Rahul

Tales of geometry for information theory and machine learningThe image is drawn using an AI tool by the AuthorIn high school, some of us had love-hate relationships with geometry, especially coordinate and 3D geometry. Even more, calculus with geometry was frowned upon. Then came a boom in information technology followed by a craze for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. The cause has inspired many to dig deeper into some mystics of mathematics and information geometry is one of them. Information…

Image: Magnet ReleasingDarkly funny and deeply existential, Mali Elfman’s debut feature Next Exit confronts questions of life and death with a sci-fi practicality that allows the emotional, character-driven story to unfold. As odd couple Rose (Katie Parker) and Teddy (Rahul Kohli) travel cross-country in order to take part in a clinical death trial, they confront their own traumas and hang-ups in an attempt to figure out what they are willing to suffer to survive. The film is pragmatic and deliberate, an esoteric…

Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi hoped on Friday that Twitter would now act against hate speech, check facts more robustly and not stifle the voice of the opposition in India, soon after billionaire Elon Musk took over the social media giant and fired four of its top executives.Gandhi's Twitter handle was temporarily locked after he shared a picture of a rape victim and received a notice from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). He had not used his account on the microblogging website for…

A formidable list of writers appears in the contents page of To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours, edited by Rahul Sagar. There’s Mohandas K Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Annie Besant, Salar Jung II, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and T Madhava Rao among others. The book is an anthology featuring extracts from the works of these writers that have been arranged thematically into chapters on topics such as English education, crossing the seas, free…

Generative Models for Tractable DistributionsLake Arrowhead in California, Picture by the AuthorIn my previous episodes of the Stat Stories series, I talked about methods of variable transformation to generate new distribution. The discussion on the variable transformation, both for univariate and multivariate distributions leads to Normalizing Flows.I recommend reading the discussion on variable transformation for generating new distributions as a prerequisite to understanding Normalizing Flows.A big challenge in…

Orthogonal Polynomials for Data ScienceThe picture was generated by the author using an AI tool.Legendre polynomials of degrees 1 through 6: Picture generated by AuthorOrthogonal polynomials are a useful tool for solving and interpreting many times of differential equations. Further, they are handy mathematical tools for least square approximations of a function, difference equations, and Fourier series. Another big application of the orthogonal polynomial is error-correcting code and sphere packing. Some other obscure…

Do we know much about Mike Flanagan’s newest television show, The Midnight Club? Not really. The synopsis provided by Netflix reads, “At a hospice for terminally ill young adults, eight patients come together every night at midnight to tell each other stories—and make a pact that the next of them to die will give the group a sign from the beyond.” But what we do know is that Flanagan has, once again, hired Rahul Kohli to play a part, and we couldn’t be more grateful. Collider had the first look at his appearance in the…

One of the most iconic images of the Emergency (1975-77), the 22-month period when former prime minister Indira Gandhi suppressed the press, imprisoned opponents, and ruled by decree, is of trade union leader George Fernandes raising his shacked fist in a defiant gesture after being arrested in 1976. Fernandes was already an iconic anti-establishment figure when he organised the strike of Indian Railway workers in 1974, which was possibly one of the reasons Mrs Gandhi declared the Emergency. Before that, he had made a…

There is no parallel to chatting with friends because we express our truest emotions, how much ever nonsensical or raw be the words that we use. Many times, we fall short of words due to the language barrier, or lack of casual jargon that can depict the emotion exactly, which we accomplish through facial expression or body language during direct conversations. AI chatbots and conversational platforms could solve this problem to a large extent, but when it comes to overcoming the language barrier, there hasn’t been…

Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on UnsplashStructured Query Language (SQL) makes a great addition to your toolbox. It may not be as popular as Python or JavaScript, but knowing SQL, especially advanced SQL, offers a number of benefits.For one thing, knowing advanced SQL techniques can help you get better insights from your data, so that you can communicate your ideas more effectively. And since SQL is subject to the same performance bottlenecks and performance issues as other languages, a deeper knowledge will help you…