I got to handle HeLa cells during my undergradute, the most controversial human cell line. Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to know the history behind the cells. The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks is by far one of the most powerful, content rich books I’ve ever read in my life. I regret not reading it earlier. HeLa cells are the first ever human cancer cell line. What makes them so great is their ability to divide indefinitely outside the human body. They came form the cervical cancer of a person named Henrietta Lacks. HeLa cells were vital in so many important discoveries such as polio vaccine, telomerase, HPV linked to cervical cancer few of many.

By definition, Agent-Based Models (ABM) are small-scale computational models used to simulate the actions and interactions of agents, which may represent individuals or groups. Imagine you are a graduate researcher studying Drosophila as your model organism. To support their survival, you need to prepare a culture medium and test the effects of different variables—say, for example, how different concentrations of perfumes impact Drosophila growth. However, you’re unsure of the exact outcomes and don’t have the time to conduct multiple rounds of experiments. You want to achieve optimal results on your first attempt. This is where ABM can be useful. In this case, the Drosophila would be the agents in your model, and the culture medium would be the environment you’re trying to simulate.

PCA is a major topic in Dimension Reduction. It delivers what it says - dimension reduction. Imagine you are trying to assess students’ understanding of math by their scores. This is just 1D data. Now imagine evaluating the overall performance of several students in school by looking at scores in all subjects, their athletic performance, and their diet. This is multidimensional data. When you apply PCA, it analyzes all these factors and identifies patterns in the data. For example, if students who perform well in sports also tend to have a more monitored diet, PCA might group athletic performance and diet based on their actual correlation, not based on any assumptions.

The Hadoop Distributed File System HDFS is a file storage system. Think of it as a library with several rooms and each room having multiple books, these books that are being held in the shelves can be compared to servers that run the data stored. The way the hdfs stores data within these rooms are different it does not randomly store books. Just like a library would have sections for crime, romance and thriller novels, hdfs has sections for storing the files. There are 2 types of data now. the filesystem metadata and the application data. Each of them having dedicated server.

Life at Library Growing up, I spent a lot of time in libraries because my mother works as a librarian at the no.1 university in our state. The job seems menial in our community or country but, it’s quite a complicated space. However, I always thought my mother had a cool job. I remember my early visits to the university library in the early 2000s, rooms piled up with huge books, periodicals, and journals written in many places. I later learned that periodicals were anything released periodically and were journals a collection of research papers in a specific field. In high school, during the holidays I used to go with my mother and just browse through different sections I remember looking through the journals and looking at complicated texts written I vaguely remember reading about research on bacteria used to make cheese, something about immunology, something about space research none of which I could understand but, I’d just look through the pages.

Its going to be 3 months since Suriya and I got married. Suriya and I have been together for 8 years now but, somehow feels like we’ve know each other for longer. I’ve known suriya from school. Both of us were book worms and we used to exchange a lot of books that friendship grew into something so special that I am grateful for everyday. Looking back, our relationship was super unconventional. Suriya and I were in an on and off relationship from 2016 but, in 2018 we put a name on it. He was preparing for CAT exam while he proposed to me, and he wanted to not talk/text until his exams got over.

Continued from my previous blog Loss function To make better predictions, we need to know how good or bad our model is performing. Loss function does exactly that. Based on the prediction, we compare it to the estimated value and check how much loss has happened in predicting right. This can be done using the function loss = nn.MSELoss(). MSE is mean squared error which makes the difference in the loss by squaring them Next, comes the optimizer. With a loss function, we can tell how well (or poorly) our neural network is performing. To improve on our model’s performance, we need to adjust the weights and biases (Read my linear regression blog understand weights better).

Building a Machine Learning model involves the following steps. Define what your model will do Collect data Choose model (Should read more about this) Train model on your dataset Evaluate model Tune and deploy model Tensors Pytorch is a python library which helps in building an ML model. FIrst, lets talk about tensors. Imagine a spreadsheet which contains rows and columns of data, tensors are more complex which can hold data in several dimensions. The common term used is “containers” that holds numbers in a structured way. Why is it important to convert data into tensors? it helps in easier computation of multi-dimentional data, it has a standardized format as they can represent image, numerical, text data in a consistent format, helpful in applying mathematical operations such as linear algebra.

I’m not a huge superhero fan neither am I a great artist. The animation in spiderverse just blew my mind. I’ve added 2 digital art work insipired by the movie and I have atleast 10 more sitting in my drafts, unfinished. Just wanted to document my effort.

Statement of Purpose As an embryologist I am in a unique position, giving hope to patients. My primary role involves performing procedures like gamete manipulation, embryo culture, embryo biopsy for preimplantation genetic screening/testing, counseling patients about their prognosis, and managing my department’s operations. It brings me so much joy seeing patients embrace babies after a successful IVF(In-vitro fertilization) cycle and when cancer patients secure their reproductive potential by freezing their eggs or ovarian tissue. My job is incredibly fulfilling. At the IVF lab, I make important decisions based only on the embryo’s morphology. However, this only offers very limited information on the embryo’s developmental capacity or ploidy status.