Thoughts on data science, statistics and machine learning.
Misconceptions about OCR Bounding Boxes
Over the last year, I have been working on an application that auto-translates documents while maintaining the layout and formatting. It has many bells and whistles, from simple geometric tricks to sophisticated gen-AI algorithms and microservices. But basically, the app performs the simple task of identifying text in documents, machine-translating them, and reinserting them such that the output document “looks” like the input.
Most documents that my app has to process are PDFs. PDFs are ubiquitous but notoriously hard to analyze. Since pretty much every app is capable of producing a PDF file, its layout can get particularly nasty. Moreover there is no single semantic description of what comprises a document - e.g. an email is as much a document as a boarding pass. Who’s to say that a selfie is not a document? This means that my users can upload almost anything into the app, and as long as it has some text, it ought to be serviceable.
Essays of Revolt - Jack London
My company uses an e-HRM system. The system is why my colleagues and I never forget to wish each other on birthdays and anniversaries. Systems like these save us from the embarrassment of appearing indifferent. Other systems like smartphones ensure that the most halfhearted birthday greeting appears sincere and colourful. All you have to do is type “Happy” and the autocomplete does the rest - it composes the shortest message needed to show how much you care. It will even recommend the right emojis - because whole words need too much reading, we can surely be more efficient. We’ve got a “Happy Birthday” greeting down to about three taps on a touchscreen. One system precipitates this behaviour with automated emails, and other systems propagate it. The greatest gift of social media is avoiding social interaction without looking like a misanthrope - it is no wonder that social media has swallowed whole an entire generation. If we’ve built and nurtured systems that make automatons out of humans, and others that reduce social interaction to taps and clicks and swipes, we probably deserve it.
Book Review: The Great Arc - John Keay
This book invokes two very different reactions in me. The primary reaction is jubilant, almost romantic. The second is gloomy. Imagine you’re watching Oppenheimer: spirits rising until the point the bombs actually drop, after which you feel guilty about having felt good in the first place.
The Great Trigonometric Survey was completed over the duration of a better part of a century, across three generations of mathematicians, physicists and surveyors (they were called compasswallahs - I finally see where Rohit Gupta gets his pseudonym), and at the cost of thousands of lives. They managed to complete an accurate-to-the-inch survey of much of the subcontinent. The Great Trigonometric Survey afforded to the Raj a much welcome administrative and military efficiency over the whole subcontinent. It is perhaps only a coincidence that the events of 1857 happened only a few years after the conclusion of the survey. But it’s very likely that the Survey was among the many things that irritated Indians. And the results of the Survey certainly played no small part in quelling of the Rebellion.
Book Review: A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
I went into this essay expecting Virginia Woolf had written about what the eponymous room is like - its design and contents. But she deals with a more fundamental issue - that one needs a room of one’s own.
The essays are a fine piece of scholarship. I’d never have thought that Woolf’s characteristic device, the “stream of consciousness” could be used to not only as a writing technique, but also as a powerful pedagogical technique.