~shree
16Apr/093

Best Paper Award at EGPGV 2009 !

Our paper (me: 4th co-author) was earlier selected for presentation at the EuroGraphics Parallel Graphics and Visualization(EGPVG, since the expansion is a mouthful) conference. From http://www.egpgv.org/programme.html

Parallel Solution to the Radiative Transport : László Szirmay-Kalos, Gábor Liktor, Tamás Umenhoffer, Balázs Tóth, Shree Kumar and Glenn Lupton

This also won the Best Paper Award at the conference, which concluded recently. Most of the hard work was done by Laszlo and his team, and kudos to them on this achievement !

This is also my first external academic publication, and I feel somewhat motivated to try some more submissions. I've been doing things for a while, but this paper has been an eye-opener in terms of the professional benefits of getting papers published !

Filed under: Info 3 Comments
13Apr/093

His Big Escapade – Destination Unknown

Sometimes I get phone calls from complete strangers. Typically, the callers get the phone numbers from my "About" page. And yes, that's the reason I keep them there.

Yesterday, at 8 PM, I was riding back from Madikeri towards Mysore. My phone rang. I had to excuse myself & asked the caller to call me again in half an hour or so. Next call at 10 PM. Guy calling was Praveen, obviously a kannadiga, and sitting in Shillong. Between jobs, and travelling his motorbike. He is using the Eicher map. He has been blogging extensively about his experiences on his blog page. He's ridden quite some distance already. Bangalore - Kolkata - Gangtok - Bhutan (yes!) and now sits pretty at Shillong.

Praveen wanted to get some road directions. Most maps show a short route from Agartala to Aizwal. My tour of the North-East had taught me that it didn't exist (or if it did wasn't motorable). I told him as much. And confirmed it today morning by calling Inspector S K Das - who's currently posted in Agartala (remember him from my Tour of North East ? He was posted in Teliamura then).

Praveen is probably busy getting permits now. Good luck to him for the rest of his journeys! Finally, turns out he's not that much of a stranger after all. He knows one of my close friends from engineering days. Is it a small world, or are the junkies somehow connected ? 🙂

Filed under: Info, Travel 3 Comments
6Apr/090

The Talk at SAP Labs

This turned out to be a different kind of an experience - and fun, at that. That was expected, since I was giving such a talk for first time.

Part of the problem while giving a talk is finding out what the audience expects OR would be interested in. I didn't have a very good idea, but guess I did a decent job. I tried to tell a story with pictures, following a model of an earlier talk that I had attended. That worked.