Hit by a Car

I was recently hit by a car when crossing the street in Davis, California. This explains why I haven't posted anything on this blog this month until now (late in the month) and why I may be slower to post next month too. I'm sure I will have much more to say about this at a later date, but for now, for legal reasons, this is all I can say.

Reflection: Starting a Shift to a New Career in Transportation Policy

This post is the second in a series of three posts about the end of my time as a PhD student in Princeton University (in this post henceforth referred to simply as "the university"). As a write this, I am still technically a PhD student enrolled full-time in the university, working on topics in nanophotonics & fluctuational electromagnetics. Next fall (assuming the current public health crisis abates to an extent that it is safe for me to do so — please note that I am not a public health expert or epidemiologist, so I am not making predictions in this regard), however, I will start a postdoctoral research position in the University of California Davis analyzing transportation policy, with a particular eye toward the effects of such current & future policies on the mobility and resulting socioeconomic opportunities for those who have been marginalized by current transportation systems, including people who are poor or have disabilities (like myself). This is a fairly drastic, and arguably surprising, change of career; I have told many friends and relatives about this, but not all of them, so I'd like to use this space to explain my thought process over the years leading up to this decision. Follow the jump to see more.

My Time at the STEPS+ 2019 Fall Symposium

Last week, I attended the STEPS+ 2019 Fall Symposium, hosted at UC Davis. (I'll have more details about the broader reasons for the trip in an upcoming post). It was a nice set of talks and open discussions about energy issues in transportation, as well as a good opportunity for professional networking. Much of the discussion was focused on California because its large geographic & demographic size, the fact that its own metropolitan areas have minimal spillover into other states and vice versa, and the clear separation of powers between the state and local governments means that it can effectively operate like an autonomous country in miniature (evidenced also by its own large population and economic output). That said, the diverse range of political interests, geographic features, and climates in the state make it to some extent a microcosm of what would need to happen at the national level too with respect to combating climate change, decarbonizing the economy, and making transportation generally more sustainable. Thus, although my interests tend more toward the direct relationship between transportation and issues of socioeconomic equity, there are strong indirect relationships through energy and climate issues too, so it was really interesting to learn about these, to learn more about communication between researchers and policymakers, and to see what models exist for working toward greater sustainability in transportation.

My Time in Luxembourg and at the META19 Conference in Lisbon

This is an update from my recent travel to Luxembourg and Lisbon. I had the privilege of traveling to Luxembourg to deliver an invited talk to my collaborator's group; we have published 2 papers together, are about to have a third published (for which I'll write a post once the publication is official), and are working on a fourth. It was productive to meet with my collaborators to hash out the details of our fourth paper together, and I think I did reasonably well delivering my talk, for which the first part was about the work with my collaborators modeling fluctuational electromagnetic phenomena at the interface between small objects that have to be treated at the atomic scale and large objects that can be treated as continuous, and the second part was about my more recent work purely within my group putting upper bounds on thermal radiation and heat transfer. Additionally, I appreciated the interesting conversations I had after my talk with various members of that group.

I also got to go to the META19 Conference in Lisbon, which is centered around research in nanophotonics and metamaterials; there, I presented an invited talk about the aforementioned work on upper bounds to heat transfer, which my advisor graciously let me do in his place. It was great to meet people that I knew associated with my advisor but hadn't seen in a few years, and we got to discuss each other's work in great depth; I got to also meet a few other people for the first time, and had some good conversations with them about our respective projects too. That said, while I think the delivery of my presentation there was good, I did feel like I could have done a better job of preparing my presentation in a way that better fit the context: my presentation may have been too theoretical, so for an audience of engineers who care more about using metamaterials and nanophotonic architectures to make new devices, I could have been clearer about broad physical insights and done a better job connecting the findings in my work to ideas of interest to such researchers. Additionally, I could have probably done a better job networking, though my reticence was in part due to uncertainty on my part regarding my future plans.

I also had a day in each city to explore, but there were issues in each case. For one, neither Luxembourg nor Lisbon are especially tourist-oriented cities compared to places like London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, or Berlin, as far as I've heard: both cities have a lot of nice restaurants and cafes as well as many nice viewpoints and other areas to simply hang out and relax, but there aren't so many specific attractions, as Luxembourg is known more for housing EU governmental offices as well as international finance companies, while Lisbon seems to generally not have invested in tourism as much. I did hear in each place that the surrounding countrysides are beautiful, so perhaps that is where more tourism happens and where more interesting things can be seen. (Also, it didn't help that I was in Lisbon on a Monday, when many things are closed.) For another, both cities are not especially good for people like me in power wheelchairs who want to travel independently; people who are able-bodied, in manual wheelchairs, or have disabilities that require them to be assisted by partners or personal care attendants full-time may be better served. In Luxembourg, I didn't feel like I missed too much because it's a fairly small city anyway, and the public transit buses were accessible (though there were some issues even there). In Lisbon, I felt like I missed more because it is a bigger city, yet its Metro rapid transit train system, which is supposedly accessible, actually has large gaps between the train floors and platforms, and most of the buildings have large steps to enter. I do hope to visit Europe again, but when I do, I hope to make sure it will be a city/area that is more friendly to people in power wheelchairs.

My Time at the 2019 SmartDrivingCar Summit

Last week, I attended the 2019 SmartDrivingCar Summit, hosted in Princeton University by ORFE professor Alain Kornhauser. As someone with a physical disability, I've become excited of late about the possibilities that autonomous vehicles could offer people like myself as well as older people or people with cognitive disabilities, blindness, or even those without disabilities but live in poverty, while also wondering about the socioeconomic implications for such people with respect to the development of autonomous vehicles and associated systems in practice. Given this, I've been in conversation with Prof. Kornhauser about these issues for several weeks, and desirous of learning more & meeting people in the field, I attended the conference.

Laudably, the conference had the overall theme of prioritizing development of autonomous vehicle systems to serve the needs of those in marginalized groups (where marginalization could be socioeconomic or through disability). As I have been reading about some predictions about socioeconomic impacts for the last few months, presentations touching upon those aspects felt more familiar to me, but it was really interesting to also see the technical developments in this field, current innovations in transportation network development for elderly & disabled people, and psychological aspects to bear in mind with respect to popular acceptance of autonomous vehicles. For instance, with respect to the last point, it didn't really occur to me that some people in marginalized communities may feel a sense of social belonging with others at public transit stops as they are designed now and may feel more socially isolated in small autonomous vehicles.

The overarching concern at the conference was about the funding pressures being acutely felt following the incident of an Uber autonomous vehicle killing a pedestrian in Arizona last year, along with the general failure of fully autonomous systems to materialize at this time despite predictions from 3-5 years ago that it would happen now. As a result, the tone of the conference felt more measured than some of the hype from that time might have suggested, yet there was an overall sense of optimism and motivation to do more work toward solving these problems. Even if fully autonomous cars fail to materialize, whether the problems are technical (i.e. they just won't work unsupervised) versus political (i.e. the number of accidents in testing becomes unacceptably high), I am personally optimistic about the possibility of working toward solving some socioeconomic inequities in transportation even with current innovations. Overall, I really enjoyed learning more and meeting new people, and am hoping to get more involved in this field in the future.

Featured Comments: Week of 2017 April 16

There was one post that got a comment this past week, so I'll repost that.

Book Review: "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil

An anonymous reader said, "I had one question. Since algorithms may have access to the internet, (not controlled by the government or any particular single body), I imagine it would be extremely difficult to minimize their abuse or misuse. I hope precautionary measures such as new government or private bodies or maybe benign algorithms will deal with this issue in the future. Does the author talk about such measures ? Also, it seems that there is a lot of unrest regarding AIs these days. People like to imagine situations where an AI designed with a rather innocent goal of calculating 'pi' with a significant precision exterminates human race, sets on a conquest of the entire galaxy just to calculate 'pi' but for reasons unfathomable. Does the author talk about misuse of algorithms by AIs ? Although I am asking about the book, I would be more interested to know your personal views on these. :) Thank you."

Thanks to that reader for that comment. I don't have anything particularly planned on this blog for this week, but I may have a distribution review next week. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Autonomous Cars and Autonomous Ownership

I was originally going to do a Linux distribution review this month. However, when I tried a couple of distributions that I wanted to test, none of them would properly boot from a live USB, so I gave up on those. Instead, I wanted to use this space to ramble a bit on what the near-future of self-driving cars might look like. It comes from some conversations I had with my family last weekend while visiting California, after having seen the limited self-driving capabilities of a Tesla Model S (namely, its ability to autonomously pull in and out of a parking space). Moreover, as some of you who know me personally would know, I have a disability that prevents me from driving, so the sight of even minimally-autonomous cars as a present reality excites me, and I'm keeping an eye on current developments in that field/market. Given this, if you'll indulge me, then follow the jump to (not exhaustively) explore some possibilities for self-driving cars.

How the Economics of Rewards Relates to Open Source

As I just noticed, this is post #10000000_2, #80_16, or #200_8! (The underscore separates the number (on the left) from the base system (on the right).)
I got the idea for this post from a video embedded in an article on the website The Linuxologist. It deals with how incentives affect people's performance - specifically the incentive of a higher reward for better performance. Follow the jump to read the rest.