Saurya Simha Velagapudi

• Guitar - I like playing heavy metal guitar. I have a Jackson Kelly Electric, and an Epiphone Acoustic.
• TAing - 51 - I TAed CS51 first semester of my Junior year and I wish I had started TAing much sooner. 166 - I HTAed CS166 the second semester of my Junior year and had a blast. Recommended for masochists and those with a death wish. 127 - I TAed CS127 in the fall of '09 since I worked on the course over summer '09. I am currently HTAing CS166 again.
• Consulting - The SunLab, my lair, appreciates my presence so much it provides monetary compensation. But what use do I have for money, when I am in a place with such rich irony in its name?

• Brownie Points - My UTRA for 2008 was an e-cash scheme to make BitTorrent (hopefully) more productive and equitable.
• H-Store - A parallel main-memory OLTP database under development with Yale, Brown, and MIT in the mix. The problem I'm working on involves input to the database designer. The database designer requires statistics about the nature of the data accesses in the workload, if there are too many multi-partition (multi-site) transactions then there is probably a need to re-design and re-partition. My job involves gleaning these statistics from a workload trace. Ask me about it! I'll blather on endlessly.
• Csched - A little pet peeve of mine was that the consultant schedule never reflected the requests for subs which seemed to flood my inbox in an irksome and informal way. Now we have a system which flags all sub requests on the schedule, so they're easy to see. It was a great way to learn bash scripting as well.
• 166 Final Project - The final project for CS166 before was WarGames, an adaptation of the game hogs developed by over 9000 people. My goal was to develop a project based on some real-life scenarios. Banner was a small inspiration, and so we created a course management system which has various security vulnerabilities. Various FUN security vulnerabilities which I am not at liberty to reveal here for fear of opportunistic 166 students.
• 51 Regex Checker - Kids submit some pretty impressively-sized regexes for CS51 homeworks, so I came up with the idea to write a program to check them. It was a not-so-simple implementation of EQDFA, courtesy of Sipser.
• 127 Development - My UTRA for the summer of 2009 was to re-design CS127, database management systems. We created a lot of new assignments which are going to be tested out this next semester!

• Computer Science: Data structures, data mining, concurrency, databases, theory
• I find brains very fascinating, I would make quite an eager zombie.
  • A brilliant neuroscientist called Vilayanur Ramachandran. He writes about his experiments with mirror neurons. A popular science summary would flow as follows, "Mirror neurons are the neurons responsible for sympathy and empathy, the mapping of the actions of the others to our own neurons. They help us learn by watching, help us simulate what parts of the brain the other person is using." He also did quite a bit of work with amputees who had phantom limb pain and gave a breathtaking TED talk on what happens to the brain when it is damaged.
  • NPR ran a special once on brain training programs. These neuroscientists give their opinion on these programs.
• Astronomy
  • APOD is a great source for all astronomy pictures. They're accompanied by simple-enough-english explanations; quite accessible!
  • I find gravitational lenses fascinating. The idea is very simple: mass bends space and how much the space bends is a function of the mass. The bend in space changes the path of the light rays. So an object far away from us which emits radiation toward us will have its radiation bent by the mass in between.
• Math errata - I love numbers. I wish I could bake a cake of numbers and rainbows, and we could all eat it and be so happy.
  • Perfect numbers
  • Ramanujan number 1729
• Humor
  I enjoy a variety of webcomics which many experts agree is the closest my generation gets to humor.
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - science and atheism jokes, though I assure you there is nothing funny about either
  • xkcd - science and romance jokes, though I assure you there is nothing funny about either
  • Penny Arcade
    Ctrl+Alt+Del
    video game jokes, though I assure you there is nothing funny in either
• Cooking

svelagap *definitely not at* cs.brown.edu

Box 2350

Brown University

Providence, RI 02912