I am a big fan of the movie Matrix. The concept of virtual reality has always inspired me. It is something which sounds achievable but yet we are not able to reach to the level of perfection. I wanted to make this happen ever since I saw that movie. I knew this would involve some intense engineering, so I tried to get myself into one of the most prestigious engineering colleges in India. Through the hard work of my earlier days, I got a remarkable score in the entrance exams and got accepted into a reputable National Institute Of Technology (NIT) in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) program.
Till the time I reached my second year I tried to gain enough knowledge in programming to help me realise my dream. My first idea was to design a headset which would use a phone screen as display and the sensors inside to track head movement and give the user a feel of Virtual Reality. Yes, I know that this reminds you of Google Cardboard, but it wasn't existent then. A Close friend and I used to travel a long distance each weekend to a halfway meeting spot, to discuss and code this project. We coded a sample game and programmed an app which would send the sensor details to a computer.The process of making this device 'wireless', exposed me to socket programming and consequently to computer networks, my second love of computer science. When the device was ready, I started looking for ways to detect human motion. This is when I came across computer vision (my first love) and the problem of depth perception.
As I used to stay a great distance away from my college, a lot of my time (4hrs/day) was spent in travelling. This also meant that I had to do best with whatever spare time I could get. I used to study and work on my side projects in this time. I felt exuberant when two of my side projects received commendation during my second year. An app to capture complete 360o panorama as a pictorial sphere surrounding the user, was handpicked for Intel App Innovation 2013. The other one was an online tool for students to work on their personal projects, find collaborators and experts to help them out. A close friend and I worked on this project, and we were amongst the top 8 finalists in Google Cloud Developer Challenge 2013.
During the summers of 2014 I got accepted into the esteemed Google Summer Of Code (GSoC) program. I worked for the open source latex editor LyX and was mentored by Dr. TC. I had to make Lyx support collaborative editing by two or more people. The challenge here was that the document was not placed on a server, rather each individual had his own copy and the changes had to be synced across the network, which gave rise to lots of real time collisions. We used a approach similar to Git in order to solve this collision problem. Even though I used to get stuck a lot while handling this collision cases, the affable and supportive mentorship of Dr. T, helped me bring the project to completion. Although I was not able to push the feature into production, this experience taught me a lot about problem solving and introduced me to the world of open source contribution. I was also a part of GSoC 2015, I worked for the open source virtual private network(VPN) tool IP over P2P (IPOP) under Dr. RF. I implemented a feature to support centralised monitoring and control of the VPN, through master/slave model. I learned a lot about internals of VPN and handling single point of failure cases.
During my final year, I did extensive research and tried to solve the problem of depth perception in a unique way. I was mentored by Dr. VT.. To brief you on the current state of research, depth perception through a single camera is mostly inaccurate while depth perception through a duel camera (analogous to our eyes) is accurate but requires a special setup of duel camera. My approach was different, use motion of the objects in a scene to predict their depth. The basis of the research was on the fact that moving objects which are closer to the camera will appear to move more distance than those farther from the camera. Not clear? lets try a little experiment, close one of your eye and hold a finger very close to the open eye and move the finger horizontally at a constant rate. Try the same thing with the finger little farther this time. The apparent distance traveled by the finger the second time was relatively less than the distance traveled the first time. I use this information, but in a eccentric way, I assume that the scene is static but the camera is moving. This research produced some magnificent results and it has myriad of applications ranging from a probing robot to a self driving car.
By the end of my college years, I had lots of job offers. The salary offered to me broke the college record by being 1.8 times the previous record. This has helped me for partially arranging the finances for my Graduate studies. I was also ranked third in the CSE department with a GPA of 8.9 compared to Topper's GPA of 9.1.
Although I would have liked to pursue a career in Computer Vision, the opportunities in India are very low. So, I settled with my second liking, Networks and Distributed Systems. I worked in Housing.com, India's leading real estate platform, in Communications cluster of projects, which involved likes of log management, user to user chat etc. This gave me exposure to the system design to handle a scale of 10k requests/s. Recently, I joined Zeta, an e-wallet and I seek to learn the system design for securely handling inerrable payment transactions.
From what you have read so far, you might have noticed a pattern. I have always been engaged in either CV or Networks. This is exactly why I want to pursue Masters, and not PhD in CV. I am torn between the two and I also feel that I have not given the other subfields enough cognition.
** HERE, I WILL SAY WHY A PARTICULAR UNIVERSITY IS MY CHOICE. I WOULD PROVIDE REASONS SUCH AS FREEDOM TO CHOOSE COURSES, PLUS RELEVANCE TO THE RESEARCH ALREADY BEING DONE THERE **
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Hello Guys,
I am the writer of this essay. Couple of things I want feedback on:
1) Grammatical Errors: English is not my primary language, those errors will be opaque to me, so please tell me about them.
2) The essay is too long, I need to cut it down, A LOT. But each paragraph conveys some key information which I don't want to ignore. So, Feel free to replace sentences with a shorter one and highlight irrelevant info to remove.
3) Do I sound arrogant? I have used a lot of "I's", Please let me know about the sentences if they sound arrogant.
4) Is the language is too pedestrian? if so please suggest some words.
I know that the essay contains lots of jargons, but as this will be read by professors, I assume they will understand it properly.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
