New Semester.

The fourth semester of my engineering course is due to start on 9th January. 

These are the technical courses I'll be taking this semester.

1. Numerical Methods
2. Communication Engineering and Coding Theory
3. Formal Language and Automata Theory
4. Computer Architecture
5. Discrete Mathematics
6. Software Tools (VB/VC++) 

Already shuddering thinking about the workload, and the fact that I'm going to juggle MOOCs alongside these. Let's see how this plays out.

New Year.

So, Happy New Year and all that Jazz.

Udemy decided to go crazy and offer a bunch of really expensive courses for free through coupons, so this happened.

They're all certificate courses with lifetime access too. Yay.
Starting with the Android course now.

Published!

So my research papers finally got published and I'm what they would call a published research scholar now.

Bells chime in the distance. Tremendous academic snobbery ensues.

So here are the links to the papers and their abstracts.

The first is on Symmetric Cryptography, and is the one I am most proud of, because I'd been working non-stop from January for this.

Title: RASS — A Concurrency Based Bitwise Symmetric Key Cryptographic Algorithm

Abstract: The security and strength of any cryptosystem's encryption depend on the difficulty, both in terms of time and technique, of cracking the message. This paper suggests a bit cipher, a symmetric key cryptographic algorithm which provides bit-level security with linear time complexity and robust security (two 16 bit keys), and uses optimal time compared to other such ciphers by implementing concurrency through multithreading.

Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7777842/

The next two are on Image Processing and were really interesting because the topic was new to me and I had to learn on the run with some help from my professors and a lot of help from Google.

Title: Segmentation-based Image Compression

Abstract: In this paper, a procedure for segmentation-based image compression is suggested. Two types of segmentation techniques are used, namely threshold and region growing algorithms, and JPEG is applied to obtain the final compressed result, which provides better ratios compared to standalone compression algorithms.

Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7777822/

Title: Hindu-Arabic Character Recognition using Mathematical Morphology

Abstract: Presentation of a novel decision tree based method to improve the ability of hand written character recognition using mathematical morphology. For this paper, classification of hand written digits is done into two groups: one with blob and another without blob. This paper proposes the recognition of digits using certain features that can distinguish one digit from the other.

Link: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7777841/

This research was one of the few good things that happened to me this year.

Until next time.

Ron.

[UPDATE: The full text for each paper is now available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ronit_Ray]

 

It Begins

My name is Ronit Ray, and I am the fastest man alive.

Nope. My name is Ronit Ray and I am an engineering student looking for the will to live. Now that's more like it. Over the last few months, my mediocrity has crept up to me and I feel there are more impediments holding me back than ever before. I'm trying to stand out from the crowd of mediocre engineers, and can't seem to find a way to do so. Which is what I hope to change here.

I'm going to try and keep this blog as updated as I can over the next few years so that it serves as a technical journal, a progress marker of sorts, and maybe even as a decent addendum to my CV provided I can do half the stuff I dream of doing.

Here's who I am, or at least what my LinkedIn profile has to show.

A computer science student at the University of Engineering and Management, Kolkata.

My skills: 

Elementary:

Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, C, Python, SQL, Arduino.

Intermediate/Advanced:

Yup, nothing.

Trainings and Certifications I've undertaken:

1. Embedded Systems and Basic Robotics using Arduino from a firm called Distronix India.
2. HTML5 and CSS3 Fundamentals- Development for Absolute Beginners (Microsoft MVA)
3. Front-End Development Certification- FreeCodeCamp (I still have a couple of projects left to get the actual certificate, but the course is done and dusted.)
4. Introduction to Programming Using Python (Microsoft MVA)
5. Intro to Python for Data Science (DataCamp)
6. Tidy Data in Python Mini-Course (DataCamp)
7. Ethical Hacking Workshop from a private firm called HackCieux.

Projects I've done:

1. Basic Calculator with HTML/CSS/Bootstrap/JS/jQuery
2. Wikipedia API Search with Wikipedia's JSON API.
3. A Local Weather Viewer which uses the OpenWeatherMap JSON API coupled with the browser's geolocation or ip-api's JSON API to automatically show the weather for the user's location without any manual input.
4. Research Projects
1. A concurrency-based bitwise symmetric-key cryptographic algorithm.
2. Segmentation-Based Image Compression
3. Recognition of Hindu-Arabic Characters using Mathematical Morphology. 
• All of these were presented at the 7th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference at Columbia University, New York City and should be published anytime now. Hopefully. Just about now. Aaaanytime now would be nice. Please?

That's about it. I used to have great scores in school, but my college scores are just about average. 82.5% in the first year, and an entirely directionless second year. I'm sitting here blogging when I have an exam on Monday. You get the drift.

Anyhow, I picked Blogger because it loads a lot faster than WordPress (which was my favoured medium earlier. Oh yeah, Medium. Medium would have been cool too, but again, I needed something which loads fairly fast even if I have downloads running in the background, which I almost always do.) Let's see how this goes.