Nabin K. Malakar, Ph.D.

NASA JPL
I am a computational physicist working on societal applications of machine-learning techniques.

Research Links

My research interests span multi-disciplinary fields involving Societal applications of Machine Learning, Decision-theoretic approach to automated Experimental Design, Bayesian statistical data analysis and signal processing.

Linkedin


Interested about the picture? Autonomous experimental design allows us to answer the question of where to take the measurements. More about it is here...

Hobbies

I addition to the research, I also like to hike, bike, read and play with water color.

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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Congratulations to recent Nepali Physics PhD graduates

Wishing all the best to the recent Physics PhD graduates.


Dr. Hikmat BC
New Mexico State University 


Dr. Shyam Badu
University at Albany


Dr. Madhav Neupane
Boston College


Dr. Pashupati Dhakal 
Boston College

Dr. Mukti Aryal
UT Dallas 


Locating Nepali Physicists on Google map LINK here:


Please join us to congratulate Nepali Physicists graduating with PhD degree. The Google group of Nepal Physical Society LINK here.



Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Collective Behavior in Animals

Feel like yawning? Look around, someone near you might also be yawning!

The so called collective behavior such as yawning might be an urban myth but a recent studies have attempted to model such collective behavior. The modal system they considered consists of an example of collective behavior of cows. Such theories have not been tested it in the real cows, however one should not be surprised to see such studies to be verified in near future.

In a recent work, published in arxiv,  Sun et. al. study the collective behavior of animals such as cows.  Animals are coupled oscillators. They simply model the cow as coupled oscillator. By considering the discrete states of such animals and by considering such couplings, they study the collective decision bearing of such system.
Specifically, they consider three states of cows: standing, sitting and grazing; say "1", "2" and "3" just for sake of easy symbolization. By coupling the states, they assume that behavior of one is going affect the behavior of nearby ones. So, there is more tendency of uniform state such as 1,1,1,1,1 than 1,2,3,2,1 or 1,2,1,2,3. However, for larger cow population there can be some nice oscillatory behavior between the stable states.
The paper is interesting! Have a look.
Ref:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.1381
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25171/


Acknowledgements are due to the first author for suggests in the draft version of the post and allowing to use the figures.

Fig: Coupled cows.

On the lighter side:
One can see the influence of "spherical cow" on the coupling diagrams. See Jackson, J.D. Third Edition Ch3 problem#15.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Heading for MaxEnt 2010, Chamonix France

I will be visiting France for a week to attend the MaxEnt 2010 Conference.

There, I will be presenting my work on "Entropy Based Search Algorithm for Experimental Design".