Writing on Harshvardhan

A New Home on the Internet

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For the last few years, I’ve maintained two separate websites. My personal website — built with Hugo Apero — housed my publications, projects, talks, and an about page. My blog — a separate Hugo site with the Archie theme — held all my writing. The idea was to keep “professional” and “personal” apart. In practice, it meant I was never sure where something belonged. Is a technical tutorial about R a “project” or a “blog post”? Is a conference reflection a “talk” or a piece of writing? The boundaries were artificial, and maintaining two sites meant twice the headaches.

Language Models and Multiverse

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was listening to a podcast by OpenAI where they tell us how they trained GPT-4.5, one of the largest models they have today. GPT-4.5 shows intelligence in unexpected ways, demonstrating common sense like other models totally miss. I haven’t used it much myself so cannot comment on that, but at 38:38 in the video, Sam Altman asks Daniel Selsam “why does supervised learning work?”. Without skipping a beat, he replies “compression”. Then he explains that “the ideal intelligence is Solomonoff Induction”. Unfamiliar with this term, I jumped on a conversation with GPT-4.5 and along the way, I learnt several interesting things that I want to share with you all.

A Week in Tirana, Albania

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last month, I spent a week in Tirana, Albania. Nestled across the Adriatic from Italy and bordered by Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Greece, Albania has long been one of Europe’s hidden secrets. Until 1991, this small country lived in almost total isolation under a communist dictatorship. After communism collapsed, Albania became a democratic republic. In 2009, it joined NATO and today stands as an EU candidate state—to becoming a full member soon.

Power of Your Passport

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A passport is “an official travel document issued by a government that certifies a person’s identity and nationality for international travel.” The word comes from the medieval French passer (“to pass”) and port (“harbor”): originally a document allowing you to pass through a port town’s gate. The document requests all border protection agencies and governments to give safe passage to the bearer. It validates the identity of the concerned citizen. My Indian passport specifically says:

From Data to Decisions: The Story Behind My PhD

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On March 31, 2025, I successfully defended my dissertation: “From Data to Decisions: Enterprise Demand Forecasting with Machine Learning.” My work is rooted in generalizable research at the intersection of machine learning, operations research, and organizational decision-making, grounded through a real-world implementation at HP Inc.

Final accepted draft of my dissertation is available here.

What is my dissertation about?

Demand forecasting has a rich intellectual and practical history. Ancient texts like the Indian Arthashastra (350 BCE) and Chinese Han Dynasty archives both emphasized blending qualitative judgment with quantitative grain records to estimate demand. Fast forward to the industrial age, companies like Ford and Chrysler pioneered judgmental forecasting to support assembly lines. In the 1960s, statisticians like Box, Jenkins, Holt, and Winters developed foundational time-series methods like ARIMA and exponential smoothing, which still serve as industry baselines.

AI Manifesto

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve used a lot of AI in the last few years. I’ve also written a lot about it previously. Here are some of my previous posts around AI.

Improvements in Artificial Intelligence, December 9, 2021
I wonder how this AI thing is going to shape up, March 3, 2023
How does GPT work? Understanding Generative AI Models, April 26, 2023
Four AI Chatbots other than ChatGPT, November 27, 2023
OpenAI’s GPT is a terrific idea, February 8, 2024

When ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) took the world by storm, I was actually offline in a Vipassana course. I only got to know about it after a while but it fascinated me that it could write a poem, albeit poorly. Now, I couldn’t make the joke “oh, it can’t write a poem anyway”. Creative jobs were up for grabs now.

Recipe: Making a Homestyle Indian Curry

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some friends of mine asked me how to make homestyle Indian curries. We Indians are good at it; we make many types of Sabzi सब्ज़ी that non-Indians simply call “curry”. Sabzi literally means vegetables. Today, I’m excited to share a versatile curry recipe that’s perfect for anyone looking to explore Indian cooking.

The recipe is a template or a base recipe for homemade Sabzi. You can use it with any vegetable of your preference or even Chicken (but cooking Chicken will take longer, so remember to adjust for that).

Happiness: What makes us happy?

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Try the quiz

If you want to test your knowledge about happiness around the world, try this quiz I made based on World Happiness Report 2024.

Link to Quiz (10 questions, 5 mins activity): https://happiness-quiz.netlify.app/

What makes us happy?

One of the early realizations of my life was that happiness depends more on perspectives than circumstances. A wise person would strive for a perspective that brings them happiness. So, why isn’t everyone happy? To a large extent, it’s because we are told what should make us happy: job, marriage, kids, and so on.

Best Cafes in Knoxville

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been in Knoxville for more than three years now since I started my PhD in Analytics at the Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee. During this time, I have explored a fair bit of cafes around. Not all cafes, but most cafes within 5 mile radius of the university. That covers almost every cafe in downtown Knoxville, the university area, and South Knoxville.

I’ve had many friends and colleagues ask me about my favorite spots for coffee, so I thought it would be helpful to share my experiences. Note that I haven’t been to enough cafes in West or North Knoxville, so they aren’t part of this list.

The Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Estimating the total number of species that have ever existed on Earth is highly challenging due to the vast diversity and complexity of life. Current estimates of the number of living species vary widely, from around 3 million to over 100 million. One of the more widely cited figures is approximately 8.7 million species currently on Earth, which includes 6.5 million on land and 2.2 million in the ocean.

But knowing the exact number is really hard. As Robert May summarised in a paper published in Science:¹