Do What Matters

Every semester hundreds of students graduate in Computer engineering from SJSU Charles Davidson College of Engineering. Visit my Linkedin post  for this semester's 295B projects: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/technology-showcase-day-rakesh-ranjan/ 

#1 - Why Vote? - ML powered analysis of voters and polls and their impact on citizen metrics Idea is to visualize the data about historical polls (how people vote in their democratic elections worldwide) and show correlations between the voting patterns and the important metrics such as health and sanitary conditions in that area, educational excellence in the neighborhood schools and other important  metrics such as roads and infrastructure. Goal is to make  people understand that in democratic society, people have power and rights to choose their representative who will work for the benefits of the society and when they fail to exercise that rights, they and their community suffer. Tons of opportunity to use Machine Learning to predict outcome in this project. Contact me for more detail. #2 - Sustainability App - You notice everyday in Facebook, someone posts a nice clever idea to recycle a plastic bottle or cardboard box to make something  new and usable. Why n...

#1 Help insurance companies identify risky and cautious drivers Develop a cloud service which could be integrated and used by Insurance companies to identify risky and cautious auto drivers. The service should have subscription based offering. The statistical and machine learning model would use driving records of various drivers (historical data) and predict a risky driving behavior Develop a dashboard for Insurance data analyst to visualize and predict. #2 A mobile dashboard (android tablet) to control all connected IoT devices in the house.   This dashboard should allow control of lights, toaster oven, music player, thermostat or anything else connected via wifi in the house) #3 U sing gps and accelerometer data from mobile phone, predict tourist’s behavior (whether tourist will see a particular exhibit or visit a particular shop) http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-03973-2_9 #4 Employee demand & Churn forecasting Employers deal w...

Its time for team based project for my Fall class at SJSU again. It requires a great deal of passion and team effort to do something that has not done before. I always encourage my students to think big and solve a problem which has not been solved before. And trust me, there are plenty of problems which might have solutions but either they are not uniquely addressing the problem or they can't be afforded by the masses. Anyway, here again I am posting some ideas that you can research and brainstorm to come up on a problem statement. 1. Barcode of Life (DNA Barcoding) DNA barcoding is a molecular-based identification system that aims to identify biological specimens, and to assign them to a given species.  DNA based identification for multi cellular life is an emerging concept and scientists from 25 countries have got together to create a database of DNA barcodes (BOLD) to solve multi-faceted problems.  Here are some potential use cases: a) Timber and wild life traff...

Let me start by sharing my new year resolution because its a tradition :) All passionate people like me fight at work, at home and when we fight, someone looses. Looser may not be the two persons fighting but the cause itself. Project suffers, your colleague looses morale and business does not achieve results. So I am going to find ways to create situations where everybody wins. I am working on how part and will share when I have concrete ideas. For now, the reflections on the past year. Professionally, 2015 was exciting, fast, and fruitful. At work, I led and drove many major initiatives for transforming our data and analytics business into cloud. dashDB has been a huge success. Seeing it grow in terms of values it provide to data analysts and data scientists and the customer base, it always reminds me the day 0 when few of us created this cloud offering focusing completely on users. R analytics always has been the value for both quick productive use and long term machine learnin...

Happy 64th Independence day to all Indians around the world. I am taking the opportunity to remember what we used to do as a kid on Indian Independence day and tell the good inspiring stories of those who sacrificed their lives to my kids. We definitely did not have big SALE going on that day. Our parents neither planned a long vacation on that day nor they got us for shopping. We celebrated at our school, starting with Flag hoisting and a day full of activities such as motivational plays, essay competition or colorful parade. I heard things are changing now. Big SALE at malls are stealing the thunder. Kids are loosing the touch. Hope this day does not remain as just a big SALE day. Happy Independence day to all, Congratulations !!

When I started teaching at University early this year, I had no idea how I am going to engage my students with the course materials and how to make sure they apply what they learn in the classroom. For me it was a multifold process of developing learner's outcomes and overall performance objectives for the class and using cognitive approaches to design and develop instruction materials. Since teaching grad students was  something brand new experience for me, I had to understand and learn more about the cognitive approaches that experts have been using. I started with researching Bloom's taxonomy for cognitive learning. We all know that there is more than a single type of learning. Benjamin Bloom in 1956 lead a group of educational psychologists who developed a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important for learning. This classification was represented as pyramid and became famous as Bloom's taxonomy. Figure 1 below represents the original Bloom's tax...

Inc.Magazine published an article by Ari Weinzweig, co-founder and CEO of Zingerman's community of businesses in Ann Arbor Michigan on the power of visioning. Ari in his article claims that he always creates vision for his company and every small or big project it starts and that vision guides the company to success in future. I liked his philosophy, so I wanted to translate his techniques for setting vision for his business to the techniques to set our own vision for a successful career. Remember power of visioning comes from imagining the future as if it is happening today. Here are the eight steps to a vision of your great career: STEP 1: Pick a specific topic - Its important to start by being clear what you are visioning for? Your skills, your income and asset, your retirement or an expensive car. STEP 2: Pick a time frame - Your vision works best if you set out the time frame. For example 1-2 years for short term career vision and 2-5 years for long term career vision will...

IBM shattered US patents record again.... 18th year in a row.This time breaking the record of achieving more than 5000 patents in one single year. Here is the top 10 list: 1 IBM 5,896 2 Samsung 4,551 3 Microsoft 3,094 4 Canon 2,552 5 Panasonic 2,482 6 Toshiba 2,246 7 Sony 2,150 8 Intel 1,653 9 LG Electronics 1,490 10 HP 1,480 Also don't forget to watch this video on what inspires IBM inventors...

This new year was spent mostly in jet lag, as I just got back from a little short of month long trip to India. The gloomy sky, rainy weather, lost dish TV reception gave me a chance to spend  good time with loved ones and few books and magazines that I carried with me. India is shining in terms of GDP growth, world class airports, 6 lane highways, high rise buildings in every small or big town. There are many things however still the same. No accountability and ownership of work, specially among Government workers. Even nationalized bank employee don't fear the competition, may be they will some day when they realize that they get paid by people's deposits in the banks. Corruption is at its peak as federal and state money is abundant to spend on infrastructure and other social welfare programs. For some reason, I was more focused on looking what has not changed rather than seeing what has changed. I am very optimistic that things will improve back there considerably in this ne...

101010 or October 10, 2010 was celebrated as largest day of positive action on Climate change. People around the world have shared their stories, posted videos, blogs and more at, http://www.1010global.org/uk Other news stories of 101010: Baby girl arrives at 10:10 a.m. on 10-10-10 Thousands of Couples Marry in Las Vegas on 10-10-10 computer club celebrates 'nerd holiday' Chicago Marathon held on Sunday 10-10-10 Leicester boy turns 10 at 1010 BST on 10/10/10 and last but not least Ubuntu 10.10 released on 101010 My story? I posted this blog at exactly 101010 10:10 PM :-) What's your story?

On the occasion of International Peace day, this article is a must read for all of us. http://www.wikihow.com/Live-in-Peace

Japanese government released its foresight survey in June which basically is the futuristic view of a panel of 40 scientists. In past these foresight survey has been very accurate. In 1997 these futurists said that Internet based phone service would be available in 2003, the same year Skype was debuted. Here is the current foresight survey taken from Popular science magazine: 2020 - Thin flexible electronic displays will replace newspapers. 2022 - Synthetic blood will make blood donation unnecessary 2023 - Any cancer will be cured by medicine 2025 - Electric cars will go 310 miles in a single charge (In fact with rapid enhancement in Lithium Ion battery technology, this could be possible in next 6 -7 years.) 2026 - domestic humanoids (intelligent robots) will do house chores 2028 - Television will produce smells and tastes to every living room 2030 - Artificial Intelligence will be able to form opinion on books, movies and art 2031 - Earth orbiting space vehicle will offer sigh...

I have seen many videos on how to party and network, but first time I came across a video to teach you how to be alone. This is by fiilmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis. Also you may be interested in reading a NY Times article about giving your brain a needed downtime.

Today is a big day for me, I have been given responsibility to manage a high performance team. For me, it is very important to understand what makes a team highly performing and intrinsically motivated. Creativity is a product of Intrinsic Motivation. Theorists Malone and Lepper define intrinsic motivation more simply in terms of what people will do without external inducement. Intrinsically motivating activities are those in which people will engage for no reward other than the interest and enjoyment that accompanies them. Malone and Lepper based on their research put together a list of factors that create  intrinsically motivating work environment: Challenge - people are best motivated while working toward personally meaningful goals whose attainment requires activities with optimal level of difficulty. The goals should align with people's self esteem. Curiosity - Simulating sensory (introducing abrupt changes) and cognitive curiosity (wonder about something) ...

A last couple of days, we were trying to come up on some innovative and creative solutions to a problem at work. Being distracted by myriad of things, I wanted to pause and take help from some of my favorites self help books. I have said before that I am a big fan of self help book like 59 Seconds by Dr. Richard Wiseman. He claims through various studies done in the past that when it comes to innovative ways to look at the world, there goes a lot more to your unconscious mind than you can imagine. When it comes to getting solution to the challenging problems, he suggests taking a break and let your conscious mind fully occupied by some word puzzles or Sudoku game. Before starting to play word puzzles or sudoku, just jot down the problems you are trying to solve. Once occupied by the game, simply without thinking too much, jot down possible thoughts and solutions to the problem. Dr. Wiseman also provides some tips from his another book about ...

I am a regular reader of Jason Fried's column in the Inc. magazine. In general, I like his idea of sharing his work ethics, his best practices and his entrepreneurial skills with the readers. It provides him a FREE advertisement for his company 37 signals and his products and establishes him as a credible business leader.In the current issue of Inc. he wrote about how a smart business can utilize invisible by-product to generate a hefty sum of income. He explained, just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a by-product of saw mill) a knowledge based business can sell many by-products which can generate money. He always makes his case by telling his own story with confidence and this time, he explains about how he started using his own company's rented space to conduct training and seminars for his customers and partners and got the entire year rent covered by running few of these seminars. I have practiced this myself when 13 years ago, I was asked by my employer ...