Monday, June 27, 2005

Delfikorakle : About me || Anand Manikutty's Biographical Information AND free Life Coaching Advice - READ THIS FIRST if you are Googling for "ANAND MANIKUTTY" - this stuff is kinda interesting. :-) ||

Below is Anand Manikutty's time-tested approach to Solving All Problems That Life Will Throw At You. Psuedocode is provided here. Pseudocode is also available in C, C++ and Java, but if you don't know Python, our sincere advice is for you to learn this wonderful language. Don't worry - it does not bite.:-)

Below is also Anand Manikutty's biographical information. (Scroll down below for a list of representative publications in computer science as well as his publications in other fields.) However, we are not quite sure how that will actually help you. Linked here is his About.Me page: https://about.me/anand.manikutty/. This page has been created as a link back for his Twitter feed. Here is the link to his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/2authors2books/ We are not sure how this will help you either. What will help you is the pseudocode below. The pseudo-code on Solving All Your Life's Problems will definitely help you at least understand how you could have solved that problem that Life threw at you that other time. No, not that one. That one could have been solved with a simple Google search that would have taken 10 seconds. You screw up on the little things, sometimes, too. Come on - don't flatter yourself. :-)

We also recommend you buy a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - to get all the references thrown around in this essay. In case you are unsure whether you found the right book, please note that the book has the words "DO NOT PANIC" written in large letters on the front cover. The Python code is meant to be run on an interpreter that can understand Python 3.0. If it doesn't work on your Windows machine, try it on Linux (the mjolnir package is not available for free download, unfortunately.). If all else fails, RTFM. Read the fine manual. :-)

~

Pseudocode

import mjolnir

# This page includes information on how to solve a lot of your life problems

# This is the Only Life Coaching course you will ever need.

# the sure-fire approach to approaching all problems - and solving most of them

my_problem = "so and so"

def area_in_which_problem_lies():

     mjolnir_identify_area(my_problem)

area_of_my_problem = area_in_which_problem_lies(my_problem)

mylist = []

my_list = find_names_of_experts_for_area(area_of_my_problem, 12)


number_of_books = 5

mybooklist = []

mybooklist += find_book_in_area(area_of_my_problem)

for index in range(number_of_books):
     read_book(mybooklist, index)

for index in range(10):

     send_email(my_list[index])

identify_your_own_approach()

=

About Anand

Anand Manikutty is an engineer, inventor, researcher and entrepreneur based in India and the United States. He is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Stanford University and Harvard Business School. He has worked in technology and software companies for over 15 years in the United States, and conducted research in the industry and in academia in computer science and technology (operating systems, real-time systems, databases and XML) and business and management. 

He received his Bachelor of Technology in computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras where he was awarded the Governor's Gold Medal for 1997. He earned his Master of Science in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. He has also pursued research at Harvard Business School.

In his research at IIT Madras, he used computational techniques to solve operations research problems in real-time systems. As part of a research team, he investigated the use of heuristics to solve algorithmic problems using various mathematical and computational techniques. In subsequent research, he has published papers in journals, conferences and workshops in the areas of internet technology, database technology and systems software. As part of the research and development team at Oracle, Anand investigated problems at the intersection of XML, the markup language that is a generalized version of the HTML used in web pages, and advanced database systems. He has co-authored more than 10 papers and articles in computer science academic journals and conference proceedings. As an employee of Oracle Corporation, he is an inventor on over 17 patents filed in the areas of XML and database systems.

During his time at Harvard Business School, he helped form the non-profit organization Digital Green, which was initially funded due to the interest in the project of a certain billionaire philanthropist. Digital Green has achieved economic impact in some of the most economically deprived areas of the world. The project covers over 25,000 farmers over 4 states in India, and is projected to cover 100,000 farmers by 2015. It is the recipient of a generous grant from the Gates Foundation. Digital Green was the recipient of the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2008. In addition to Digital Green and Oracle, he has also been employed as a software design engineer at Microsoft from early 1999 to 2000, as an engineering intern in the Oracle Summer Invitational Program in the summer of 1998, and as a consultant for software companies in the Bay Area.

He recently contributed to a book on organizations and leadership "The Essence of Leadership". The book was published by Macmillan India in 2009. The book has been received well by Stanford’s James March, whose collaborative work with Prof. Herbert Simon on organizations, decision-making and leadership led to the latter winning the Nobel Prize, and USC’s Warren Bennis, University Professor and Founding Chairman of the Leadership Institute at USC. He is currently assisting with a textbook on Strategic Management.

He has been a blogger at the award-winning blog Zoo Station (http://wetware.blogspot.com). He now maintains a blog called "Ask the Delphic Oracle" (http://askthedelphicoracle.blogspot.com) for his Times of India Group column of the same name. He is also a trivia enthusiast having conducted several quizzes in India. He has won several notable quizzes including the Lone Wolf Quiz (solo quiz) and the Odyssey Quiz (team quiz) in Chennai, India.

His Indiatimes columns may be viewed here : http://www.indiatimes.com/columnists/Anand-Manikutty/216

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Representative Publications in Computer Science

  • Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James Warner and Vikas Arora, "Towards an Industrial Strength SQL/XML Infrastructure",Proceedings of the International Conference of Data Engineering (ICDE 2005).
  • Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James W. Warner, Vikas Arora, Susan Kotsovolos, "Query Rewrite for XML in Oracle XML DB",Proceedings of the Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2004).
  • Manimaran Govindarasu, Shashidhar Merugu, Anand Manikutty, and C. Siva Ram Murthy, "Integrated scheduling of tasks and messages in distributed real-time systems", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices (JPDC 1998).
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It's Not About The Bike 

by Anand Manikutty

Below is an essay I wrote with the help of Mjolnir, my Artificial Intelligence program. Mjolnir is an Artificial Neural Network-based software which can write in the style of any author, contemporary or near-contemporary. It can accurately capture the writing style of everyone from Marx to Hemingway, from Narendra Modi to Winston Churchill to Nir Eyal. 

Let's take Nir Eyal. Nir Eyal is an acknowledged expert on focus and learning. As a matter of fact, I have been discussing a bunch of stuff off and on with Nir Eyal on LinkedIn. But he is not the only person whose brains I have picked.  So, here is my question for you. Do you think you might also be able to discuss this type of "focus" and "learning" stuff with other experts and gain valuable insights? What about Professors of Psychology? Do you want to engage in high level discussions with professors of the Psychology of Optimism, for instance? What about Professors of History? Do you want to engage in high level discussions with professors of history? What about Professors of Economics? You know where I am going with this. Can you really achieve a good understanding of a number of different areas and use it to improve your own life? I believe it is possible. And that is how you win at life. This is what I would call the Surefire Way To Solving All Your Life's Problems. 

If you are not born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or indeed, come from a fairly modest background like I do, there may indeed be no other way. What is the Surefire Way To Solving All Your Life's Problems? Here it is, in brief. What you basically do is read a whole bunch of books on the topic on which you are facing the problem. You are aiming not for mastery but for a solid understanding of the topic at hand. Then, you email a bunch of experts to verify your understanding and ask them for help. Then, you form your Execution Plan.

I have utilized this approach for everything from eye surgery ("should I go for Lasik or PRK or Intraocular Collamer Lenses?") to dental procedures ("how do you prevent gingivitis from progressing to periodontal disease? how do you follow optimal oral care?") to business school program selection ("should you spend a quarter of a million dollars to get a degree (viz., the MBA) that you can basically get for almost a tenth of the cost? How good an entrepreneur/businessperson are you if you cannot figure out what to do with a quarter million dollars?") 

Let us say you are trying to find out how to find the optimal solution to reduce/eliminate your dependence on glasses. Pseudocode for this approach follows.


# the sure-fire approach to approaching all problems - and solving most of them

my_problem = "optimal solution to reduce/eliminate dependence on glasses"

def area_in_which_problem_lies():

     mjolnir_identify_area(my_problem)

area_of_my_problem = area_in_which_problem_lies(my_problem)

mylist = []

my_list = find_names_of_experts_for_area(area_of_my_problem, 12)

number_of_books = 5

mybooklist = []

mybooklist += find_book_in_area(area_of_my_problem)

for index in range(number_of_books):
     read_book(mybooklist, index)

for index in range(10):

     send_email(my_list[index])

identify_your_own_approach()

# for oral care, your approach might be:

# (1) brush twice a day

# (2) floss once a day

# (3) get dental alignment problems fixed using braces or dental aligners

# for vision, try and understand what Lasik does. Note that Lasik creates a flap in the cornea, the

# transparent dome-shaped surface of the eye that accounts for a large part of your eye's

# refracting power. The principles of optics, such as Snell's Law, that the angle of reflection

# is related to the engle of refraction, is important to understand here. What are

# some of the disadvantages

# with Lasik? Books and/or research papers can tell you that.

# What about ICL? What is the size of the vault you need to have to be a good candidate for

# ICL? What are the chances of glaucoma with ICL? When does it arise? What is the

# difference between anterior chamber and posterior chamber procedures? Note that 

# the anterior chamber lies between the iris and the inner surface of the cornea.

#

# notice the level of detail I get into when I discuss sugical procedures for correcting eyesight. 

# understanding things to this level of detail is very helpful in forming optimal decisions.

#

Prefatory Note #1: The essay below was written as an exercise for a class and reflects what were some of my thoughts at the time. It is highly unlikely that you or anyone you know will go through the same experience. For me, the problem was primarily a health issue.  And through the course of resolving my health issue, I realized that our talents need not be confined to one subject. By assuming that, we make ourselves quite a bit less powerful than we can be In fact, the reason why I was able to resolve my health issues have to do with the fact that there are powerful models and excellent research articles written on the specific health issues I was facing written by experts who had spent years studying the topics at hand. After a while, I realized that I knew as much about the topic as literally every single physiatrist or physical therapist or massage therapist that I met. Then, I attacked the topic of leadership. Now, I could tell you what books to read to bone up on the health issue I was facing. But that is not likely to help you. What you might want to know is what other books you could read on the topic of leadership and management. The few books I would recommend on this topic are the following:

- True North by Bill George

 Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge by Warren Bennis

Organizations by James G. March , Herbert A. Simon 

The Functions of the Executive by Chester I. Barnard

- Administrative Behavior by Herbert A. Simon 

- The Human Group by George C. Homans.

- The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor.

- A Behavioral Theory of the Firm by Richard Cyert and James G. March.

 

To be perfectly honest, I hesitate to recommend the ideas I have presented in the essay as a blueprint for anything. I highly doubt that the problems I had to solve will be anything like the problems you will have to solve.

Update:

It would be remiss of me to not note that these are actually not the foundational books on the topic of organizations and leadership. What you really need to do is to read the foundational books. Those books are typically covered in an MBA. So, you would need to first go through the curriculum in an MBA program before you start going through these books. I don't think just reading these books alone would add much value.\

Pseudocode

book1 = "True North by Bill George"

book2 = "Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge by Warren Bennis"

book3 = "Organizations by James G. March , Herbert A. Simon"

...
book8 = "A Behavioral Theory of the Firm by Richard Cyert and James G. March"

mybooklist += book1
mybooklist += book2
mybooklist += book3
...
mybooklist += book8

for index in range(number_of_books):
     read_book(mybooklist, index)

for index in range(10):

     send_email(my_list[index])

identify_your_own_approach()

execute_approach()


[==+==]

Prefatory Note #2: It is not only the physical universe that runs on models. We already know that the Solar System runs according to Newtonian laws (to, at least, the first degree of approximation, there are few violations, and those violations may be seen to be the "lower order bits" for whatever it is you are trying to model or understand). But what about the stock market? What about the world of finance? What about society, in general? It turns out that the stock market also follows certain laws. This is more or less what one needs to come to understand. 

This was an epiphany, at least, for me, but it arose rather gradually. I then began to wonder if I couldn't use the same sort of approach (reading a lot of material; understanding the models involved; understanding the theories involved) for a number of other areas. It turns out that it is not only the Universe that obeys certain laws or, out differently, acts according to certain theories. Even the world of Finance has theories and models. If you understand the models behind the stock market, for instance, you are in a better position to invest in the stock market and make supra-normal returns.

A lot of people have asked me about making money on the stock market over the years. The best way to invest in the stock market is to read a bunch of books on Finance and use the research already done on the topic to finetune your own approach.


Pseudocode

book1 = "Investment Science by David G. Luenberger"

book2 = "Investing for Dummies"

book3 = "Corporate Finance by Brealey, Myers and Allen"

mybooklist += book1
mybooklist += book2
mybooklist += book3

for index in range(number_of_books):
     read_book(mybooklist, index)

for index in range(10):

     send_email(my_list[index])

identify_your_own_approach()

execute_approach()

Prefatory Note #3: 

The style of this essay is supposed to resemble my own writing style on the IITMCS97 mailing list and other mailing lists I am a part of. This writing style is close to the writing style of the academics on Crooked Timber - the language is meant to be simple, accessible and, of course, also extremely politically correct. This is a deliberate choice. On mailing lists, you want to write in such a way that you don't offend anyone - whether on the basis of race, gender, sexuality or anything else.

As for the contents of this essay, I did write the entire vontent in one fell swoop. No A.I. could come up with that. So, that entire paragraph was wholly my own work, but other than that one paragraph, the A.I. made significant contributions to every other paragraph in this final version of the mini-essay. 

There is a book by the now disgraced former American cyclist Lance Armstrong called "It's not about the bike". I used the same title for this essay. In the book, Lance Armstrong talked about how he was suffering from cancer but, after much effort, made a full recovery. I also was once suffering from a fairly painful disease. But I am also completely disease free now, and I can relate to that aspect of his life. That's why chose that as the title for this mini-essay.

I wrote this when I was going through a Life Coaching session. This was partly because I was getting skeptical of the whole thing. This was also partly because people in India sometimes have asked me if I have any Life Coaching type ideas to offer. (Given its large population, there is a sizeable number of people in India, probably numbering in at least the hundreds of thousands, who are into books like Robin Sharma's "The Five A.M. Club", "The Secret" and so forth. This demographic might be the best audience for the mini-essay that follows.)  To be honest, I am very skeptical of these Life Coaching types of things. Any way, I did use it as an opportunity to put all this down on paper. If you want a self help book to give you some sort of method to try out, you could check out Robin Sharma's book "The Monk who Sold hi Ferrari". (Comments on the book are included below). 

I got the graphic on "Impossible" from a WhatsApp group the week-long Life Coaching people had set up. I have a feeling that people like to read this type of stuff, but I must mention that I am not a Life Coach, and, also, I don't consider myself an example or exemplar for anything. One thing I will say is that I have very little control over the final output since much of it is written by an A.I. If it sounds like I am too full of myself, it is only because, beyond a point, it is not possible to massage the output of the A.I. any more than a certain amount. If there is one major take-away for you from all this, it would that the matter of solving life problems by self study, analysis and modelling has not been sufficiently appreciated in popular media. Even non-doctors can make significant headway in resolving even medical issues that doctors might have given up on (this happened to me). Having had success solving medical issues for a number of different diseases (faced by my friends and relatives), I want to use this essay to give people some hope that many more health problems can be solved than may have been previously thought - simply via self effort (and, of course, if everyone adopted good dietary practices and got sufficient exercise, a number of lifestyle diseases would not arise in the first place.) - and this applies to not only diseases. The same modelling approach can be used to solve "The Personal Finance Problem" (please see pseudocode above to see how you can solve this problem.). The same modelling approach can be used to do Stock Market Investments. (The process for this would be similar to the process for Personal Finance.)

Prefatory Note #4: 

If you want to find out how good A.I. is at writing stuff these days, or you want to write a book yourself using A.I., let me provide you some information here. First off, here are links to my most recent books (these books were written with the help of A.I.):

(1) Amazon: https://amzn.to/38NmdMj

(2) Flipkart: https://bit.ly/2XJC4Fs

Then, below in the Pseudocode are other books you could read to bone up on this topic.


Pseudocode

book1 = fetch_title("https://amzn.to/38NmdMj")

book2 = fetch_title("https://bit.ly/2XJC4Fs")

book3 = "Machine Learning Simplified by Andrew Wolf"

book4 = "Practical Statistics for Data Scientists"

book5 = "Mining of Massive Datasets by Rajaraman and Ullman"

mybooklist += book1
mybooklist += book2
mybooklist += book3
mybooklist += book4
mybooklist += book5

for index in range(number_of_books):
     read_book(mybooklist, index)

for index in range(10):

     send_email(my_list[index])

identify_your_own_approach()

execute_approach()

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With that out of the way, I offer you below the mini-essay - written in part by Mjolnir the A.I.. (The list of representative publications is not part of the essay.) For the best reading experience, read this on an iPhone or an iPad.

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ESSAY

After a lot of hesitation, I finally signed up for an online Life Coaching class. This provoked me to reflect on my own life and occasioned a visit to this biographical section. 

Although I started off as a Computer Scientist, I have also looked into other fields. Below this Note are some of that papers I have written in fields of human inquiry other than Computer Science. As I mention in my About Me page, I am a member of TOPSociety, a High g-factor Society, for which I have also served in an editorial capacity.  Like many people in TOPSociety, I love to read up on a number of different areas. Where I've tried to be different is that I've also tried to attack one or two big problems in the areas that I study. Please note that many of these papers are still being prepared for publication. 

There is a bit of background to this. I landed at Harvard Business School in the doctoral program having no background at all in management or business research.  I was in a bit of a dodgy situation at that point; however, I was quite eager to put in a lot of effort reading and learning. Still, I was not prepared for what we were assigned for one of the courses in the program. ("Management and Markets" professors - yes, I am thinking about you!) The Reading Lists in this course, which was just one of the required courses in the Harvard Business School program, was really quite long. Harvard is well known for assigning massive reading lists, I later learned. We had to do 300 to 400 pages of reading per week. This was in addition to a much feared course sequence ("Microeconomics 1" followed by "Microeconomics II") and typically one or two other courses for the semester. And contrary to what you might think, I did not get virtually any help from my father, who is a Professor of Management himself. Where I think his suggestion actually helped was in his recommending meditation to me. The purpose of mindfulness meditation was always to alleviate Buddhist "dukkha" (Sanskrit:दुःख; Pāli: dukkha), and this whole movement of utilizing mindfulness, whilst unmooring it from its Buddhist foundations,  especially for combatting the stress of daily life in corporate America seems to be a step in the wrong direction. But that is a discussion for a different time.

Back to Harvard. It is there that I learnt to apply certain tricks to being able to get through long reading lists. So with that preamble out of the way, here is my little secret to the whole thing. It is one that I hope you will find useful for your own future endeavors. My main "go to" method is getting on an exercise bike every weekday and biking for an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes - and doing all the requisite reading on the bike. Do this three to five days a week - Monday to Friday, maybe - and you will be getting a lot of your reading done while also getting your daily exercise (for later learning adventures, I have sometimes done two or three days per week on the bike due to time constraints). If you are a reasonably fast reader, you will easily get through 50 pages of reading per session. The level of concentration achieved is also excellent.

This has to do with a result in psychology wherein it was found that the surge of endorphins experienced during aerobic exercise boosts brain power by enhancing processing speed, memory and absorptive capacity (https://bit.ly/3ikjiMN). Now, if you do this with some consistency, you might be tired the whole week but you will get a lot of reading done. Do this consistently week after week, and month after month, and you will find that what you thought was impossible is now possible. Doing 300 pages is just a stone's throw away from engaging in just this one activity five days a week. (Another useful thing to know - mindfulness has also shown to be immensely helpful in helping people manage stress and anxiety better, and has even been shown to increase grey matter in the brain.) Knowing about this result and other results in education psychology has meant that it has been possible for me to get into new areas in a matter of weeks - as opposed to months. I cannot overemphasize the importance of being able to get a lot of reading done in a short period of time. This has been immensely useful for a number of business situations as well. Given how difficult it has been for me sometimes to acquire the "right knowledge", I have always been a little dissatisfied with the way Buddhism pushes aside this important question with its ariya-saccas (and even Christianity with its emphasis on prayer and faith), but more on that later. Ultimately, though, it must ne kept in mind that a certain degree of academic talent and application is also called for (and the former correlates well with the g- factor measured by intelligence tests). 

I have been called a "polymath" by a work colleague and even as being "one in a billion" by a very prominent professor in an Ivy league institution, but ultimately, it must be acknowledged that there is always going to be a mix of talents and traits required to succeed in any endeavor, even ones that seem, at first, to primarily be about intelligence. I can probably be called upon as an expert witness in Computer Science, Strategy Management, IP Law and Indology, but outside those fields, I do not generally, in legal or professional settings, claim expertise equal to that of practitioners. This fine grained distinction is important since High g- factor individuals tend to get into multiple areas and since at some level, everyone's expertise is being called into question these days, including even that of Elon Musk (e.g. in the Space Karen incident), Barack Obama (e.g. in thr Clocky Boy incident) and, of course, Donald Trump  (e.g. in many incidents involving his tweets). The important thing to note is that, despite all these accusations of being a "Space Karen", Elon Musk is the best example of the idea that it is, in fact, possible to get into more than area, technically, and be successful. The best application of this ability to get into multiple areas is in the field of medicine. I have been able to solve the health issues of not only family members and relatives but even one or two colleagues by simply going through the medical literature  on a particular ailment after reading base material on the particular topic. This has really been the most satisfying aspect of this interest. I have tried to keep this sort of stuff under wraps because friends and relatives tend to pester you with requests to solve everything from acne to hair loss. I am deliberately adding a lot of background about myself not because I am full of myself, but because I hope to give you some sense of how intractable medical problems can, in fact, be resolved.

Back to reading on the bike. Here is another trick I use to motivate myself. A few times, during summer holidays, I would get into Facebook discussions on certain topics and I would start my reading-while-biking-major-books-in-an-area thing at the same time. I would start engaging with Facebook-ers on the selected topic on Monday and, by the time, the discussion was done on Friday, I had become much, much more knowledgeable. I would have gotten through five hundred pages by then. Sometimes, by the next week, I would have gotten through a thousand pages. Now, a thousand pages of reading material is enough to make you quite knowledgeable about almost any area. The best part of it is that it was practically imperceptible for the people in the discussion, and so, people often thought that I was really much more knowledgeable than I really was. Where this sort of approach is helpful also is that it helps corrects any biases you may have in your understanding of various topics. More importantly, debating things on Facebook can add to your learning, and can add a bit of gamification to the process of learning as well, which, I think, can be an incredibly efficacious thing. But this simple idea is not going to solve all your life problems. If you are looking for a guide for that, maybe you could try Robin Sharma's book "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari." But I am getting ahead of myself right now. (More comments on that will follow below.)

My philosophy of operations with business situations has been that if you don't know more about the subject matter in question than the people you are entering into deals with, you are in the wrong business. This learn-the-subject-matter-thoroughly-approach is also an excellent way to get into entirely new legal areas. I think that one should always enter deals with superior knowledge. Superior knowledge combined with superior execution is really the best way to get the best out of business and legal situations. This sort of focused attention and learning might also really be the only super-power we have in the world of business, and I now consider it one of my acquired skills. Since we are considering the problem of acquiring knowledge, the question of what is the right knowledge now becomes pertinent. It occurs to me that the emphasis in Buddhism on alleviating suffering (Sanskrit:दुःख; Pāli: dukkha) through the Eight Fold Path may also be misplaced in that certain forms of suffering cannot be alleviated merely by following the Eight Fold Path. For instance, if you are suffering from a disease where the practitioners in the field are divided in terms of what the correct approach to resolving the problem is, it would be apparent that desire or tanha cannot be said to be the only root cause of suffering. 

Suffering from disease can sometimes only be alleviated by going through great trouble, and such alleviation may only come from knowing what is the right thing to do. Therefore, learning how to learn is a very important skill, and that may be the fifth ariya-sacca (or Noble Truth). This has been one of my chief points of departure from Buddhism, personally speaking. Buddhism emphasizes "Right Knowledge". But the problem in modern society, ultimately, is how to know what the right knowledge is and how to acquire that knowledge. Here is a classic example. Let us say you have a disease. Now, even if one of the doctors you talk to presents a solution, and you are likely to encounter many different solutions presented, how do you know which is the right one? For this, a certain level of domain knowledge and talent for understanding the academic literature is essential. But beyond this, a certain scientific temperament is also called for. Sometimes, it is helpful to talk to the experts as well. (And interestingly, you will find that a number of experts will say that many lifestyle diseases, including even diabetes and heart disease, can be solved by diet alone (e.g. the vegan diet) - this might be the biggest public health secret for which there is actually evidence in plain sight.) The real trouble with disease is that the truth is sometimes hard to spot, especialyl with the advent of marketing (as multiple Harvard professors will attest). As Jiddu Krishnamurthi once said, truth is a pathless land. It really is when it comes to disease.

Now, as I have mentioned, given that someone has a disease, they have to figure out what the solution is - out of the many solutions prescribed. This is actually an analogy for the problem that entrepreneurs in tech face all the time. Given the plethora of  different ideas that one can pursue, which idea is the one that one should devote three or four years of one's life on? A recent survey has revealed that more than 75 percent of adults in America believe that angels exist and are real. More than 60 percent of adults in America believe that the Devil is real. Disinformation in prevalent in America to a degree that people who have not lived there would not believe, especially in certain areas such as pharma and medical research. This is why I am quite unsure that any single self-help book would be the solution. After all, if somebody is deeply embedded within Jehovah's Witnesses' ideology, wouldn't they have to first extricate themselves out of that before they proceeded to better their lives? And this is also why I am unsure that there is any single guide book that can really help entrepreneurs. Given the number of different problems one could solve, how does one decide which problem to solve based on recipes from a guidebook? Also, what type of guidebook could one write? If people haven't figured out whether angels exist and are real, then what are the chances that they will figure out which startup idea to pursue even if you do write a guidebook for them?

I discovered along the way that I had this skill for reading academic papers in a number of areas. This skill has also helped me engage with people from all walks of intellectual life - from Noam Chomsky on agricultural matters in the Third World (Hi, Noam!) to Tyler Cowen and Amartya Sen in economics, from Steven Pinker in linguistics to the late John McCarthy in Computer Science. (If you really want to know what I was discussing them, I emailed John McCarthy to get permission to translate a work of his into an Indian language, and Noam Chomsky said what you might expect Chomsky to say about the role of the knowledge of women in improving agricultural outcomes in the Third World.) I might be the only person with the unique distinction of having emails from about 5 percent of the Nobel Prize Winners in Economics in my email inbox - without being an economist. Trust me - if you have actually read two or three books by any author, and you tell them that, they are quite likely to be impressed enough to reply to your emails. Even Nobel Prize winners. They are only human after all. 

You could call this approach the evidence based approach. The other great benefit from this approach - besides being able to converse with experts in a variety of fields - is that you can apply it to solve various scientific problems. The most important arena for solving problems in science, if you ask me, is the field of medicine. It is, in my opinion, quite important to familiarize yourself with the basic outline of understanding in any medical field in which there is a disease that you are actively seeking a cure for. This is because, firstly, your doctor may be wrong. Secondly, a lot of good doctors know that they may be suffering from judgement biases and are open to working collaboratively with patients in resolving medical issues. I have myself applied this reading-oriented approach a number of times for researching medical issues in dermatology, ophthalmology, and gastroenterology - to name a few areas of medicine - where the recommendations from different specialists was different. The only way then to figure out the best way forward in these sorts of medical situations is to go through some background material and read the research papers in the area oneself. The health issues that you or your family members may suffer from can have long lasting effects on your career and your happiness, and the best way to attack these problems is to question doctors very closely about the issues at hand before arriving at an approach. If you have seen the movie "Lorenzo's Oil", you will know what I am talking about. 

There is a concept in Buddhism called Pratītyasamutpāda (Sanskrit: प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद pratītyasamutpāda; Pali: पटिच्चसमुप्पाद paṭiccasamuppāda). This holds that everything in the human condition arises only in relation to other things. I really love that concept and it is the active principle here. In fact, how people react to the very mention of the term "intelligence" is a very good instance of this phenomenon at work:  some people like talking to intelligent people, some people don't. Some people think that referring to intelligence too often is a sign of insecurity (it could very well be, but then, it may not be, even.) Most people don't think too much about these things, but it would suffice to say that mentioning the very term "IQ" even is considered a bit of social faux pas. So, I personally avoid mentioning it. (The fact is that high IQs are not at all underrated in elite circles where it matters and, in fact, IQ is well known to be correlated highly with understanding and achievement in many fields. No matter how many memes you have already seen on IQ, the high correlation of IQ with the g- factor for intelligence  cannot be denied (and, indeed, given significant biases in various areas within Indology and other areas of academia, IQ tests provide a measure of intelligence -less- biased by such factors as race and gender)). Also: where most people see someone who is naturally very gifted or smart, I know that, in my case, it was just someone who was only suffering at the time, and wanted to get rid of the dukkha and, therefore, had to work hard. There is a part of this narrative that I have not emphasized very much. It is in that little phrase up top ("a bit of a dodgy situation") that may clue you in to what actually happened. What really happened was that, in order to end my own suffering, I had to engage in a whole lot of work - some of it while meditating, some of it on a bike. Some of it happened to be in the area of research, and all you are seeing here are the results of the work, not the process of what happened. 

In fact, I am quite skeptical of all these self-help books because they are not evidence based. In fact, the trajectory they describe has not been my trajectory at all. Indeed, it is those unfortunate circumstances which forced me to even start doing research in all these areas in the first place. And the fact is that being known to be smart can actually be a significant negative, especially on social media and even in companies. People will try to troll in all sorts of ways, for one. I have made my share of excruciatingly painful trolling experiences and am generally on the look out for trolling behavior all the time. That makes it harder for me to even be myself online sometimes. Recently (as of 2020), I have begin to optimize for throughput and so I have tended to even Tweet in batch mode (this results in ridiculously high levels of time savings - maybe 90% to 95%.) Over the years, I have tried to use the contacts I earlier developed to be a sort of Consulting Detective For Academic Controversies and Medical Controversies. (My approach is very similar to that of Sherlock Holmes: study the topic; eliminate hypotheses and - here's my cool new hypothesis on the matter - whatever remains after you have eliminated all other alternatives must be the truth. Wait, I think someone may have already said that before.) It is virtually the only value I have gotten out of several years of social media activity, including blogging. The important thing to keep in mind is that unless you are willing to use evidence-based methodologies and learn a business domain quite well, ideas put forth by, say, Robin Sharma or Rhonda Byrne are not going to help you.

I went through both one of Rhonda Byrne's book and one of Robin Sharma's. Of the two, I found Robin Sharma's book to be better. Now, what type of book is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne? I think it is precisely the type of book we should avoid. It is so full of completely unverified information that one should not bother to pursue anything the author recommends. This much was apparent within ten minutes of my having picked up the book. Rhonda Byrne appears to be a Life Coaching Celebrity. Indeed, this "celebrity type" is precisely the type of people that get attention and do well on social media - they are also exactly the people Plato warned about - believe it or not - some two thousand years ago. This includes actors, athletes and so forth. People admire them because they want to be like them. But how many people can be these types of celebrities? There is space for only so many people in the front pages of all the newspapers in your country, and, after a while, you realize that their talent is often not that substantially different from that of others. How many of us truly believe that Tom Cruise is a far better actor than the hundreds of out of work actors on the streets of Los Angeles. The truth is that, on social media, they get virtually all the positive attention. For me, as I said, social media has, at times, been excruciatingly painful. I had hoped that by just posting that I am reasonably smart will mean that people will leave you alone. Instead, all that happened is that the trolling moved to subtler forms. Many years ago, when I was trolled, I wished there was a way I could hide the fact that I was reasonably intelligent. I even tried doing that. But that only caused a heck of a lot of trolling. So, I tried the opposite strategy. And that has worked reasonably well. (One simple way to avoid trolling is to tell people who are trolling you fair warning and then for them to give you their email addresses. Then, send them a polite email, generally speaking, to stop the trolling if it continues for a period of time after your warning.) If there was some way I could have hidden the fact that I was intelligent, I would have. But now that the information is out, it is, in my view, much better to own up to the fact that this information is out. The reason I am mentioning all this is that the situation of disinformation in America created a lot of problems in my life. In fact, the trolling problem became so bad that I had to actually develop software to combat the problem.  Trolling and disinformation has risen to a new high in the 2010s and 2020s. Any way, it is not our job as entrepreneurs to fix this problem. What is our job is to build products and companies. (And I also believe that I doubt that I will be able to convince anyone that even Rhonda Byrne is mistaken.)

I had mentioned commenting on self help book in the comments above. So, here are some further comments. Now, if you are looking here for a solution to problems of life or happiness, unfortunately, I strongly believe that no such magical solution exists. If you want a self help book to give you some sort of method to try out, you could check out Robin Sharma's book "The Monk who Sold his Ferrari". Although this does include a Method, the basic problem with the method is that it doesn't actually tell you how to solve the harder problems that arise in life. It is certainly true that it is important to develop focus (that is, you must "Master your Mind"), that it is important to work on things you think are important (that is, you must "Follow your Purpose"), that it is important to have discipline (that is, you have to be consistently good at what you do), and so on. But it is unclear how you will "Follow your Purpose" if you have some sort of disease (of which disease I am thankfully fully rid of) for which there is no known cure. This sort of thing cannot be taught. It is a skill to be learnt - like carpentry or plumbing. Based on personal experience, I can tell you that most of these "very difficult challenges" can only be overcome by spending a lot of time and effort working on said challenge, and acquiring certain types of skills. Some of these challenges are hard to solve, but it can be done. Other challenges such as the perceptions of people form of you because of your race or gender can only be partially overcome. And such things as institutional norms are often informed by and a result of racial and political hierarchies ("why is it okay for a Westerner to speak Sanskrit or Hindi with a Western accent in an institutional setting when it is considered par for the course to pull up a non-Westerner for speaking English with an accent?") that existed in the past, but that continue to exert their influence to this day. But skill development, to me, is always going to be key.

I once offered some students for me to do for them a Life Coaching class. I have been asked many times what methods I would advocate to solving the sort of problems life throws at you. What sorts of skills must one acquire to solve Life Challenges? Well, there are two types of problems that you encounter in life: those that can be solved and those that cannot be solved. The fact is that there are some problems that cannot be solved. But there are some problems that can be. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that the best thing to do is to provide a reference to some method rather than none to solve those problems that can be solved. That is why I picked Robin Sharma. His ideas seem to make sense. But here's the thing: I also tried to get some social proof. I looked on Quora to see how many people have actually benefitted from Robin Sharma's method. There was one Quora question on this very specific question. And not a single person has said that Robin Sharma's methods have actually worked for them. Maybe the people that Robin Sharma is able to help don't use Quora very much. Perhaps, if you use his methods long enough, they will work out for you. Personally, I think a lot of people follow a more jagged path to success. Like Steve Jobs once said, the dots won't connect for you right now, but you have to have enough trust in yourself that the dots will connect one day. This sort of approach seems to appeal a lot to two kinds of people in America: blue collar workers and entrepreneurs. For some reason, I have always made a lot of friends among the blue collar workers in America. (Maybe it is because neither bunch of people typically has time for too much b.s.) What I would tell them is something like this: "This method may work for you. But then, it may not work for you. Either way, it is better that you focus most on developing your skills in [carpentry | plumbing | ... other chosen profession]". Here is a graphic from that book that I will post here. I hope you find it, at least, somewhat useful - although I am somewhat skeptical about that also.



One person in a High IQ Society I am a part of raised the question of how and why someone is involved in so many different areas. My answer to that is as follows: first, it is about intrinsic interest; and second, it is about the challenge. Just one of the papers below combined with one or two other papers extremely doable papers would earn a Ph.D. in America, which has some of the best universities in the world, incidentally (e.g. the paper on the Chicken-and-Egg question combined with one paper analyzing Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-philosophicus" and another analyzing Immanuel Kant's "The Critique of Pure Reason" would easily earn a Ph.D. in many departments of philosophy in America). These papers that I refer to as "doable papers" would merely require a certain amount of focused attention, time and attention to write. These sorts of papers take maybe six or seven months of effort, but those types of tasks are just basically nose-to-the-grindstone type of tasks. That sort of stuff will get done. As another example: just the paper on Tamil linguistics along with two more doable papers (e.g. one analyzing "silappathikaram" or "Nagarjuna" and another analyzing "kamaraamaayaNam" would receive a Ph.D. in any American department of South Asian Studies. These doable papers are just a matter of time in terms of getting them out. So, effectively, what you have is two or three Ph.D.s worth of work here in the citations below.

Now, on to another topic. given that I am writing this while taking a Life Coaching class, I am led to wonder how impactful a single one week course can even hope to be. If you are looking for sage advice on it, then this mini-essay is not it. In fact, I am quite skeptical of the claims of Robin Sharma, Deepak Sharma and anyone with the last name Robbins. For that, I would like to point out to you the works of some philosophers and thinkers who have approached the problem centuries before Robin Sharma, Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins and are known to have arrived at what have been considered some pretty good answers. This includes the writings of Epicurus, that of the Seneca and the Stoics as well as the religious scripture of the Buddhists. There are plenty of references out there on the Internet on how these eminent individuals believed life should be led. The approaches vary widely. 

I would like to end this mini-essay with a theory. As part of this theory, I would like to propose the hypothesis that this sort of temporal association between reading and the release of endorphins may be helping the brain construct a positive association for reading itself. As we know, endorphins are the "pleasure chemicals" of the brain. So, with this strategy, you are effectively fooling your brain into thinking that it is the reading that did the pleasure thing. Thus, long-term, your brain without being told explicitly - and, here is the crucial thing - may begin to think that reading itself is associated with pleasure. I have no data other than my own experience as proof of this hypothesis, but I think that it may be a very useful hypothesis to test: "Does correlating aerobic exercise with reading temporally lead to long-term positive associations in the brain for reading?". My gut feeling is that it is probably a true hypothesis.

As far as Life Coaching is concerned, Life Coaching concerns itself with transforming people's lives. It seems to me that there are actually three parts to it as far as entrepreneurs are concerned. One, finding the right problem to solve; and two, acquiring some mental frameworks to actually solve said problem; and three, solving the business problem. One and three are business problems. Two is a personal problem. So, for one and three, I would say use the tools, frameworks and methodologies offered by business schools to solve the business problems. Go through the coursework. Go do some projects. You cannot be an expert in inventory management without knowing about the newsvendor model. You cannot be an expert in finance without knowing about the CAPM model or the Markowitz model. Now, clearly, it is important to know this stuff. And on this piece of advice, I am on very firm ground. This stuff is proven. This stuff will work. As for two, you can use any of the methods suggested by Tony Robins or Robin Sharma or whoever else to get your behind to work each day. Given that there are no answers on Quora on anyone who has actually benefited from Robin Sharma's Monk book and that there are plenty of people who will attest to the fine quality of teaching at the various business schools in America, it is quite clear to me that the evidence-based methods as taught by business schools are really what one can reasonably recommend. Note that this analysis does not rest on Robin Sharma being wrong. Indeed, even if he is right, all I am saying is that I am placing my bets on the B School methodology.

Note that, in this mini-essay, I have used some terms from Buddhism but the ideas here are not religion-specific. I have deliberately kept the language here extremely simple so that the ideas are accessible. With that out of the way, I have compiled below a list of some representative papers/ideas/books/projects in fields other than computer science that I have worked on and taken to completion. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

To summarize, I highly doubt that any Life Coaching class can really solve most of the biggest problems people face.  However, what we can do is to try and adopt a focused approach to solving the problems that life throws at us.

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Representative Papers/Ideas/Books/Projects in Other Fields

(1) "Which came first - the Chicken or the Egg?" 

This is an age-old question in Philosophy that has not, in my opinion, been satisfactorily answered. I believe I have a novel answer to this question that is based on the theory of evolution in my paper on this topic. Available on SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2562098

[My father's comment: coming up with a paper like this for an age old question is not easy to do.]

(2) "A New Proposal on the Orthography of the Tamil Language" 

The Tamil language is one of only seven classical languages in the world. As Wikipedia says:

A classical language is a language with a literature that is classical. According to UC Berkeley linguist George L. Hart, "it should be ancient, it should be an independent tradition that arose mostly on its own, not as an offshoot of another tradition, and it must have a large and extremely rich body of ancient literature."

The other six classical languages are: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Chinese and Arabic. It was my privilege to look at the orthography of this classical language that boasts of some very fine poetry and literature. It is worth keeping in mind that Tamil is also the only Indian classical language still being spoken. As a classical language, Tamil retains certain special aspects that make it hard to use in the twenty first century for certain specialized purposes, such as accurately capturing the names of  necessary medicines. Another issue with orthography in Tamil is that, although there is much overlap in terms of the cultural traditions of Northern India and Southern India, it is still not possible to capture even the names of the major deities in Tamil accurately. What is missing? Some diacritical marks to augment the set of syllables in the Tamil language. As the aforementioned Professor George Hart pointed out to me via email, my system could be  used to capture "the names of Ganesha", for instance. (Ganesha has a lot of names - trust me.) Although the term "diacritical marks" may sound somewhat fancy, this system is ridiculously easy to learn for almost anyone. It may prove to be extremely useful in specialized areas such as pharmacy and surgery, and has myriad practical applications in a number of areas.

[My father's comment: "I am really glad you wrote a paper on Tamil, Anand. Tamil is our mother tongue."]

(3) The Theory of Reproducibility: A New Theory in  the Economics of the Arts (published in my Book "A Book of Poetry Written in Seven Hours for India and America"):

In this paper, I presented a new theory in the Social Sciences, specifically, in Economics. I call it the Theory of Reproducibility. (I came up with it around the time I was writing a new Artificial Intelligence software that could capture the style of writers, both contemporary and near-contemporary.) Under this Theory, the Reproducibility of an Objet d'Art in a particular Realm of Art has a major influence on a number of things in that realm. A piece of music is high-fidelity reproducible in a way that a painting is not: you can make a copy of a song with very high fidelity, but a painting that is copied is not considered an original. Now, have you ever wondered why an Objet d'Art in the realm of Music (that is, a song) typically sells for a dollar or two whereas an Objet d'Art in the realm of Painting sometimes even sells for millions of dollars? Why does Brittany Spears sing catering to mid-brow taste - neither too high brow nor too low brow? What should be your strategy if you want to make money as a musician? These are some of the questions answered by the Theory of Reproducibility.

[My father's comment: "Is this like the Theory of Evolution?" The short answer is: Yes. It captures the dynamics of the market for Art much like evolution captures the dynamics of how the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations leads to new species being formed. My father's further comment: "I have not come up with a theory in the social sciences like this one."]

(4) A Book of Poetry Written in Seven Hours for India and America: 

This is a book of poetry whose theme is Covid-19. In view of that, I chose to include nineteen poems in the collection. In this collection of poems, I utilized an A.I that was written for a very specific purpose. The Artificial Intelligence could capture the writing style of any author, contemporary or near-contemporary. Note that the A.I. is not told who the author is or anything specific about the way the author writes. For instance, after I wrote the A.I., I came to know Ernest Hemingway preferred to use nouns to describe places and things where most writers would use adjectives. He would use nouns, for instance, to describe a boat or a meal and, without directly saying that the boat was not in good condition or that the meal was a poor one, it would all be implied in the way he described it using nouns. Hemingway was also famous for using short, simple words to describe things. When I turned the A.I. on to Hemingway's writing, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the A.I. also chose words that were rather simple. Later, when I turned the A.I. on to Japanese haikus, I was quite pleased to see that it automatically outputted verse - without it being told that the input was verse. Free verse poems, in fact. A collection of these poems was published as part of this book. And, yes, this book was really written in under seven hours.

[My father's comment: "Could you not do it in six hours?".]

(5) Mjolnir, an Artificial Intelligence program to write in the literary style of any author, contemporary or near-contemporary

Mjolnir is an Artificial Intelligence program with a difference. Mjolnir can capture the writing style of any author, contemporary or near-contemporary. Mjolnir takes as input text that represents the style of any author. It outputs text that captures that author's style. It was particularly impressive in that it helped me write the aforementioned book of poetry in under seven hours. (It was never told that the input was verse - and this is an important thing for researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence for reasons I shall not go into here.)  It was also quite impressive when dealing with input text of non-native speakers of the English language. For instance, when I gave it lines from the speeches of Narendra Modi, it outputted text that I, personally, would never in a hundred years use to describe something, but that quite accurately captures the way Narendra Modi employs the English language.

[My father's comment: "If you can capture the language of Narendra Modi well, that is very well done. That is not easy to do.".]

~

My father is a retired Professor of Strategic Management and Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the leading institutes of management in Asia. He still teaches as an adjunct professor. Here is a link to my father's web-page at IIMA: https://web.iima.ac.in/exed/faculty-details.php?id=6

~


~

Not with a bang but a whimper?

It looks like everybody is now talking about the overheated real estate market. Thomas linked to two articles in the Economist in a previous post (1,2). The Atlantic Monthly has a two-page article on the housing market - the article is subscribers-only, but anyhow, it covers much of the same ground as the article in the Economist. BusinessWeek is running as its top story an article on the increasingly hard-to-believe mortgage deals that are popping up all over the place. BusinessWeek also ran several other articles as part of a special report on mortgage financing and the real estate market.
The market is rife with interest-only loans, as well as "option ARMs" that allow borrowers to roll part of the interest they owe back into the principal on the mortgage (see BW Online, 6/16/05, "The Mortgage Trap"). It has gotten so bad that you hear anecdotes of some lenders not even requiring proof of income before handing over a million bucks to a homebuyer.
But it turns out that's just part of the reason lenders are offering such unbelievable deals to their customers. Many lenders are just plain desperate for business, according to some experts. In a bid for market share, mortgage lenders are offering highly favorable terms to borrowers. That's forcing the rest of the industry to match their terms or lose customers.
The industry's underlying problem is simple: Overcapacity and a drop in profitability from its all-time high of 2003.
How will this pan out? The profile of the bust, if it happens, may be quite different from that of the stock market. This is in part due to the far greater length of ownership with real estate as opposed to stocks, and a far higher personal stake in the affair. The Atlantic Monthly says that the boom may not end in a hard fall after all. Prices may merely level off. This is, of course, a prediction of the housing-market nationwide, not locally. Since the market for real estate is primarily local, the profiles of the local markets will probably vary a lot.

Moving locally to the Bay Area, what will be the forward-looking profile of the market out here? For one thing, the market in the Bay Area is super-heated. Atherton and Los Altos are two of the 20 most expensive zipcodes in the United States according to Forbes. Two, jobs in the area don't pay nearly enough for borrowers to be able to weather large downward market corrections. House prices are 300,000 dollars and more, and downward market trends will hit many people hard. Three, by all accounts, the California market is showing many signs of an overheated market - a large number of "innovative" mortgaging schemes, large proportions of low-income borrowers and large proportions of speculative purchasers.

The housing market out here does appear to be ready for a correction. Here is hoping, though, that the boom will end not with a bang but a whimper.

[Cross-posted to Zoo Station]

Sunday, June 26, 2005

Publications

Below is information on my publications.

Published Papers

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James Warner, and Daniela Florescu. "Conquering the Heterogeneity and Evolutionary Nature of XML Using XML Union Views." Proceedings of Databases and Applications, 2006.

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James Warner, and Vikas Arora. "Towards an Industrial Strength SQL/XML Infrastructure." Proceedings of the International Conference of Data Engineering, 2005.

Muralidhar Krishnaprasad, Zhen Hua Liu, Anand Manikutty, James Warner, Vikas Arora, and Susan Kotsovolos. "Query Rewrite for XML in Oracle XML DB." Proceedings of the conference on Very Large Data Bases, 2004.

Manimaran Govindarasu, Anand Manikutty, and C. Siva Ram Murthy. "DHARMA: A tool for evaluating dynamic scheduling algorithms for real-time multiprocessor systems." Journal of Systems and Software, 2000.

Manimaran Govindarasu, Shashidhar Merugu, Anand Manikutty, and C. Siva Ram Murthy. "Integrated scheduling of tasks and messages in distributed real-time systems." Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing Practices, 1998.

Anand Manikutty, Shashidhar Merugu, Manimaran Govindarasu, and C. Siva Ram Murthy. "A Distributed Real-Time Air Defense System." Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-time Systems , 1997.

Shashidhar Merugu, Anand Manikutty, Manimaran Govindarasu, and C. Siva Ram Murthy. "Integrated Scheduling of Tasks and Messages in Distributed Real-Time Systems." Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-time Systems , 1997.

Manimaran Govindarasu, Anand Manikutty, and C. Siva Ram Murthy. "DHARMA : A Tool for Evaluating Dynamic Algorithms in Real-Time Multiprocessor Systems." Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Computing, 1996.