Hello,
Please evaluate my SOP for masters in Computer Science(pasted below) for grammar, flow as well as the content. Thanks in advance.
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Artificial Intelligence had my curiosity, when I first witnessed the process of pattern recognition at the age of 17, when I watched a dog-like robot - which turned out to be the AIBO -- on TV avoiding a penalty shootout in a game of football for robots. Years later, my emerging among the top 0.4% of the state entrance examination of Tamil Nadu, India, helped me get into Madras Institute of Technology(MIT), Anna University. With Mathematics being my strong hold, I chose Computer Science as my undergraduate major, only to find the curiosity in Artificial Intelligence shape into an attention, a year later.
During Semester IV, as part of a team project, we implemented a strategic agent to play the game of Connect 4[1]. This project was my first exposure to existing research in the field as well. It also taught us the importance of defining the rules and solvability of a problem as extensively and concisely as possible, before drawing out a pseudocode. College also marked the period of active participation in online programming contests, technical treasure hunts, programming and debugging contests [2]. During my final and pre-final years, I became a prime problem-setter for Asymptote, the college symposium in MIT. I also designed Dextera, the online technical treasure hunt for the same. My final year project was my first attempt in exploiting the concept of domain ontologies to identify static web-pages that do not adhere to a given protocol. We used WordNet to isolate webpages of our university that were obsolete in terms of activity.
I graduated in 2009 and was among the top 6% of my department, after which I took up a job at <Company1>, due to financial constraints back then. In 2011, I moved to a start-up - <Company2>, excited by their idea of replacing live video content using audio/video watermarking and fingerprinting [3]. The contents to be replaced and their replacements are decided beforehand. During my stint here, I developed an application that makes this decision. Essentially it boils down to finding an optimal solution for the multiple knapsack problems, within the constraints of the application. Apart from this, I also contributed to the minimization of false positives during fingerprint matching [3].
I then met with an accident at the end of July 2013 and was bedridden for a while. Hence, I had to take some time off the industry. I am using this break to examine the possibility of applying Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for the specific use-case of optimizing one's take-away based on previous estimates of their grasping power under Dr. Santhi. Automating this task eliminates the other practical factors that potentially harm the output decision, which is generally made by a human.
The groundbreaking research that UCSD does in the field of Machine Learning coupled with the advanced courses that it offers in Theoretical Computer Science were influential in my decision to accelerate my research interests further, especially in the sub-field of deep learning. Given my previous experience, I eagerly look forward to play an active role in the Artificial Intelligence Group of UCSD and in COSMAL too, given UCSD's interdisciplinary take on this field. I strongly believe that the kind of exposure that COSMAL offers will assist anyone, leave alone me, in choosing a promising research topic for my doctorate, which in turn will bring me one step closer to cracking how brain works, or better yet, provide an enhanced mechanism.
As a person, I have won several oratorical competitions in school and inter-collegiate level. I am a strong believer in making the world a global school and consequently an advocate of Massive Open Online Courses. I have completed a decent number of courses in Coursera, although not on time due to the workload. Relevant courses include Automata, Machine Learning, Analytical Combinatorics (Part I) and Games Without Chance: Combinatorial Game Theory. As a leisure-time project, currently I translate famous lectures that would make sense in all high school levels and college-freshman levels, into Indian languages (Tamil) and send them to schools in India where the medium of instruction is not English. I believe this is my fair share in globalizing education.
Thank you for taking your time to consider my candidature and scholarship applications.
[1][2] Details on the project available in my resume.
[3] The Patent can be found here: <Patent location>
[4] Covered as part of Item number [0031] in the above patent.
