Graduate / SOP for MS in CS with Text Minining, Information Retreival, NLP focus [4]

Problems of finding meaning out of large sets of data are of prime interest to me. I am especially interested in open-ended problems in the field of Text Mining social networks and Information Retrieval from the resulting datasets. This is a field that is seeing exponential increase of information overload; at the same time this is also where more and more interaction is taking place every day. This makes it increasingly complex to glean meaning out of these social sources of big data. I plan to work on how to make information from social networks and other communication medium easily inferable. To achieve this, I must gather deeper insight in the field of Data Mining and Information Retrieval. A Masters in Computer Science guided by accomplished professors will help me narrow down my specific research areas and use it to work on more real-world big data challenges. For this purpose I have applied to XXXXXX.

For me, this Masters course shall be a step towards my PhD degree, in which I hope to research the field of Text Mining and Information Retrieval more closely, which in turn shall be another step in the direction of my intended career in academic research. Academic world has always attracted me for the sheer amount of meaningful research it produces and also for the fact that it provides unparalleled scope for independent research.

My undergraduate courses and projects at XXXXX helped me explore the field in a broad manner and has provided me with prerequisites like computing skills and commitment for research. The courses that interested me most are computing, data science and artificial intelligence related: Data Structure, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Compiler Design, Distributed Computing, Discrete Mathematics, Database Systems, Data Mining & Warehousing, Artificial Intelligence. And XXXXXX has courses on - Big Data, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Languages Processing Probabilistic Artificial Intelligence, which shall be a natural extension to my undergraduate education in the field and shall build up on my knowledge and work experience in this field which I shall discuss henceforth.

I went to System Software Lab at XXXXXX for my summer research internship which was sponsored by Ministry of Human Resource (Govt. of India). There, I worked on Text Mining and Information Retrieval from Twitter public timeline. I developed a system that retrieves tweets in real time and returns only those tweets that match a given search-keyword or its synonyms. I began with lemmatising the search-keyword and fetching its synonymous from the lexicon and saved them int a set WordSet. The system also lemmatises words present in a tweet. When a lemmatised word, from a tweet, matches with a word in the WordSet, the tweet is marked as relevant. This is an improvement over Twitter's standard search feature which matches the exact keywords, but completely ignores tweets having its synonyms. I achieved 65% accuracy rate using WordNet as lexicon. While this was an acceptable result, to achieve better accuracy I realised the need for having further knowledge in the field of pattern matching and machine learning. While reading published literature during this work, I came across one which had explored how to use status updates to predict the sentiment of a social network. This motivated me to explore the area of sentiment analysis.

After returning to college I extended internship project to include a keyword classifier as a simple approach towards sentiment analysis. The system decided whether a set of tweets has a negative, positive or neutral sentiment. I achieved this using number of keywords of a particular sentiment present in the tweet and other factors like presence of a smiley. I reused lemmatisation to utilize the sentiment corpus effectively. Working on this project I realised I needed to delve deeper in this field to understand the nuances of sentiment analysis. Deep knowledge of classifiers like Naive Bias Classifier, Decision Tree Learning, Support Vector and Maximum Entropy is required to increase the relevance and accuracy of sentiment analysis of a given data set. This also motivated me to look at this field from a practical point of view, as in, how it can be used in real life problems and realised this portion of research in this field is highly under-represented.

Mobile computing was the burgeoning area when I finished college. I joined XXXXX as an XXX engineer. At XXXX, I worked on a text based command and query system which accepts text commands in natural language and generates relevant actions in the appropriate phone application. For example: "Tell my mother I'll be late for dinner", sends a message to phone user's mother with the body "late for dinner". I implemented Semantic Relationship Extraction of this system which found the related phone applications based on the keywords in the input, classifying different keywords of the input text as content words and functions words. I achieved this using pattern matching in a graph of content words (e.g. "picture", "email") as vertices and the edges being denoted by actions(e.g. "send", "display"), where edges map to relationships. This project gave me an opportunity to work on, and helped me grasp, the basics of natural language processing and pattern matching. I also realised that this field aligns with my research interest in information retrieval, so further academic research in this field will be the next logical step in my career.

Outside academics and work, I have always been active in extra curricular activities. I captained my departmental Cricket team in college, and I currently play for XXXX. During college, I was also associated with an NGO XXXXX where we taught children, from financially weak families, whose parents couldn't afford to send them to a regular school. Twice a week, I took Math and English classes with those children. That is where I realised how fulfilling teaching can be. Later on, I, along with some of my batch mates, organised tutorial classes for department juniors to help them with coding concepts.

I was also very active in quiz competitions. I won first prizes in my college and represented the same in other colleges. Being a seasoned traveller, I have trekked some well known and arduous routes like 'Doodh Sagar Rain trek' and the two and half day trek 'Green Route trek' in the Western Ghats; the latter is arguably one of the most scenic routes on the planet Earth. Such activities helped me in building my character and personality in a holistic manner. I learned how to be resilient even in hostile of situations and how perseverance and patience are the keys to achieving anything of value.

XXXXXXX has the best Computer Science department in XXXXXX and arguably one of the top few in the world. The courses in XXXXXX course match well with my research interest. Also, looking at Prof. XXXXXXX's XXXXX research group I find some of the ongoing research of my interest, especially the proposed work by Dr XXXXXXX "XXXXXXXXX". This is very much related to my Masters thesis proposal "XXXXXXXXXXXX" in the sense that both the proposed projects aim to get information out of collective data of social networks. Also, noting his research focus on "XXXXXXXXX" I find this team and group to be a great match for my research interests, and given a chance to be part of this group I hope to contribute to the work currently going on.

I believe I'll be able to do justice to the opportunity given to me as an XXXXXX Masters scholar and add value to your esteemed department via skills and expertise gained trough my excellent Information Technology undergraduate studies and my R&D work experience with the world's leading XXXXXX organisation.

Thank you very much for considering my application.

- Please help me trim it! Should I make projects less descriptive or maybe remove technical details or "how"? Should I remove one or two (I've total three and I think they are very much related to my area of interest; besides I do not want to skip on my hard work :( )

- Do I need a "hook"? I've failed after trying for weeks. Couldn't come up with a hook.
- Is there any section I should try or start differently? Especially the first or second.
- How is the overall flow? Do I need to rearrange/remove sections?
- Is any section inappropriately written?
- Seems I am reiterating my interest "Data Mining and Information Retrieval" a lot. Is it fine or I should rather say "field" after once or twice?

- Have I used '' or "" or () somewhere inappropriately or am I missing them somewhere?
- What about sentence formation and overall feel of grammar and control over language?

Graduate / I've been intrigued by information hiding techniques and data privacy; SOP [6]

Since my undergraduate years I've been intrigued by information hiding techniques and data privacy. My goal is to be able to design services that are secure, protect user privacy and works as a reliable medium. To achieve this I must gather deeper insight in the field of Information Security and Internet technologies. A masters guided by accomplished professors shall help me narrow down my specific research interests. Looking at the course structure and research at XXXXXXXX, it is clear to me that it satisfies my needs, and is the perfect course for my post graduation in the field of Information Security and Mobile Computing.

My undergraduate courses and work have helped me explore the field in a broad manner and has provided me with prerequisites like computing skills and commitment for research. The undergraduate courses that interested me most were computing and security related: Data Structure, Algorithms, Web Technology, Operating Systems, Compiler Design, Network Security, Information Security, Intrusion Detection. I've excellent grades in these courses. However, I was most intrigued by Information Security and Intrusion Detection which were taken by professor XXXXXX at XXXXXXXX.

In my final year, I did a project titled XXXXX Security XXXXXX, guided by professor XXXXXXX. This involved surveying the field of Steganography, researching different information hiding techniques and reading existing literature. As an implementation of Steganography, I developed an algorithm to hide secret text inside a cover text using White Steg, i.e. white spaces between words inside the text. This project also involved study of shortcomings of existing methods of Steganography and its history. Now, I intend to improve the algorithm and write a paper on the this with my project guide.

Mobile computing was the burgeoning area when I finished my bachelors. I secured a job as a software engineer at XXXXXXXXXX. My experience of 3 years in XXXXX XXXXXX team has provided me a platform to put the concepts learnt in college to practical use in commercial software products. At XXXXXX I had the opportunity to work on Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) implementation, which is a form of public-key cryptography based pairing for Bluetooth. For this, I researched man-in-themiddle-attacks and prepared a report on possible attacks and methodologies to prevent them. Then I went on to implement association model for second stage in SSP authentication, where public keys and nonces are exchanged for link-key generation. This project helped me grasp the standard security services like authentication, authorization and data-integrity. During this project I was also exposed to the limitless scope of Information Security and realized that further academic research will be next logical step in my career.

For me, this masters course shall be a step towards my PhD degree, in which I hope to research the field of information security in the light of user privacy and data security more closely, which in turn shall be another step in the direction of my intended career in Information Security research, either in academia or in industry.

XXXXXXXXX is an excellent blend of culture, education and cutting edge research. Research focus at XXXXX, which deals in user privacy and anonymity, meets my research goal in a wholesome manner. The other aspect of my research goal, which is implementing such services, is a research focus at XXXXXXX. Besides, I've always wanted to travel Europe and a masters from two of the top XXXXXXX universities shall give me an opportunity to have a glimpse into European culture from up close.

I believe I'll be able to do justice to the opportunity given to me as a XXXXXX XXXXX XXXX scholar and add value to it via skills and expertise gained trough my Information Technology undergraduate studies and my R&D work experience at world's leading mobile computing organisation.

I had planned to write a fresh, new SOP for my other applications; longer and with more personal touch. I also wanted to make it unique. I had to write this quickly so I couldn't take better care of language either. Now, whatever I try to write tend to mimic this SOP and if I try too hard I lose my train of thought. Practically I am not able to move forward and I do not have many days left for my application to start.

- It's a generic SOP. The question was - Write a SOP.
- I've to remove these work experiences and add new ones
- Have to change intended field of interest
- I've tried so hard for the last 3-4 weeks but couldn't settle on a "hook". I guess I'll send without one.

- Is my SOP seriously short?

Please critique my SOP and I would appreciate some generic guidelines/comments other than specific ones from inside the SOP itself.