could become to our lives. Its weird how we fear when any single entity in our life becomes too vital to our happiness.

Next post I think will be a discussion of Automotive control systems – the past, present, and (hopefully) future. Sunil and I have been working on a project related to this topic.

Just saw an hour show on the life of David Bowie, what an awesome story. Crazy music…I think for an artist to really reach the heights of “artistry”?, the artist’s life must itself be a work of art. Van Gogh, Caravaggio… I guess writers can create their own stories in their writings, so maybe its not so important. But then again, every life has its ups and downs, so maybe its just a matter of framing…

Been feeling this song lately, I like the version with Jason Mraz better, but this version is good too. I really dig Ingrid Michaelson’s voice.

So its been a while since the last update, the video above is about the project I worked on over the past year, its a demonstration of a wireless factory control system. The audio could have been more exciting maybe, but it gets the job done. I was thinking of putting some background audio up, but didn’t want to get hammered due to copyright infringement.

Link Fest

- During the election last year, Obama promised to make government more open. Its exciting to see him follow up on that promise by having the White House release sets of government data a few days ago. Mad props to Barack and CIO Vivek Kundara: Data.gov

- Furthermore, if you’re enthusiastic about exploring these data sets, there’s a contest and prize for new and interesting applications of this data: Apps for America

- A little late, but how awesome was the Lost season finale? I loved the beginning scene of Jacob and Fred talking and the extended shot of Jacob reading “Everything That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor as Locke fell off the building behind him. Pretty interesting story: “Everything That Rises Must Converge”

- “Sometimes I wonder if the time I’m wasting is actually being wasted. Isn’t blowing a couple of hours on the Internet, in the end, just another way of following your attention? My life would be immeasurably poorer if I hadn’t stumbled a few weeks ago across the Boston Molasses Disaster.” In Defense of Distraction

- Congrats to Venus Ultimate on an awesome year! Fifth in the nation! Women’s College Nationals Results

Its weird to be graduating in a day. Its exciting to be moving on to the next chapter of life, but it also leaves me a bit anxious. From talking with other people, I know I’m not the only one. Did I maximize my experiences over the past four years? Socially? Academically? What choices would I change? Its easy to double-guess yourself I guess. I’m going to miss a lot of people and a lot of things about college. But I think its necessary to just be thankful for the experiences you had, and do your best to make sure the future is everything you want it to be.

That’s the end of that, I promise the following posts won’t be so emo. In this post, I wanted to clarify my purposes for starting this blog.

First, I want to document my experiences and experimentation with different types of technologies. Partly inspired by Sunil’s Tutorials  but hopefully with a unique flavor. I hope others can gain some help from documentation, as I have been helped so many times by these types of tutorials. (BTW, great command line intro Sunil, really enjoyed it). Part of my motivation for this, aside from providing something of use to others, is to cement some of the new things I learn about or encounter. I also just like talking about tech in general, so some of these posts will be ramblings about cool and interesting technologies.

Second, I would like to relay, discuss, or throw out items that I find interesting in general. This may be music, videos, news, or pictures… just random stuff.

Finally, I would like to have a personal online presence. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there wasn’t a selfish element to this endeavor. Hopefully this will end up being helpful to some people rather than being a cyberspace black hole.

Well, now that all of that is cleared up, hopefully the following posts will be much more interesting! Also, if anyone needs any help in setting up their own blog, or personal website, don’t hesitate to contact me at Avinash dot S dot Rajput at gmail dot com.