The Robot is Ready!

It's here! It's here!

Last month we rolled out the recently media-famous Ankle Robot or simply the AnkleBot, into the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center. There we are going to test it on populations of patients who have sufferred various degrees of strokes. It's my responsibility to conduct those experiments, analyze the data, take my interpretations back to my group at MIT and re-engineer the device as needed. There's a little bit of everyhing involved: development of computational models for human walking, experimental work with the AnkleBot, and "getting your hands dirty" as the people at MIT put it. The year has also started off very well on another front: I got elected to the position of the Chair of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society!! Of course, whether people take me seriously during the meetings remains to be seen since I have been told that I have been one of the really young guys to occupy that post.

I am so excited that CNN is visiting our lab sometime in March to make a documentary, but for some reason, it seemed to be a regular thing with the other folks in the lab. I seem to be always alone in my excitement. Thank God for my wife being around! Though it's torture for her I guess.

I am trying to not get burnt out and at the same time retain my productivity. Thinking of a hobby. Up until now, my activities away from home included only watching Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond apart from CNN. Got to do better than that! Can't become a lazy bum at the age of 30.

Here's a more philosophical question in my mind: does the drive to succeed exclusively come from within as an inherent quality or is it also a function of your professional and/or academic training i.e. where one has worked and/or studied?

Before I start boring others and what is much worse, myself, I am going to ponder on my question and go make some Bengali mutton curry. At the end of the day, the only thing that I do live for, is good food. I have been blessed with a beautiful wife who can cook so well! The best of both worlds, eh?

First few days at MIT...

Well, I arrived at my dream workplace many days ago. Truth be told, I was walking in awe staring at anything and everything in sight! The MIT culture is so very different. Geeks? Yes, but there is a lot more to it. Personally, what I found is kind of paradoxical. It almost seemed that people in my group do not work as hard as one might expect people at MIT to do, but hey, somehow research really got done and got done well. How is that possible? Somehow, it has to do with the quality of time and effort combined with the quality of ideas emanating from the faculty and research staff.

Anyways, enough about MIT lest I get branded as a pompous big mouth. I have settled down well and am thinking of smoking a pipe, a desire I have had since my days in England. Ciggarettes are anyways too expensive in Massachusetts! Why not quit? Not now!

Before I start writing more crap, let me quit for the day and come back later and post better comments...

Ready to move!

Yes, after many months of wrapping things up at Georgia Tech, I am ready to now move on to a new position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Am I excited? You bet. But also apprehensive of the pressures on the job. Anyways, take life as it comes is the lesson that has newly dawned on me!