2007 Thanksgiving was uneventful and low key spending time with my family and my visiting MIL. I got sick (cold etc.) most of the day and ending up resting thru’ the weekend.

The boys and I caught up on College Football and it was finally great to see my alma mater beat Kansas in a great game.

How ’bout ‘em TIGERS!

When I was wrapping up Data Mining class last semester, we heard about the Netflix challenge. Few of us joked that if we had time, we could give it a shot - when there were stalwarts in the field working on it. The final victors are from AT&T Research and it is glad to see their solution and paper online.

Congrats to team BellKor/KorBell - what an appropriate name!!

The kids and I watched DARPA Challenge from few years back where the world for the first time saw few autonomous vehicles made it through rugged terrain. This year the drivers competed on a newer challenge - driving without drivers in a urban environment. This includes things like - making a left turn in a 4 way  stop sign, making a left turn at a T junction, handling road blocks among numerous items.

The results are in and CMU came in first beating out Stanford. For those who knew the race from past - Stanley (Stanford’s car) beat CMU in the first DARPA Challenge. So this was sweet revenge for CMU.

Closer to home, my university make it past semi-finals and was disqualified at the end for the final race. I met Peter Stone at a reception after the race and he said that the disqualification was unfortunate. Marvin (our vehicle) did great all through and ran into a memory leak in one of the standard libraries they used on the day it was being watched and crashed (literally!!) The unfortunate thing was that the same route and maneuvers were completed successfully by Marvin the previous day.

The important take away from that conversation was that *when will we have ghost riders* and NOT *if we will have them*.