It has been a long time since I wrote here. The last few weeks have been quite hectic with all the thesis work. Now that it is written and submitted, I hope I can be more punctual with these mails :)

A short description of my work: Ensuring the correctness of automated systems is crucial. The supervisory control theory proposes techniques to help build control solutions that provide certain correctness guarantees. These techniques rely on a model describing the behavior of the system. Unfortunately, such models are hard to create, thus limiting the industrial adoption of SCT. This thesis aims to improve the situation by providing an approach to automatically learn a model that captures the system's behavior.

To this end, we propose two approaches to integrate active learning and supervisory control theory. Active learning is a promising technique to learn models by interacting with the system to be learned. Using active learning helps avoid the manual step of creating models, thus allowing the use of supervisory control techniques in the absence of models.

Text editors and Lord of the Rings

I realized last week’s email had the wrong link. So here comes the corrected link. Enjoy :)

On Writing

Things have been quite hectic on my end. I sent in my thesis draft for evaluation last week. Now I have two months to finish the thesis and everything I promised in it. This was why I missed last week’s mail.

I ended up writing my thesis by hand. Of course, I typed it up into digital format. But, it turns out, writing by hand is more efficient than directly typing stuff up. There seems to be some research into note-taking habits, and the conclusion is to use paper to take notes. Taking notes on paper is shown to be far superior for recalling and understanding concepts. The articles can be found here and here.

This is good! It helps.

The week went by way too quickly. But thanks to this newsletter, I am forced to think back and review the week and write short snippets during the week. It helps give a sense of closure to know it wasn't a week wasted.

I am still writing my thesis. The first draft is due this week, along with another paper I have (I think) finished. So it's been lots of writing the past week.

In other news, I open-sourced the tool I have been working on in the last couple of years. I call it MIDES(Model Inference for Discrete Event Systems) pronounced:Myd dz; or something like that. It's been almost 3 years in the making and has gone through 3 major rewrites so far. You can find it here

Another week whizzes by! I still have no clue where this is going.

Things with my thesis still look...well... incomplete.

I have been working on an essay, partially part of my thesis, but I also have plans to write some free standing blogposts about the work I have done so far. Following is a sneak peak into the essay where I introduce formal methods.

Hiyall,

I want to push myself to write more. Or, maybe it is just me procrastinating. Either way....here we go...

I was hoping the blog will be beneficial but it turns out I am being too picky on what I write there and end up trying to produce good writing there. And you know what they say about good writing. There is no good writing. It's always "first draft, second draft, third draft, throw it all out, new first draft, more research, second draft, hopefully, eventually publish." Instead, I was contemplating writing a regular newsletter maybe once in two weeks or once a week if I find content, something that is a bit less formal. That way, I might be able to push myself to write more often and also helps with my weekly review. Making me review more often.

I am not sure what I plan in this newsletter. I guess it is going to mainly contain things that have caught my attention during the week; things I am engaged in, just the usual technology, philosophy, cooking, books, the likes... let's see.