Ritwik Gupta

Ritwik Gupta

AI and Policy researcher driving innovation in humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR).

Blog posts

2022

The Department of Defense is Prioritizing Open Source Software. Here’s How Open Source Projects Can Benefit.

10 minute read

Published:

On January 26, 2022, the new Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), John B. Sherman, released a memo to the entire Department titled “Software Development and Open Source Software”. In this memo, the CIO addresses two primary concerns: 1) using open source software (OSS) introduces supply chain risks for DoD software programs, and 2) sharing DoD code via open source channels without proper checks enables potential leaks of proprietary DoD information to adversaries. In laying out how these two concerns should be addressed properly, the CIO categorizes OSS into a unique position, one which can be utilized by OSS foundations and project maintainers to gain funding for their essential contributions. Read more

2019

Thoughts About My High School’s Math Curriculum

10 minute read

Published:

I went to high school to Thomas Jefferson High School in Pittsburgh, PA (not the famous one in Alexandria, VA). I wrote an email to my math teachers there talking about my thoughts about our high school math curriculum now that I’ve been through an undergrad, currently taking grad courses, and have a full-time job doing math for a living. I’m pasting the emails as-is here, with some additional formatting. Please let me know if you have any comments or criticisms. Read more

2017

Making a Self Driving Car - Part 1

8 minute read

Published:

I just graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and have some time to relax before starting my job, so my dad and I decided to build a self-driving car. We think we can do it, and even if we can’t, at least we’ll learn some cool stuff while doing it. The goal is to start simple and build as we go. Read more

Understanding HL7 Structure

6 minute read

Published:

What is HL7

HL7, more formally known as Health Level-7, is a standard used in the healthcare industry to transfer clinical and administrative data. Much like many SaaS services “speak JSON”, healthcare applications “speak HL7”. Read more

Idea for Efficient Cell Image Compression

1 minute read

Published:

Premise

Pathology and histology slide images are taken with extremely high resolution cameras, resulting in:

  1. High cost of storage
  2. Bandwidth issues while transporting images

It is important to note that these images often rely on lossless compression, because any artifacting will result in a lowered ability for the doctor to give accurate results.

Example of a cell image.

Proposed Solution

In most regions of the body, neigboring cells looks alike to the cells bordering it. I propose the following solution to compress the images:

  1. Segment the image into distinct cells.
  2. Take a dot product of the matrix of cells with itself (ATA) to figure out which cells are most similar to other cells. I call these “reference cells”.
  3. Store a set of deltas for all other cells in terms of rotations, translation, and transformations.
  4. Apply further compression using any standard algorithm to the deltas themselves.

Example of “reference” cells.

A set of deltas in a binary format would be better than a large amount of pixels and allow for better compression.

I attempted to do something along these lines on GitHub here, but had to stop development due to time constraints. Hopefully I can continue this down the line! Read more

2015