Pursuing graduate studies in Computer Science (Machine Learning), aspiration to become a professor

Hi all,
I have just updated my SOP, looking forward for your valuable feedback.

research university professor

I want to pursue graduate studies in Computer Science and my career aspiration is to become a professor at research university. My research interests include machine learning and natural language processing.

My motivation to pursue graduate education stems from working on several research projects as an undergraduate in Nazarbayev University. My alma mater is a leading university of Kazakhstan with English medium of instruction and international faculty. In our first project, I worked with Professor Zhenisbek Assylbekov on unsupervised methods for parallel webpages detection. I have published results of this project in international conference as first author. Currently, we are working with Professor Assylbekov on neural networks for language modeling. Furthermore, I collaborate with other groups in Brain-Computer Interface and Social Network Analysis projects. Additionally, I am working on industrial project on conversational bot development for answering questions about tax laws of Kazakhstan.

My acquaintance with research started at Summer 2016 from a project on parallel webpages detection under Professor Assylbekov's supervision. The main aim of this project was to analyze statistical properties of bilingual webpages from Kazakhstani and foreign websites to estimate quality of their translation. We started the work by using standard unsupervised learning algorithms, but they were not good enough for this task. Finally I came up with my own algorithm which had significantly better performance than baselines. Our work was accepted to the conference in Japan and I went there to present our findings.

Our next project in Natural Language Processing is focused on application of deep learning to language modeling. Initially, significant amount of time was devoted to fundamentals of neural networks, programming in TensorFlow and textual data preparation for language modeling. The main goal of this project is to come up with variant of recurrent neural networks competitive with the LSTM algorithm that is current state of the art in this field. Currently, I'm continuing the study of deep learning fundamentals for implementation of the competitve algorithm proposed by Professor Assylbekov.

Taking a machine learning class of Professor Berdakh Abibullayev in Fall 2016 inspired my interest in brain-computer interfaces. Under supervision of Professor Berdakh we tackled open ended question of classification accuracy improvement in the movement intention detection field. In this project we reproduced the state of the art results in this field achieved with SVM and compared it with other algorithms.

Starting from Spring 2017 I was interested in Social network analysis for malicious activity detection with Professor Mark Sterling. I started this project by finding interesting research project on cyberbullying detection in Twitter. I read a Ph.D. Thesis about it and presented it in our weekly seminar. After that we worked on literature review and data collection in order to study interactions in some of the groups with malicious behavior in Twitter. Now our goal is to predict suspension of Twitter users in this groups.

My interests lie not only in academic projects, but also in industrial applications. In one of the hackathons of Fall 2017 we implemented smart assistant for the Ernst & Young company. In order to satisfy both the accuracy and speed requirements we used sparsity matrix to detect a paragraph in a question and Bidirectional Attention Flow algorithm to answer the question itself based only on the detected paragraph. In this way we achieved both speed and accuracy in the hybrid algorithm. Finally, our team won the first place and received a part-time job offer. Background from research experience played a decisive role in my contribution to this project.

There are several professors at X whose projects are especially appealing to me:
Profs. A, B, C. I also like to engage with people from different backgrounds, so the diversity of the research groups in CS is appealing.

For these reasons, I would like to join the Computer Science Program at the X University.

Alibi, a proper masters degree course requires the applicant to have at least 2 years of actual work related experience, not just an extensive academic (research) exposure. The SOP has to indicate real world applications based upon your current job requirements. I do not see that in this statement of purpose. This is too academic in nature, regardless of the number of publications you have been a part of and the extent of your laboratory participation with various professors. It is the lack of actual work experience that may weaken your SOP and consideration as a student during the actual review process. Your purpose for your masters studies cannot be based on continued education alone. Universities frown upon "professional students" who do not really wish to apply their education to anything specific. Even though educators like have ardent learners as students, they also want students who will share their knowledge with the world and help to improve it through specific projects and profession related applications. From the looks of your current SOP, you will fall under the "professional student" segment and have an even weaker chance at acceptance consideration.

On a different note, this essay should be more informative when it comes to the journals where your authored work was published. Please make sure to include a number of article titles, publication formats, publication names, volumes, issue numbers, and release dates as these will be necessary, should your application be seriously considered, for the verification of the information that you have shared. Additionally, you need to mention only 2 professors in this SOP. The ones from whom you have permission to mention their names specifically because they will be writing recommendation letters and will allow themselves to be (potentially) interviewed, should your application go to the next round of screening.

Your essay must focus less on your academic background, more on your professional setting, the actual application that you will be using this knowledge for, I know, you want to become a professor, but you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. You don't become a professor based on the number of diplomas you have, you become a professor based upon actual experience gained in relation to your academic profession. Start as science teacher then work your way up. Don't try to pilot a space shuttle even before you learn how to fly a plane.

@Holt
Thank you for your feedback. First of all, I would add more info about the published paper, this is a good point. Secondly, I will try to link my research experience with professional setting as you suggested. Nevertheless, I'm not sure that one needs to work as science teacher in order to apply for research based MSc and Ph.D. programs. Moreover, as far as I know, most of the students in these programs are coming straight from their bachelor's studies. I want to become a research professor because I want to continue doing research, that's why I focused on it in the application. Is this different in your field of study?