Ganesh Swami

WEC was a lot of fun. Let’s just say that most of it was a breeze and I can’t seem to recall anything of note. Our team garnered a lot of interest from companies that deal with voluminous amounts of data. We’ll see where it takes us.

Size does matter. The funniest thing at WEC was the amount of attention our poster attracted. My team-mate Calin got some of the dimensions wrong: instead of 80×60 in centimeters, he asked for inches. As a result, our poster developed its own gravity field!

Above you can see my friend Adam finding it difficult to use his vocal chords. Here’s one more: “I’m sorry, I’m not able to hear you above the size of our poster.”

Every year about 200 engineering from western and central Canada come together for a conference known as WEC. This year the event is to be held at UBC. My team’s representing SFU in the innovative design competition.

I’ve been super-super-super busy the last few days throwing together a demo for our technology. This also includes the hours I’ve spent talking and demonstrating to potential customers the features of our product. And passing along some of my enthusiasm. What I’ve really done is setup a feedback cycle between the customers and the engineers – it’s been working great so far.

We’ve just finished the poster for the project. We brainstormed the content and the basic layout earlier today. After about seven revisions Calin did for me, I was happy with the outcome. It’s about 3am right now, and this is the earliest I’m going to bed this week.

This is easily the best part of my life — I’m enjoying every moment of it. Thinking and solving problems during the day, while in transit or while tucking yourself in bed. Innovation without constraints to hold you back.

I’ll be offline for the rest of this week.

PS: I don’t want to disclose the idea just yet because some of the folks involved in this project want to protect it.

One of the biggest advantages of being in school (while most of your friends are graduating soon) is the immense opportunity to learn at all times. The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Science center at SFU has lined up a list of high profile speakers over the next few months.

They are: Jesper Lutzen, Efim Zelmanov, David Brillinger, Craig Evans, Herbert Wilf, John Mason, Paul Seymour, George Papanicolau, Christos H. Papadimitriou and Marsha Berger.

As always, I’ll be writing about the “take home message” from these talks. For those at SFU, these will be held in the IRMACS center as usual.