Hello,
I am Aruna Maurya, a final year student pursuing Computer Science and Engineering from Amrita School of Engineering. I am interested in solving problems in the domain of Computer Vision using Machine Learning and Deep neural networks. The idea of working with something as basic and natural as images, and be able to analyze them to actually solve real world problems is what excites me.
As a freshman, I invested my time in Competitive Programming, solving problems from CodeChef and Codeforces. This helped me develop my logical and reasoning skills and also made me dynamic and focused. I learnt how to code well and struggle with hard problems- a sign of perseverance. As a sophomore, I became a member of FOSS@Amrita, one of the largest student communities, in the Amritapuri Campus. I have contributed to Mozilla(Firefox) and Tor(core). Contributing to open source software helped me communicate(IRC channels) and network with other developers in the space. The most amazing aspect of contributing is the freedom and the access to read the code written by other experts in the field.
My interest in Machine Learning was kindled by a course I took from Udacity Intro to Machine Learning. On completion of the course, I received a scholarship for the Bertelsmann Data Science Challenge Scholarship Course. Thereafter I spent some time working with data sets on Kaggle. I have also participated in the Google-India Hackathon and was a part of the winning team for the ML track. Talking about my projects, I have worked on Optical Character Recognition using Keras which implements character recognition using a CNN. I have also worked on Trash segregation using Google TensorFlow Object Detection API which classifies objects in an image as biodegradable or not using the Faster RCNN model. I have also been one of the top 14 finalist teams in the Philips Data Science Hackathon, as a part of which I have worked on Negation cue and scope detection.
One of the primary reasons why I want to be a part of this hackathon is because of the freedom that one gets to innovate and create. Solving problems with a group of people who share the same level of dedication and a tinge of insanity is what I look forward to, if I get a chance to be a part of this hackathon.