Inclinedtowards the field of education from a very early age, I involved myself inseveral edifying endeavors. Continuing on the same lines, I carried outsignificant research work in educational technology during my undergrad and itwas during this time that my interest in human-computer interaction gainedmomentum. I was fascinated by the way technology can be leveraged and employedto build systems which will foster and facilitate better and easier interactionbetween humans and computers. I realized that I particularly liked designingand developing such systems and in pursuit of my interests, I am applying for agraduate program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in Computer Sciencewith an intended research focus on human-computer interaction.

  Speakingof my undergrad experiences, I was familiarized to the entire gamut of coursespertaining to the field of Computer Science. Nurturing my passion for research,I did a project, JFLAP Extensions forInstructors and Students in the second year. In a three-member team, Iworked to improve upon an earlier extension of specifying the correctness ofautomata construction problem programmatically. In India, students who strugglewith FLA courses are likely to be less skillful programmers as they haverelatively poor mathematical abilities. I devised a simple and intuitive meanswhich can be used to specify correctness of automata construction problem andprovisioned a mechanism to test their automaton against the automaton defined usingthis new user interface. We also generated a log file containing details aboutthe interactions made by students while constructing the automata, which wouldhelp instructors analyze the problems faced by students. We co-authored a paperon this project and it was accepted and presented at The 6th IEEE InternationalConference on Technology for Education, 2014, held in Amritapuri, India. Thesame year, during my summer break, I interned at the Center for Computer Visionand Image Processing, PESIT and worked on FeatureExtraction from Retinal Fundus Images.

I teamed up with two colleagues andvisited Narayana Nethralaya, a famous eye hospital in Bangalore, to understandtools which, if developed, can help doctors diagnose diseases quickly. Wedeveloped a tool to extract features from retinal fundus images and provided itto the ophthalmologists for further analysis. OpenCV libraries with C++interface were used to implement algorithms like Canny Edge to detect bloodvessels and histogram-based segmentation to extract hard exudates. Thepassion towards educational technology led me to undertake a project on’Photocasting’ as my undergraduate thesis project. I was very keen onimplementing my learning from the previous exposure to Image Processing techniquesand with this in mind, I teamed up with two of my peers to devise a noveltechnique that could reduce the cost of creating and sharing digital lecturenotes by the Instructor.

We implemented this prototyping technique on Androidplatform; the app for instructors had the interface to generate JSON file whichcontained the details of the animation speed of text in the image such that itmatches with the explanation in the audio. I developed the app for studentswhich parses the JSON file and animates the handwriting and plays audio. I usedOpenCV libraries for Android to recognize and animate the text in the image.This technique would greatly reduce the cost of sharing digital lecturematerials (mainly data transfer costs) with an additional modest effort by theInstructor. The size of the three files (photocast) together would be about 1%of the size of the video of comparable quality.

A paper was accepted and presentedon this project titled Photocasting: ALow-Cost Technique to Create and Disseminate Digital Lecture Notes at the 24thInternational Conference on Computers in Education,2016 Mumbai, India. Heedingto my predilection to understand various aspects of Computer Science, I workedon several projects during my undergrad. I worked on Adding Dynamic Headers to Curl Loader, an open-source tool (writtenin C language) used to simulate application load and behavior of HTTP/HTTPS andFTP/FTPS clients. Dynamic headers, unique to every client, are read from a textfile defined by the user.

I added a function to the source code of Curl loaderto add these header values at runtime to every request sent. Prodded on togreater and industrial-based learning, I also interned at Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd,Bangalore during which, I contributed to the Business Intelligence Team.

Ienhanced features of User Interface screens for the Business Intelligence Appsusing Angular JS. I learned to write quality code adhering to corporatestandards.  Apartfrom pursuing my academic interests, I was actively involved in various otheractivities. I organized an event ‘Mathe-maniac’ in the science fest ‘Dunamis’,organized by PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore. This was a Mathematicstalent hunt event which attracted around 150 participants from entire college.

 Successfullygraduating with my Bachelor’s degree, I started my career at Tesco Bengaluru , an offshoredevelopment center for Tesco Worldwide. As a part of the Retail DemandForecasting team, which develops solutions for ensuring better availability ofproducts in Tesco stores and reduce wastage, I develop RESTful web services inJava using Drop Wizard and Hibernate Framework for the application which isused to plan the events like Christmas or Halloween. It requires expertise inJava performance tuning as we handle a huge amount of data (GBS) to generateforecast values for all products sold in around 3000 Tesco stores. I alsodeveloped user interface screens using angular JS framework.

 Havinghad an assortment of experiences in various fields of Computer Science, I wouldlike to explore interdisciplinary areas connecting human-computer interactionwith computer vision, artificial intelligence. A burning desire to acquiregreater, more advanced academic training in these fields motivates me to pursuegraduate studies. I envision myself as a successful and dedicated researcher inthe field of computer science be it academia or industry. I believe a graduateprogram would help me gain the right technical skills to accomplish my careergoals. I also am confident that my appetite for gaining knowledge will help meassimilate more skills as I assume and carry out bigger responsibilities.  Ibelieve a Master’s program in Computer Science at University of Michigan, AnnArbor would provide me a favorable environment which would help me learn.

Iwould like to build user-centered systems using appropriate technology. Ibelieve my research interests are in-line with the research carried out at InteractiveSystems Laboratory. I would like to learn from Professors like Prof. Elliot Soloway andProf. Jeffrey S Ringenberg and the teams working undertheir guidance. I would like to contribute to research in human-computerinteraction.

I take particular interest in the research carried out in the areaof Mobile Learning at the Interactive Systems Laboratory as I have previousexperience in educational technology.  Iam confident that I will meet the best Professors and Researchers at Universityof Michigan who will help me acuminate my skills and shape my future. Istrongly believe that a graduate program at University of Michigan would be anexcellent place to accomplish my academic and research goals.

I look forward toan exhilarating and enriching academic life at University of Michigan.