The Yahoo Internship 2011- part 2

From the second week, the work began in full flow. We had a discussion on the initial model to be tried, and I had to derive the inference equations and then code it up. I was given a Java implementation of LDA written by a Lab member called Prithviraj, and I had to first understand it and then modify it to our model. Also a fair amount of text processing was involved. For two very hectic weeks I was busy with all this, and even had to work full time on weekends, albeit from home. The code was long, and I was always afraid that there will be some bug. There was no concrete way to understand if there is a bug or not.  Throughout the coding phase I tested on small parts of the data. My mentor was often not satisfied with the result and insisted that there was a bug somewhere, and made me look for it. Sometimes a bug was located, and sometimes not, and we had to conclude that the model had limitations. When the code was ready I started to run it on the full data. The results were moderate, but my mentor was not satisfied. However, my advisor in IISc also wanted me to do some work for an approaching deadline. The fourth week of May was very hectic as after returning to the campus in the evening I again had to run to the lab to do this work. Finally in the final week of May my adviser arranged a 1-week break in the internship so that I could do the work in IISc. The leave was granted, but the IISc project did not work out, and I rejoined internship on 1 June.

After the initial results with topic models in May, we decided to try other approaches. This involved designing of features. Throughout June, we tried a wide variety of features, some inspired by other papers and some based on our understanding of the data. I spent quite some time just going through the data to get a feel of what could be good features. We consulted different people, including the Signal Processing stalwart Malcomn Slaney, who had come to India to give a talk at a summer school jointly organized by Yahoo and IISc. Nothing, however gave really promising results. Dhruv once observed that Rajeev's voice was gradually rising, and was worried that a bashing may be coming up soon. Finally, by the last week of June we decided to freeze the issue of features, and go back to modelling. Most of the Java coding was done by me, while Dhruv wrote a few Matlab scripts.  After a fair amount of hard work for a week, Dhruv was satisfied with the results, and decided to move over to the next phase- Explore-Exploit Algorithms. I was satisfied with the hard work and the learning experience, but often rued the lack of freedom and a scope to try my own ideas.

Throughout June and the early part of july I was thus preoccupied with the work. I hardly had any leisure time when in office, and though there were some more interns i never got any chance to make friendship with them. The lunchtimes were monotonous, as already described in the previous post. In the cab also there was no one of my age group except Pavan (1 year senior), but he rarely came, and even if he did come he was busy with his laptop throughout the journey. However, i have the ability to enjoy solitude, and I had a nice time observing the route and the other passengers. I soon picked up the route and with the help of Google Maps, developed an fair idea about the geography of some of the areas we covered during the journey. The most interesting part of the journeys was the Kannada film songs which played on Radio City FM radio. Although I did not follow the lyrics I found the tunes quite amusing. Memories of those tough days are abound with the tunes of "Ore Pinkuu..", "Don't worry Padmavathi", "Sanju mattu Geetha" and "Thara Thara Hidisire".

Another interesting part was in observing the copassengers. In the original schedule I was the first pick-up, but later Sarvanan superceded me. He was an elderly and glum person, who sat quietly on a seat throughout the journey. Shortly after my boarding came Inayat Shareef, the accounts officer in his 40s, with whom I developed an unlikely acquaintance despite the massive age difference. Next were Preethi and Pavan, both of whom were always late by around 5 minutes, introducing a delay of nearly 10 minutes. They boarded near Mathikere bus stop, after which we drove to MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology, where on some days the bulky S. Balakrishnan boarded and promptly started reading something on a Kindle Reader. Down the same road was the quiet and ever-punctual Vipin, followed by Shiva and Ravi near MS Ramaiah Hospital. Next was Nethra in Sanjay Nagar, who also kept us waiting regularly at the door of her house, till she returned from the market on a scooter and handed over the vegetables to her maid. After this the bus drove a long way to Kaveri Cinema where the gorgeous Deepika boarded, usually on time.

The bus usually reached the office around 8:30AM, after which I had breakfast in the Cafetaria. There was a wide variety of food, but my menu revolved around veg/onion-cheese-grilled sandwich, masala dosa and idly-vada. Usually the breakfast was taken alone, though sometimes Amit (Swagato's friend) also joined. During the work hours, when I needed to relax the brain and eyes, I strolled around the building. It was 6-storeyed, and we occupied the 3rd floor. Each floor had a "theme", and all the glass-doored conference rooms in that floor were named according to that theme. In our floor, the theme was "Cars", and so the different rooms were named as "Toyota", "Nissan", "Ford" etc. Each floor had a few "Breakout Areas", some of which were for beverages/snacks and some for foosball and TT. Throughout the building, the restrooms were hilariously named "Go-pee" (men's) and "Go-pee-ka" (women's) :-o

(To be continued)