Ganesh Swami

I was at the BC Technology Impact Awards ceremony last week representing my company Zymeworks. Zymeworks was nominated for the most promising pre-commercial technology company, but unfortunately we didn’t win. The award in this category went to Lignol Energy Corp., a clean tech company.

The organizers had tiled one wall of the Banquet Hall with a 100 feet screen. They had calibrated multiple projectors to blend the edges. Pretty impressive. You can get this technology from a couple of companies: here’s one.

Abebooks.com, an online market for new and used books also won an award. I’ve been using this website for the past couple of years to get used textbooks. Highly recommended.

John MacDonald, the founder of MDA (the ‘M’ in MDA) and of Day4Energy Inc. got the Person of the Year award. It’s truly an honor to be in the same room with the accomplished!

It’s been about four months since I last wrote anything here.

At times your life can reach a state of local optima — you are settled and you begin to get comfortable. If you were to critically analyze the situation, you’d realize that you are at a 7 on a scale of 10 (arbitrarily normalized.) Going any higher would require significant changes and would probably cause a lot of pain. So why do it?

My answer doesn’t matter.

I came across this incredible speech “Man in the Arena” by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, that never has and never will become irrelevant:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

That is all.

I’m taking just one course this semester — a special topics course on Computational Anatomy and Medical Image Analysis. The course is highly focused on the research interests of my supervisor, so instead of sitting beside each other in the lab, we go to another class room and sit beside each other.

Computational Anatomy is “the use of mathematical analysis to learn how tissues grow, assume new shapes and morph into mature structures.” The first few classes are review of the pre-requisites – linear systems theory and stochastic systems. Having not taken either of these courses, I’m seeing plenty of new material. A lot of it is intuitive, some of it not obvious at all. Overall a Good Thing.

I don’t have a copy of the outline yet, but some of the topics we are going to cover are vector space theory, variational calculus, differential and riemannian geometry, tensor analysis and applications in Computational Anatomy. An example of an application is what I’ve just finished writing — linear statistical analysis to classify the hippocampus in dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.

I’ll be posting about things that I find interesting here. If you’re in the class and want to follow along, a quick way to do so if by bookmarking the tag: ensc462.