I am originally from Chandigarh, India and studied at Yadavindra Public School, Punjab. Enamored by Computer Science and its creative possibilities from an early age, I went on to pursue my undergraduate in Computer Science and Engineering, from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Delhi). I further pursued the field and my interest in distributed systems and networking by getting a PhD from Northwestern University, IL. My adviser there was Prof. Peter Dinda and my thesis was titled "Black Box Methods for Inferring Parallel Applications' Properties in Virtual Environments". More information on my PhD work is available on the research page. I defended my dissertation in March 2008.
During my undergraduate and graduate school, I interned at Google (a new ad delivery algorithm for AdSense), Intel Research Labs (both the Pittsburgh/CMU and the Cambridge UK labs) , and IBM Research Labs.
After PhD: I have recently joined the quantitative hedge fund D.E.Shaw and Co. (in NYC) in a computer science role in the Options Trading group.
Please click the links above to navigate the site.
My old college page is still located at http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~agupta/
Contact Information: I can be contacted at ashishgup at gmail dot com
Interests:
I have been doing computer science for a long time, and greatly enjoy programming, as evident from various kinds of software and downloads available from this site. I started writing and even selling software from the age of 12 including software for teaching astronomy and physics. I also used to enjoy participating in algorithm/programming contests in school and college because of the requirement of quick thinking and problem solving under pressure and the adrenaline rush that it provides. My resume lists some contests I went to at the national and the international level, including the ACM-IBM Worldwide Programming Contest (2001) in Vancouver, Canada. At that time we happened to be the only team selected to represent India.
I greatly enjoy sports with squash being my favorite. I think it has the right mix of speed and low reaction time along with strategy and is a most excellent way to keep fit. I greatly enjoy reading sort of addicted that I end up reading any words I see anywhere. I enjoy non-fiction in the genres of business reading, philosophy, religion, comics, humor and sometimes fiction as well. Other personal interests include music (listening and learning), teaching, writing and puzzles.
I have recently moved into the field of finance so I also now enjoy reading and learning about finance and economics.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life and it's already 11:30. What a waste. Stephen Colbert
Some independent projects done in the past
DoubleTrust - A mashup of Google and Yahoo
Click to check out DoubleTrust, an experimental search prototype
Featured in BusinessWeek : Links one , two and three. (Sampling the web's best mash-ups)
ABCNews TV coverage : Top three fun and useful sites of the week . June 2005
Chinese Checkers
With an Artificial Intelligence Agent
Written with intelligent AI heuristics (Minmax with additional heuristics), this game is extremely difficult if not impossible to be beaten by a human player
GUI developed in Borland C++. Runs on Windows Platform
Click here
Connect 4
Connect 4 is a popular game similar to Tic-Tac-Toe, except with a larger board and gravity for your pieces to settle at the bottom.
It implements artificial intelligence algorithms featuring a strong computer opponent.
Click here
ScriptFlash
for algorithmic visualizations in Flash
Want to create Dynamic runtime Flash Animations the easy way ? Use ScriptFlash , an intuitive and simple way to generate cool Flash animations at runtime.
I was originally motivated to write this when I wanted an easy way to present complex algorithms or information on the web for which using Flash Editors would be a major hassle. This can be embedded in CGI scripts etc. to dynamically generate Flash animations based on user input and database queries. Contact me for details.
Some Generated Samples and Detail (IE recommended)
Calendar Conundrums
What is the smallest calendar program you can write ?
Here is my hack at it, a one line solution.