Sunset - Wabamun lake

Oh,
to fall in love, with a purple sunset,
the golden rays, warmth of its soft embrace,
the festive sky, the dancing clouds of red.
To drown in the moment, of heavenly grace.

Knowing,
the impending gloom of the night,
the sky, with the dark drapes drawn,
empty, but for the sparse glimmer of stars.
The memories, of a sunset bygone.

Oh,
to fall in love, with the fading green of the summer,
with a quaint cloud’s shadow, in a tempestuous sky,
with a passing cityscape, in the rearview mirror,
with the smiling eyes, murmuring good-bye.

How many a minute, do I have?
How many a day, do I have, to wait?

White-throated Kingfisher

White-throated Kingfishers are quite a common site in Galle, Sri Lanka.

City of Galle

Galle, a coastal city in the souther Sri lanka, is my hometown. Tihs is the city seen from the Roomassala mountain.

Few more photos from Galle:

Ruwanmeli Seya

During Poson, the whole Anuradhapura gets very festive. This is Ruwanmeli Seya, a few days after Poson Poya 2011. It is quite a sight.

Ruwanmeli Seya is a popular location of religous worship for Buddhists.  According to wikipedia :

“The stupa is also one of the Solosmasthana (the 16 places of veneration) and the Atamasthana (the 8 places of veneration in the ancient sacred city of Anuradhapura). The stupa is one of the world’s tallest monuments, standing at 300 feet (91 m) and with a circumference of 950 ft (290 m).”

]]> http://madushanka.info/2011/08/ruwanmeliseya/feed/ 0 http://madushanka.info/2011/08/ruwanmeliseya/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/madushanka/feed/~3/mWKf9TV02Eo/ http://madushanka.info/2011/04/cancun-mexico/#comments Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:21:11 +0000 Madushanka http://madushanka.info/?p=583

Cancun, Mexico

I got the opportunity to attend IEEE WCNC 2011, as I had couple of my papers accepted in the conference. The conference location was the beautiful Cancun, Mexico. White sandy beaches, the blue sea and gorgeous sunsets were absolute treats.

The high humidity and the temperatures were quite a change from Edmonton’s early spring, but I was quite home as the conditions were very close to those in Sri lanka.

I stayed for few days after the conference, to explore the city. It was an thoroughly enjoyable time, with the company of new friends from the conference, including Ben, Yuvi, Charaka and Saba. Not to forget the exciting adventure tour with my labmates payam, Reza and Mahmood, jumping 10s of feet in to cenotes, driving ATVs and going in zip-lines. The safety measures in these were not quite stringent, which helped boost the sense of adventure. :-)

It was one of the coolest trips.

More photos from Cancun:

Dwarfed

I got to visit UCSD last week, and its ece dept grad fac staff had organized a hike at the Torrey pines state natural reserve. The photo above was taken at the torrey pines state beach.

Torrey pines, present in this reserve, are claimed to be the rarest type of native pine trees in North America. Hence, the name.

Few more photos from the hike can be found in my flickr page.

The work done here is truly amazing, in two major aspects. First, the achievement in terms of natural language processing.  Making a computer decipher human language is no easy task. The second, even more impressive, achivement is its remarkable decision making method. The ability to attribute successs probabilities for its decisions, and show the trail of reasoning in reaching that decision shows phenomenol promise in a wider range of applications.

These will surely lay the platform for the next generation of computer assistants in our daily lives.

An interesting panel discussion on Watson and its future can be found at http://www.ted.com/webcast/archive/event/ibmwatson.

Related links:

IBM Watson wesbite – ibmwatson.com
Stephen Bakers blog – http://thenumerati.net/ – The author of the book, Final Jeopardy, Man vs Machine
IBM youtube channel - http://www.youtube.com/ibm

It was kinda amusing to see IBM reiterating it’s a humankinds victory (who knows, there might be people planing on protests to shutdown Watson worrying about losing their jobs to Watsons :)), while they discuss the applications of it in business analysis and medical diagnosis.

I’m off to warn (and rub this on) my friends in the medical facutlty. ;)

Yosemite in Winter

Yosemite is amongst the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. The grandeur of the mountains, veiled with an ethereal mist was sublime.
The upper and lower Yosemite falls made a stunning appearance as well.

Due to a snow fall the previous day most of the trails were closed, thus limiting our explorations. I want to go back in a summer to make up for it.

More photos from my US trip can be found here.

I decided to use feedburner to get the stats easily, and the simple procedure is given in http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483.

Just thought of mentioning it here for the information of anyone who has subscribed to the old feed. :)

Do give them a try even if you are not expecting an interview anytime soon, as the puzzles themselves are a treat. :-)