So, it’s been a day since a very interesting and memorable event took place at my humble lab. I've been going through intense emotions and still am as I begin to put down them as words in here...
December 22 2019 - NUA Dev Meet v1.4
Things took off at around 8 AM, as some very enthusiastic group of young minds gradually started to arrive at my lab venue and take their seats on a chilling winter morning.
It was an honour meeting each and every one of them. I was thrilled and deeply encouraged by their extreme eagerness and motivation to learn something new that day.
While they were having or finished breakfast, I did not want them to get bored as there was still quite some time remaining for the event to start. So I distributed some copies of a paper titled, Your Gameplay Says It All: Modelling Motivation in Tom Clancy's The Division from arXiv.
A one on one interaction was very helpful in understanding their unique interests in Applied AI Computing.
The event finally started around 10:15 AM. The first seminar was titled, “Nvidia's Breakthrough In AI & GPUs by Rohit Biddappa (Head Developer Marketing & DLI, NVIDIA India). As a matter of coincidence, Rohit Sir had helped me in handling an online technical glitch during poster submission at GTCx India 2016. The poster was related to my PhD’s initial research work (GPU Accelerated Microbial Cell Growth) and without his timely help, I would perhaps never been able to present it back then. During the webinar, his perspectives on Edge Computing were really very interesting to listen to. Many many thanks to him for sharing with us his precious time.
The next part was quite an emotional one for me. It was about the inauguration of my lab and book that had been pending for quite a long time. What better time would it be than this day! It was quite a joyous moment, when Sandipan Chattopadhyay, (Co-Founder & Director Engg., Mihup) did the honours, followed by a short but very motivating interaction at the lab. I came to know about the Julia language that I’ve already started to explore it’s documentation (especially Julia's GPU programming ecosystem) a while ago via julialang.org.
Sandipan Sir’s talk that followed next was an absolute eye opener and a thought provoking perspective that had a human touch towards applied computing. My most favourite phrase was the quote, “Start being humble”. I also really liked how he mentioned Nikola Tesla. Immensely grateful to him for sharing his valuable time and enlightening us that day.
After that we had some lunch and networking.
Aditya Prasad, the founder of XRIG, was also present showcasing his high end deep learning workstations. It was a pleasure interacting with him and talking about how I use GPUs for my research work. I showed him my Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS Linux system running with ROCm installed for the Radeon VII. It was a pleasant surprise to know that he already knew about ROCm
! Really very thankful to him for being there.Next, I had a group discussion with the highly enthusiastic young minds about the paper I had shared with them in the morning. I had already underlined many interesting points and their feedback about it was very interesting. I related AI, GPUs and Gaming together and they took a lot of interest and listened to it. They also shared the names of their favourite games and their perspectives about their respective AI mechanics noticed during gameplay.
The last part was a lot of fun! One of the participants, Riko Banerjee had mentioned Red Dead Redemption 2 as his favourite game and coincidentally, I already had it installed on my external ‘Windows To Go’ hard disk. We had a demonstration of how NPCs remember gamer behaviour through a hands-on experience of the game!
Throughout the entire day, Amlan Panigrahi was like always, an amazing co-host and speaker who spoke about the basic fundamentals behind GPUs and also gave a demo on Jetson Nano before the event finally concluded.
Is that all folks? I guess this is only the beginning...
Finally, I would like to thank Amlan Panigrahi, Sourav Rudra, Koustav Acharya and Rupam Das for being such excellent organisers during the event. Thank you too Ankush Das for always being there even remotely.
Thank you all so much for participating in the event and making it a grand success! Looking forward to see you all again sometime at my lab. Till then..adios.
Wish you A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year!
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