My journey to NordSecMob. Some tips and G5.

“The next application round for NordSecMob programme begins 3rd November, 2008 and ends 9th January, 2009” – while reading this during my application days, I didn’t have no clue that I would be writing this post as a NordSecMob scholar

“Congratulations on your successful application. Competition for Erasmus Mundus scholarships has been more intense than ever this year, with over 22 000 applications from 166 countries around the world. Of these applicants, only 8% were selected. We hope you will decide to accept your offer of a scholarship….” – it wouldn’t take me more than 139.889 milliseconds to accept such an offer ni hoina

G5 – Grand and Garlanded Gratitude to Goodness Grace, I mean.

http://nordsecmob.tkk.fi/index.html is the link that should provide you with all the necessary information on this course. There are 5 partner universities viz. Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) in Finland, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University of Tartu (UT) in Estonia. You have to choose two among these and your specialization will vary based on your choice of universities. I had chosen TKK and KTH. That means my first year is in Helsinki and second year is in Stockholm. Both these universities are highly esteemed and I am grateful that my chosen mobility was granted

TKK is the coordinating university with which you will communicate all along the application procedure. The process is to first fill in the online application and then courier them the printed application form along with other supporting documents. Don’t worry, all these things are mentioned in the site above. I used FedEx to courier them the documents, nevertheless, you can also use Linkage or other brokers which provide the service in low prices.

About Documents:

• BE Original Certificate or BE Provisional Certificate – Must. I had to improvise with Provisional since Original was not issued by then.  Attest it in Balkhu.
• BE Transcript – Must. Everyone already has this, I guess . Attest it in Balkhu.
• +2 or ISC Transcript – Must. I attested it in my +2 college.
• Letter of Motivation – Must. Take time and effort in crafting this. Limited to 4000 characters.
• CV – Must. Put your achievements and portfolio here.
• Letter of Recommendation – Must. Two of this is required. I took one from HOD and one from my major project supervisor.
• BE syllabus – Must. Limit it to some 20 pages. Exclude subjects like Mechanical Drawings, Applied Mechanics and other not directly related to Computer Engineering.
• Passport – Must.
• English Proficiency – Must. I took TOEFL test on 23^rd November. Better take it earlier than this.
• Work Experience – Optional. I didn’t send any experience letter from my workplace. However, you can include this, if you don’t want to take any chance.

Letter of Motivation is very important in the sense that, this is your chance to say “Why choose ME?”. So don’t do no hurry. Collect yourself and remember all your achievements and vital milestones you have achieved. Since the letter limit is 4000 characters, make it short and sweet. Simple but Sample, I mean I had the following things in order in my motivation letter.

1. Who I am.
2. My aptitude and activities on communication and security during my college.
3. Hands on experience and knowhow on scope of security and wireless communication during my professional tenure.
4. How this course can help my career.
5. My plan after this graduation.

CV or Resume is also equally important. Mine was only 6 pages and contained following sections.

1. Education
2. Work Experience
3. Other Experience
4. Technical Skills
5. Professional Projects
6. Academic Projects
7. Awards and Achievements
8. Publications
9. Personal – Marital Status is Single wala he he

Your Letter of Recommendation also needs to be good. Since this involves our teachers, who are always so so busy, make sure that you initiate this process very early. It might take you some weeks to get just 2 recommendations. I alert.

“… I have the motivation to learn, diligence to contribute and endurance to face the challenges of graduate studies. If provided with the opportunity I am confident that I will live up to the academic and research standards set by the partner universities …” I said this during my application and now I just can’t wait to experience the scope of foreign study, fun of cultural exchange and drama of my first-ever out-of-home life.

With good regards to future NordSecMob students

Some links you can use:

• http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus_mundus/results_compendia/selected_projects_action_1_master_courses_en.php
• http://www.nepalfinland.com/2008/11/european-scholarships-for-master-and.html
• http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/mundus/projects/index_en.html

Cheese and Cheers

Prajwol

Computational Intelligence in Inflation Forecasting

Open Software Challenge Nepal 2009 was announced somewhere during early 2009. And somehow, computer-half of the CSIDC team (me-Prajwol and Dipesh) decided to participate in it.

Screen blurred, grayscale stars – To talk about CSIDC, it was CSIDC 2006, organized by the IEEE under the theme of “Preserving, Protecting and Enhancing the Environment”. Saurav Ratna Tuladhar and Nilesh Shakya (electronics), and Dipesh Karki and Prajwol Kumar Nakarmi –me (computer) were selected from Pulchowk Campus to participate in it. We had presented our project “iForest – A Monitoring and Management System for Sustainable Forestry”. The certificate of participation of this competition has definitely increased the weight of our CVs – Screen normal, colorscale resumes. he he

Dipesh and I talked in phone, texted in MSN, brainstormed in Eiden Garden and came out with what we christened “Computational Intelligence in Inflation Forecasting” (CIIF). Of course Carlsberg was there to accompany us whenever possible. LOL

Now on August, we both are proud to say that we made to the prestigious TOP 10 among some 80+ projects. My heartfelt congratulations to the guys who made it to the TOP 3 (Y).

Many were expecting our project to do better before the result announcement, and of course, we were hopeful too.  But probably, the fact that our development platform was .NET pulled our legs and we didn’t make till the TOP 3 mark. We had some people asking “how can your software be open when I have to pay for it” LOL LOL a big disgrace to such a question. We tried to explain – they seemed to agree – it was apparent that they didn’t understand :’(. May the true meaning of Openness of the Software come to light to all of us, AMEN.

Let me, now, say some about CIIF. As we know, Inflation is a persistent and significant increase in general price level and it is calculated by averaging the percentage growth rate of the prices of selected sample of commodities. It is one of the most essential macroeconomic indicator as many other economic variables like wage rate, salaries , gross domestic product, interest rate are either directly or indirectly related to change in price. However the inflation can be calculated only in hindsight by comparing present commodity price with the past. As this isn’t much help while formulating the future pricing policy, a forecasting mechanism must be introduced to estimate the future expectation of the inflation rate.

In this light, the software, that attempts to forecast one of the key macroeconomic indicator- ‘Inflation’ using both Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm, was developed. Ladies and Gentlemen, we give to you CIIF . The system consists of two main engines, viz. Artificial Neural Network and Genetic Algorithm. Two flavors of the later are available as Encoding and No Encoding. Statistics are present to measure the fitness of the predicted data. For easy visualization of the output, Graph component is also available.

The input data consisted of inflation rates of USA for last 1143 months, dating back to January of 1914 to March of 2009.  Before beginning the training, the data set is divided into the training set and the validation (Prediction set). First 1043 months data are kept in training set while last 100 are kept in validation set. The application is supple in sense that by simply changing the parameter in the input file the size of validation set as well as training set can be changed. The value of R2 >= 0.5 is acceptable for our system, which implies that at least 50pc of total variation in the data should be explained by the system. Our tests show that the results are over par.

You can follow CIIF under http://collaborate.d2labs.org/projects/ciif/

Cheese and Cheers

Prajwol