Blogger Zero

In due time, other LIDS students will be writing about their travails in this space, but for now I am blogger zero. 

My name is Kush Varshney; I am in my third year as a graduate student at MIT and LIDS.  Within LIDS, I am a member of the Stochastic Systems Group, led by Prof. Alan Willsky.  I was born and raised in Syracuse, New York, graduated from Fayetteville-Manlius High School in 2000, Cornell University in 2004, and came to MIT after that.  What I will bring to the table is more as a Gaspard Menga, patient zero of an Ebola outbreak, than as a Gaspard Monge, French geometer.  What I mean by this is that anecdotes I blog about will come about as a result of occurrences that coincidentally happen to me rather than notable things that I do. 

I might write about interesting research topics that I hear about.  I may also write about connections between different topics, e.g. LIDS, as the Servomechanisms Laboratory, getting its start in a similar fashion to Gaspard Monge.  Monge, at the request of the French military, developed innovative, mathematically sound methods to determine gun emplacements, whereas LIDS was founded in response to a request by the U.S. Navy for work in gun-positioning instruments, especially servo-control systems. 

This being a professional forum, my posts may talk about finite, equiprobable sample spaces of cardinality six, or K-sat problems, but probably not Dice-K's performances on the mound.  The likelihood of my entries featuring Sanjoy Mitter is much higher than the likelihood of my entries featuring Sanjaya Malakar.  Hopefully, you the reader will get some small impression of what LIDS is like from what I write.