Graduate / Interest is in the area of artificial intelligence, with machine learning and machine perception SOP [4]

Hello everyone! I am working on my statement of purpose and here is the first version. I am also a little confused about the domain of "data mining". Does it belongs to the area of A.I.?

Any of your feedback will be highly appreciated. Thank you!
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SoP, computer science, Artificial Intelligence

I have general interest but my prime interest is in the area of artificial intelligence, often with machine learning, machine perception and their applications like data mining to the real world. I am also open to new research areas and are willing to learn new things. I am always fascinated by the challenge of creating human-level intelligence and I also realized that it now seems like mission impossible. Though with great advances in machine learning and computer vision, artificial intelligence so far still lacks the ability to earn enough common sense through auto reasoning like humans. However, the way to this ultimate goal has generated many benefits and bring a lot conveniences to people and for those benefits this question deserve further exploring.

My interest in this area comes from many sources. After taking some psychology classes and studying readings of Freud, I become interested about how people view their cognitive and mental process. Yet at that time I seldom have chance to explore their combination of computer science until I took data mining class, during which I learned a lot about machine learning tools like clustering, classifying, Bayesian Modeling, ANN,DNN and their potential applications to the real world. I am excited to find how our languages and observations could be translated into knowledge machines can understand and that the development of computer science needs strong support from many areas.After that, I started learning some online courses about machine learning and the more I explored it, the more I am obsessed with this field. Moreover, when I was doing research for image distance metrics, I learned many interesting researches of computer vision and A.I. about how to help machine "see" normal objects around the environment and how to represent knowledge for machines. This all greatly instigated my interest in this highly interdisciplinary field and I want to learn more about it.

I know that areas like machine learning, computer vision, computational neuroscience, linguistics and cognitive science all contribute a lot to artificial intelligence. Therefore, I tried to keep my background diverse throughout my undergraduate career. I took classes from various departments such as psychology, biology and philosophy, which provides me inspiration and different perspective outside computer science. Meanwhile, I kept good grades of my major. I rank second among 365 students in computer science and I rank first during the third year. I also have participated in several projects during my undergraduate career. These projects helped build up my knowledge towards how to use theory tools into real world applications, like the resume matching project I participated in used clustering methods. In order to gain systematic training for research, I jointed the group of Prof.XXX in XXX University. I am now a full-time research assistant in his group researching effective distance metrics of images concerning similarity search and how to reduce the time of calculating distances between images at scale and I have made some achievements on research and trying to work on a paper. Every week we will have a regular meeting sharing reflections upon papers we read last week and discuss with each other. This is really an eye-opening research experience which give me a better feel for what research in computer science is really like. I think my diverse background and strong academic performance prepare me well for graduate program.

All this has inspired me to continue my graduate study about artificial intelligence and devote myself to this area as a researcher. Except for solid training for computer science and mathematics, I also seek different kinds of inspirations from other areas, like cognitive science. Therefore, I believe University of Pennsylvania will be a good place for me to further my study in Artificial Intelligence since here I can get touch with many prestigious centers and institute such as Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, Penn Research in Machine Learning and General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception lab. Through my graduate studies, I hope to be, and will strain my every nerve to be an effective researcher.