I was born in Bokaro Steel City, a small town in the heart of North-India famous for its SteelManufacturing.
It was here I first realized how data without proper context can be misleading.TheSteel Plant claimed that they were the largest steel plant in India, little did I know they weretalking about the thickness of steel sheet and not about the plant’s production capacity.This gaveme a sense of realization about how much people’s thought process is affected by the manner inwhich information is represented. It’s a famous saying “Knowledge is power” but at the sametime, half knowledge is worse than ignorance. In today’s world where there is an endless supplyof data without any form or structure, acquiring and using knowledge for a good purpose is initself a daunting task.My goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.During my Schooling days, I developed a keen habit of reading everything and anything whichlead to me having a small chunk of knowledge in multiple areas being Greek and Indianmythologies, mathematics, physics, basic computer sciences.
As a result of my curiosity, I wasable to learn multiple languages namely Sanskrit, Hindi and English including strong interests inprogramming languages like Visual-Basic and LOGO. One step to another led to me choosingPhysics, Mathematics, and Web-Technologies as the main subjects during my HighSchool andeventually I ended up finishing top of my class overall and on the subject of Web-Technologies.I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. My affinity towardsComputer Science culminated in me receiving admission as an Undergrad in Computer ScienceEngineering in one of the most prestigious colleges in India, Birla Institute Of Technology. Myconfidence being sky high and with my insatiable hunger towards learning allowed me to keepgrowing in terms of skills and personality all throughout my Undergrad. In my bachelorprogram, courses like DACA(Design And Analysis of Computer Algorithms), DBMS, CompilerDesigning and Digital Image processing allured my interest with Data Mining being myfavorite.
I undertook courses on Computer Networking by NetTech India and Ethical Hacking byKyrion Digital Securities to enhance my knowledge in domains outside my coursestructure.During my Sophomore year, I joined IEEE Students chapter as a member of the teamthat organized regular C/C++ and algorithms workshops for freshman (mandatory courses for allfreshman).I was able to help students who had never once touched a keyboard let alone written acomputer program.This gave me a sense of pride, as a result I kept working as a member of theclub and by my senior year, I was appointed as the Technical Head of the Club. Even now I usemy expertise to help underprivileged kids in Hyderabad with help of Adharna Foundation andteach them basic Computer Sciences.In this modern world, our identification is judged on three things. What we have, what we knowand what we are i.e (username, password, and our biological features).
based on this idea Iworked with Prof Sumit Srivastava on Voice Based Recognitions Systems as part of my honorsproject. I looked into existing Watermarking Techniques On Audio Signals for transfer ofencrypted messages from speaker and detector and tried to come up with our own hybrid technique. we processed these signals in Time, Spatial and frequency domain and tried to maskour password signal in a larger carrier signal using a combination of existing techniques(say acombination of Least-Significant-Bit and Echo Hiding technique).We collected thousands ofvoice samples of around 100 users speaking in Hindi and created our knowledge base on them.We used HMM(Hidden Markov Model) and GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model) for a probabilisticanalysis to gauge the success of these hybrid techniques.This is the very first time I had my handdirty with inter-disciplinary sub-field of Computational Linguistics, A bit of Machine Learningand Digital Image Processing.
After my Undergraduate, I got a big opportunity to join Oracle Corporation’s Applications LabTeam in India and as they Say, Destiny Finds Its Way, I was assigned a Data Mining Projectdesigned to generate highly in-depth reports about Oracle’s Cloud-Based Earning in terms ofSaaS/PaaS/IaaS. I created a data model which could identify Revenue lines specific to cloudrevenue and get all other dimensional data for such lines (Regions, Fiscal Years,Organisation).The system was designed to do a monthly ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) onmillions of records Using Oracle Data Integrator.
With me growing in my Professional Life, Ijoined the platform team of Turvo, a Sunnyvale-California based logistics solutions Startup,founded by ex-Microsoft Employees also having Tony Fadell (designer of iPod) as an AngelInvestor. here I have worked on a module that takes live data from trucks and other mobiledevices and does a detailed analysis on the trucks pattern, total stoppages over a trip, averagedistances, lane history and route deviation by implementing and tweaking existing algorithmslike Google’s Boxing algorithms.Once again surrounded by tonnes of data for me sort and getsomething meaningful out of it. In fact, even in my daily life data fascinates me every day.
Since Iam a marathon runner I need to know how fast I ran, how much I progressed from my last run,how much energy I consumed and other details to improve my performance.My current work of handling logistics data and coming up with possible solutions to theproblems faced by logistics companies using data sciences has helped me garner a deeper insightinto how machine learning and predictive algorithms work. Keeping all my interest andaspirations in minds, I have decided that I want to further my knowledge in the field of ComputerScience especially in the inter-disciplinary of Data Sciences and Machine Learning. I want to bepart of the solution where an individual mines the infinite data available and discovers the hiddenknowledge and insights in the process.In past few months, I have done research on the Internetand talked with current students pursuing ambitions similar to me and the name of Stony BrookUniversity is synonymous with these fields of study and research. My curiosity to know more ledme to come across some of the works done by Stony Brook faculties Professor Anita Wasilewskaand Professor Praveen Tripathi in the field of Data Mining and Machine Learning.This hasgotten me salivating just thinking about the amount of substantial knowledge I can garner in thecompany of such bright minds.An opportunity to be a part of this prestigious university wouldenable me to build a strong foundation for a very fruitful research career.
