SOP for Masters in Computer Science with Machine Learning Specialization

Hi,

I am applying for Master's in a few US universities and I would be really grateful if anyone could review my SOP.

Thanks a lot!
======================================================================================

I believe in ai

I believe Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to be the cornerstone in shaping the future of technology industry. The AI revolution that is going to redefine human computer interaction in the future is on its way, of which I wish to be a part of. I am applying for a Master's program in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning (ML) or Artificial Intelligence. Recent developments in the field show that the future is going to be driven by intelligent systems and computers. With the advent of Deep Learning, the cutting edge technology in AI; opportunities in the field have skyrocketed. I believe that this field has immense challenges and opportunities to keep me excited for a lifetime.

It was my father who instilled the pursuit of mathematics and statistics in me, right from my early childhood days. He is a graduate in Statistics and I grew up reading the Math textbooks he used for his junior college, undergrad and Master's programs. This interest helped me win quizzes and acquire a high rank in several competitive exams during my school days.

Since my childhood, I had been a consistent topper of my class. I have always liked to learn by application, which is why I decided to pursue engineering rather than going for pure science after high school. I cleared the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) which is one of the most competitive exams of the country and decided to do my under-graduation in Engineering Physics at IIT Madras. I chose to pursue Engineering Physics, which is an interdisciplinary course jointly offered by the Physics and Electrical Engineering departments as I found the course curriculum had the right combination of Physics, Math, and Programming. After doing 'Networks and Signals' course in my third semester, I was ambitious to explore the field of signal processing in detail and interned at XXXXX. At XXXXX, I worked on developing a mathematical model to estimate the location of a moving object using Least Square Estimation Algorithm. The research on Least Square Estimation led me to Machine Learning, which I became fascinated about. In the following semester, I did the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng (Stanford University) on Coursera, finishing with a score of 98.8%, following which, I realized that computers and intelligent machines are what I wanted to work on. In the following summer break, I did a data science internship at a digital marketing company where I worked on developing statistical models for their omni-channel digital marketing platform. This internship helped me understand how companies are leveraging machine learning techniques to extract meaningful insights from their data.

At the same time, I continued to explore other areas of research and came across numerous application of ML technologies, which made me more fascinated about ML. Particularly, I was really intrigued by the application of Machine Learning in Image Recognition. Hence, I decided to do my final year project on Optical Character Recognition under the guidance of Prof. DDDDD. As a part of this project, I developed a smartphone-based text detector and translator for Indian languages that can extract and translate text from visual sign boards and images. For image acquisition, a mobile application was developed in Android Operating System (OS). Tesseract OCR engine was suitably modified for Hindi and used for the Character Recognition part and translation was done using Microsoft Bing Translator API. The mobile app was tested extensively on different sign boards in Hindi and obtained a prediction accuracy of 76.82%, which was comparable to the top performing OCR apps available at that time.

Higher education was expected to be the next step. But I decided to take a detour and get professional experience to further strengthen my programming and analytical skills and to enhance my prospects of getting into a great graduate school. I secured a job at WWWWW as Software Engineer of EEEEE team which focused on continuous monitoring, detection, analysis, and remediation of data discrepancies in the company's item catalogue. I worked with the team in developing real-time data processing frameworks using Machine Learning techniques to identify and remediate data issues. I used the latest technologies like Apache Storm, Apache Spark and Hadoop to continuously monitor and analyze huge datasets. My experience at WWWWW helped me to get a good grounding in Software Engineering practices and programming.

In order to get a hands on experience in ML research, I decided to join HHHHH as a Data Scientist. The Data Science team at HHHHH is highly research oriented, with lot of emphasis given to developing new state-of-the-art technologies for building better data-driven healthcare products. In my first project, I worked on Procedure Pathway Analysis, where I developed a time-sensitive automated framework to analyse disease progression from initial diagnosis. ML algorithms were used to identify the correct intervention points at which patients need to be approached in order to avoid emergency hospital visits. I was able to successfully implement the algorithm to monitor and analyse the progression pathways of more than 30 diseases. Next I worked on integrating medical, demographic and biometric attributes of patients using Probabilistic Graphical Models. I was also a part of the team which developed proprietary Convolutional Neural Networks to predict whether patients with certain chronic illness will need surgery in near future. Currently I am working on developing a feature selection algorithm to automatically identify all the diagnoses and procedures that can lead to a condition in the future. The first version of the project has been completed and is performing on par with a medical professional in identifying the associated feature variables. My work on automated feature selection was well appreciated and has led to replacing the older models with the ones aided by the new algorithm. A research paper will be published in the coming months on this work. During my work at HHHHH, I realized the power of ML to change the healthcare domain completely. This incited me to spend an ample amount of time studying it in depth and researching all its different applications in one's daily life.

It is my fond hope to conduct advanced research and get academic recognition by publishing papers and journals. As part of my short term goals, after my education, I am looking forward to work as a researcher or an engineer at reputed companies in a role that involves ML. Looking at the long term, I aim to be a researcher of repute in the field of Machine Learning in academia or in tech industry which is at the forefront of AI research.

I look forward to be a part of your university as I really appreciate the academic culture and history that comes with it. It will be a great opportunity for me to meet the best minds in the world and prepare for the biggest challenges in the technology industry in the times to come. I would indeed be excited to be a part of your scholarly community because a student's success is not solely his, but because of the formidable formation of his institution.

Zahil, try to create a more purpose driven essay. After all, this is supposed to be a Statement of Purpose instead of a Personal Statement. There are a number of paragraphs that you can use for the basis of your revised essay which will be discarding the unnecessary paragraphs and information. You can build a new, purpose driven essay by enhancing your statements in paragraphs 1,3 (skipping the first 3 sentences due to irrelevance), 4,5,6,7. You should also try to better explain the purpose of your desire to study at this university. What is it about the curriculum or training in particular that you hope to undergo in order to enhance your theoretical and practical abilities in the performance of your job? This serves as the purpose for your studies at the university and will help to showcase your desire to begin improvements in your workplace even before you complete your education. Your current discussion of why you want to be a part of the university is not very compelling nor convincing as it is very generic in statement and could apply to just about any university. So you need to be more specific in this area of discussion by using actual references to training programs, classes, and professors that you wish to learn from.