Over the course of my three-year undergraduate study at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, I have realized which areas excite me the most: Artificial Intelligence,
Machine Learning, Algorithms. I intend to pursue an MS
degree in CS to gain advanced knowledge of these areas, and do interesting and useful research. In the process, I hope to understand how I am best suited to contribute to this field in the future and take steps in that direction.
The most interesting project I have done so far is developing an attention model based on Reinforcement Learning for traffic-light detection in self-driving cars as a part of the Computational Neuroscience team at my college. It involved extracting real-time data from Mongodb database and modeling the cortical maps in the brain as Kohonen Self-Organizing Maps to map the input space in response to the real-valued state information and using Q-learning algorithm, with neighboring update function, to map a continuous input space to an action space. The project is done in collaboration with an automobile company and it will soon be added as a new feature. Apart from this, I have also done an IoT based project in which my team and I have used motion detection techniques and built a band of virtual instruments (musical instruments without physical structure, only sensors). We have a pending patent for this project.
My long-term goal is to do things that have a positive impact on people’s lives, and I’m confident that technology is the right field for me to be in – it offers endless possibilities, and I love working with it. I believe that I have what it takes to succeed in this field – drive, a competitive spirit, persistence, creativity, and a strong aptitude.