About Me

Everything I've wanted you to know about me but could never get you to ask!

I come from Bangalore, India. I graduated in 1999 with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

I'm currently trying to teach myself German. It's a fun exercise, and it helps that I spent some time in Berlin. I listen to a lot of music -- mainly any type I can get my hands on, although I'm partial to classical music. I also sing with the University Chorale. Come check out one of our quarterly concerts!

I read a lot -- practically anything but pulp fiction. I interpret that to include comics & cartooning -- some classic favorites include the Far Side, Bloom County, Doonesbury from atleast a decade ago. These days, I've acquired a taste for web comics (Cat and Girl, Diesel Sweeties, Off the mark which is eerily similar to the Far Side, and the obligatory link to Phd). Sometimes I'm inspired to take up caricaturing and/or cartooning, and for the next couple of weeks strange sketches start appearing on the whiteboards in my office.

I've recently rediscovered the geek in me -- messing around with ruby and css to customise my own personal information management system, a system that I highly recommend for its combination of simplicity and tremendous impact on productivity. I'd also love to know what your favourite life-hacks are.

Like most people in the happy happy nature place that is the NorthWest, I occasionally indulge in outdoorsy activities like hiking, running, skiing, and driving to the closest Starbucks indie coffee shop. Mmm, coffee...

Someday I will have some actual content here. Till then, you can look at some pictures, or see what's new.

What's New

• May 16, 2008 Come to the CSE Band TGIF! We have new songs, it'll be great.
• May 2008 Traveling to Saarbrucken to visit the Max Planck Institute.
• Apr 2008 Spent some time in Florence for CHI, and in Bangalore for fun.
• Mar 2008 The CSE Band has been resurrected! Our premiere performance was at the prospective student visit day.
• Mar 13, 2008 I successfully defended my thesis! I shall henceforth be known as Herr Doktor.
• Mar 2008 Poster at CVPR. Alaska in the summer!
• Feb 2008 In Salt Lake City for COSYNE (the conference on computational and systems neuroscience).
• Dec 2007 Two papers at CHI 2008! Looking forward to Florence in the spring.
• Dec 2007 Three choral concerts! I sang with the University Chorale and the Recital Choir this quarter, with rehearsals every day.
• Nov 3-7, 2007 My first SfN (Society for Neuroscience) meeting, at San Diego. With 25,000 38,000 people it promises to be a hoot. And maybe I'll even learn something!
• Oct 2007 Put up some travel pictures on the interweb. Let me know if you see something you like.
• Jun 2007 I'm continuing with my voice lessons, after a long break.
• May 2007 I'm now associated with the idea of subconscious Human-Aided computing! This is work Desney and I did at MSR.
• May 2007 In Hawaii for the Neural Engg conference and to present two papers.
• Jan-Mar 2007 I will be interning at Microsoft Research, with Desney Tan.
• Dec 2006 The Brain-controlled Humanoid Robot has been getting some press recently.
• Sep 2006 Time for my annual summer migration to Europe! I spent some time in Finland, Austria and Germany, also in the process presenting my paper at the BCI conference in Graz.
• May 22, 2006 We sing songs of War and Peace, at the Meany theater, 7:30pm. We are now an "internationally touring choir", having just returned from Victoria, BC!
• Apr 2006 TAing the new course on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). We will read representative papers in both invasive and noninvasive BCIs, and explore SOTA techniques in BCI research.
• Mar 9&10 2006 Singing Mozart's Mass in C Minor at the Meany Hall with the U. Symphony, in celebration of Wolfgang's 250th birthday. This is a recent completion of Mozart's incomplete score by Robert F. Levin, and is some truly enjoyable music. Come join us!
• Jan 2006 Paper on adaptivity in the Berlin BCI accepted to Journal of Neural Engineering!
• Dec 2005 At the NIPS conference in Vancouver. It is hands down the coolest computer science related conference there is (although SIGGRAPH does come close). To be followed by a visit to the old motherland!
• Oct 2005 This is what I do for a living! My first time as a Brain-Computer Interface subject in the Berlin BCI , controlling that cursor by thoughts alone. Look ma, no hands!
• July 2005 Who says computer science types don't have fun? I experimented with poster layouts for the AAAI conference, and finally settled on a spiral layout for the poster. Take a look! (And here's a slightly bigger version)
• June 2005 Lots of traveling coming up: Albany NY in mid-june for the BCI International Meeting, Pittsburgh PA early july for the AAAI conference, and back to Deutschland in late July for a 3 month trip. And from there, onwards thru Europe! I could use some travel companions, though...
• May 2005 U. Chorale Spring Concert, titled Songs of the Open Road, and appropriately enough we had a mini-concert-tour of Portland, Olympia and Tacoma. A singing Pradeep is a happy Pradeep!
• May 2005 Paper on classifying EMG for prosthetic devices accepted to AAAI 2005!
• Apr 2005 Spending a month in Deutschland at the Fraunhofer Institute, Berlin. A good chance to pick up some German! (I mean the language, of course. What were you thinking?)
• Mar 2005 Singing with the UW Combined Choir & Symphony concert, titled "Romantic Masters: Brahms and Verdi", at Meany Hall.
• Dec 2004 Vancouver and Whistler for the NIPS conference.
• Flash From The Past -- this is a play written by Sorin Lerner, the only play I have ever acted in. Needless to say it was a stellar performance!
• Oct 2004 Pumpkin carving for halloween!
• Sep 2004 Trip to Austria for the BCI '04 workshop. Saw Vienna, Salzburg (Mozart's birthplace) and Graz (Arnold Schwarzenegger's birthplace)....and Rigoletto at the Wien opera house!
• Aug 2004 Poster on graphical models for BCI accepted to NIPS 2004!
• Aug 2004 Check out the cool videos of the EMG-driven robotic arm!
• Jan 2004 More voice lessons (I'm finally beginning to get the hang of singing!), lindy hop, and university choir. Coming up: Mar 11/12 UW combined chorus and symphony concert at Meany Theater. Also my voice class recital on 13th March at Brechemin. yay!
• Dec 08, 2003 My brother Sandeep gets married! Welcome to the family Rashmi!
• Oct '03 Taking voice lessons this quarter. And a real eye-opener it is, too....singing is *hard*, and a lot of work and thought goes into a performance. Still, oodles of fun for free. Its good to be in grad school and have someone else pay for your indulgences :)
• Sep '03 Moving to the new department building! It's been long in the waiting but it should be worth it!
• Aug '03 Sang of "Summer Pleasures" with the University Chorale. Light summery funstuff.
• Jul '03 Enjoying the gorgeous Seattle summer, although it is a wee bit too hot. Been busy sampling from the huge variety of outdoor activities the Northwest is famous for -- canoeing, jet skiing, hiking, camping, whitewater rafting, it's all good stuf!
• Jul '03 Our EEG capture equipment is here! One step closer to pushing the envelope on brain-computer interfacing research :).
• Jun '03 Sang in not one but TWO concerts---June 5 at Meany Theater with University Singers, and June 6 at Kane Hall with Unleashed. Lotsa singing and mostly fun.
• Apr '03 Joining the University Singers -- it's a campus choir. We're singing "world music" this quarter.Demo on navigable XML query results accepted to SIGMOD 2003!
• Dec 11 Unleashed Winter A Capella Concert! We had a whale of a time, and I think the audience liked it too...one of 'em said "It was great, even pradeep!" :) I think I'm beginning to like this a capella thing :)
• Dec 7 Caroling in downtown Seattle for figgy pudding--loads of  fun! This was with Unleashed--an a capella group at UW.  In case you are wondering what a capella is, click on the horses!
• Sep '02 Drove up from SF to Seattle via Mt. Hood, Crater lake, Columbia river--yes I know that is not the shortest path up :) My first taste of how many thousands of square miles in the US can look totally uninhabited...and still have people living in the middle of it :)
• Sep '02 Went biking from Seattle to Vancouver. That's 180 miles in 2.5 days on an untrained posterior -- ouch! :) But it was fun :)