MISCELLANEOUS: Eleven languages

The BBC is running a story on an Oxford undergraduate who knows 11 languages.

Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings has won a national competition to find the UK's most multi-lingual student. 

The Oxford University undergraduate can currently speak 11 languages - English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian. 

Very impressive.

One comment (based on a discussion on Arun Viswanath's Facebook page)- it seems that certain aspects of languages create the most 'grunt work'.

I am thinking, in particular, of gendered nouns here. Every time you have to add a language like French and Hindi to your repertoire, it becomes a time consuming task to learn and keep track of all the new nouns and their associated genders. (And this is one of those things that is important to know well; otherwise, people will be tipped off as you use more and more nouns with incorrect gender). The term 'combinatorial explosion' came to mind, but it is actually not that. The extra data is only O(n) where n is the number of languages. At any rate, the volume of the data that needs to be learned as you add each additional language becomes so large that, at some point, it just becomes progressively more time consuming and ultimately impractical to remember and refresh one's knowledge of it all.

TECHNOLOGY: San Jose State U. and Udacity Resume Online-Learning Trials

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education:

After putting its high-profile online-learning experiment on hold for the fall semester, San Jose State University said on Tuesday that it would resume offering three online courses next spring in conjunction with Udacity, one of the three big providers of massive open online courses. 

The courses—”Elementary Statistics,” “Introduction to Programming,” and “General Psychology”—are among five with which the university has tested whether teaching methods and technology that Udacity developed for MOOCs could be useful in more-conventional courses offered for university credit. Two mathematics courses that were offered last spring are not being reprised. 

The three courses will be offered for credit to strictly limited numbers of San Jose State students and others in the California State University system, the university said. The courses will also be offered to all comers through Udacity’s website, but completing the courses will earn those students only Udacity certificates.

About me

Below is my biographical information. Linked here is a list of publications.

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Anand Manikutty is an engineer, inventor and entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has worked in technology and software companies for over 10 years in the United States, and conducted research in the industry and in academia in computer science and technology (operating systems, real-time systems, databases and XML) and business and management. 

He received his Bachelor of Technology in computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras where he was awarded the Governor's Gold Medal for 1997. He earned his Master of Science in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. He has also pursued research at Harvard Business School.

In his research at IIT Madras, he used computational techniques to solve operations research problems in real-time systems. As part of a research team, he investigated the use of heuristics to solve algorithmic problems using various mathematical and computational techniques. In subsequent research, he has published papers in journals, conferences and workshops in the areas of internet technology, database technology and systems software. As part of the research and development team at Oracle, Anand investigated problems at the intersection of XML, the markup language that is a generalized version of the HTML used in web pages, and advanced database systems. He has co-authored more than 10 papers and articles in computer science academic journals and conference proceedings. As an employee of Oracle Corporation, he is an inventor on over 17 patents filed in the areas of XML and database systems.

During his time at Harvard Business School, he helped form the non-profit organization Digital Green. Digital Green has achieved economic impact in some of the most economically deprived areas of the world. The project covers over 25,000 farmers over 4 states in India, and is projected to cover 100,000 farmers by 2015. It is the recipient of a generous grant (gratefully acknowledged!) from the Gates Foundation. Digital Green was the recipient of the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2008. In addition to Digital Green and Oracle, he has also been employed as a software design engineer at Microsoft from early 1999 to 2000, as an engineering intern in the Oracle Summer Invitational Program in the summer of 1998, and as a consultant for software companies in the Bay Area.

He recently contributed to a book on organizations and leadership "The Essence of Leadership". The book was published by Macmillan India in 2009. The book has been received well by Stanford’s James March, whose collaborative work with Prof. Herbert Simon on organizations, decision-making and leadership led to the latter winning the Nobel Prize, and USC’s Warren Bennis, University Professor and Founding Chairman of the Leadership Institute at USC. He is currently assisting with a textbook on Strategic Management.

He has been a blogger at the award-winning blog Zoo Station (http://wetware.blogspot.com). He now maintains a blog called "Ask the Delphic Oracle" (http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com) for his Times of India Group column of the same name. He is also a trivia enthusiast having conducted several quizzes in India. He has won several notable quizzes including the Lone Wolf Quiz (solo quiz) and the Odyssey Quiz (team quiz) in Chennai, India.

His Indiatimes columns may be viewed here : http://www.indiatimes.com/columnists/Anand-Manikutty/216

Representative Publications

• Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James Warner and Vikas Arora, "Towards an Industrial Strength SQL/XML Infrastructure",Proceedings of the International Conference of Data Engineering (ICDE 2005).
• Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James W. Warner, Vikas Arora, Susan Kotsovolos, "Query Rewrite for XML in Oracle XML DB",Proceedings of the Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2004).
• Manimaran Govindarasu, Shashidhar Merugu, Anand Manikutty, and C. Siva Ram Murthy, "Integrated scheduling of tasks and messages in distributed real-time systems", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices (JPDC 1998).
• Govindarasu Manimaran, Anand Manikutty, C. Siva Ram Murthy: DHARMA: A tool for evaluating dynamic scheduling algorithms for real-time multiprocessor systems. Journal of Systems and Software 50(2): 131-149 (2000)
• G. Manimaran, Shashidhar Merugu, Anand Manikutty, C. Siva Ram Murthy: Integrated Scheduling of Tasks and Messages in Distributed Real-Time Systems. Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience 1(2) (1998)
• Won the Best Solution Paper Award, for the paper "DREAD: Distributed REal-time Air Defense System '"(co-authored with Anand Manikutty, Shashidhar Merugu, and C. Siva Ram Murthy) for challenge problem problem on "Distributed Real-time Air Defense System," 5th IEEE Intl. Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-time Systems (WPDRTS), Geneva, Switzerland, Apr. 1-3, 1997.

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A less technical bio is available here in the "About Us" section of the Ask the Delphic Oracle blog : http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com/. Favorite papers - in purple.

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