Statement of Purpose

Video games usually are a crucial part of every child's life, and my childhood was no different.
However, reaching a certain age, the question of how do I win transformed into how it works. The
famous Mario moving and jumping on my command bewildered me and made me curious about its
working. In search of a few answers, I used to unscrew gadgets to try and understand the underlying
magic, but it resulted in a piece of damaged equipment with a lot of scolding from my parents. My
high school finally answered my questions, and the curiosity of getting more in-depth explanations
paved the way to choose Computer Science in my 11th grade and for my undergraduate studies at
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT).
The curriculum at DA-IICT helped me build a solid foundation by exposing me to a variety of
subjects and programming languages. I soon started looking for technologies where I could use this
knowledge to develop something more useful for a person or a community. In a team of four, we
participated in an Appathon organized by IEEE-WIE. Coming from a farmer's family and
understanding the void between technology and an Indian farmer, we developed a platform that
addresses this gap. Even though Agriculture is a major contributor to the GDP of India, around 18%,
information asymmetry of subsidies and market prices for crops exploit farmers, and most of the
farmers in India remain in debt for generations. In this competition, we developed an Android mobile
application that helps farmers keep track of different subsidies, market prices, electricity timings, etc.
and manage their work efficiently. The team secured the first rank in this competition and was
rewarded with an amount of INR 15,000.
Assimilating knowledge from multiple domains, I learned about Arduino as a part of the
curriculum, and developed a prototype suitcase that can be opened and closed wirelessly using a
phone. Impressed by my work, Prof. Rutu Parekh encouraged me to develop a smart bag, sponsored
by the State Government of Gujarat under SSIP program, that helps a person to track his bag anywhere
in the world along with other options of weighing, opening, and closing of the bag with a developed
Android Application. Furthermore, under her Analog Circuits course, I worked as a Teaching
Assistant where I helped students in simulating circuits in LTSpice and resolved their doubts in the
laboratory sessions, which in turn helped me expand my knowledge base in the subject.
My junior year at DA-IICT paced up my knowledge with challenging projects. My previous
experience in the agriculture domain was restricted to developing just a front-end interface, however,
I had a strong desire to build an end to end system for the upliftment of farmers in India. To create
such a real-life implementation, there was a need to design and develop the database from scratch and
in the project of the Farmer Agriculture Record Management, I worked on creating the same in
PostgreSQL. This database design captured all the relevant information related to Agriculture,
Government Subsidies, Market Prices and productivity on a farm, along with the costs and profits.
Delving into the Internet of Things, in a group of four, we worked on two projects. The first was a
Pothole detection system, which captures data of the road conditions in the form of accelerometer
reading and then uses that data to model the Support Vector Machine algorithm which classifies road
as good or bad. The result produced is plotted in the form of location of potholes on a map in a web
application. This project not only taught me to work with Machine Learning algorithms, but it also
taught me to collect and analyze the data in the real world and then select a learning model accordingly.
The second project was a poultry farm system, where I developed a 5x5 feet arrangement, which
automatically feeds food and water to the birds on a timely basis, as well as monitors and maintains
the environmental conditions of the surrounding area using different sensors.
 Along with my academics, I actively participated in extracurricular activities for my all-round
growth. Serving as a member of the Academic Committee, I looked after the issues faced by students
and resolved the same giving my best efforts. My work for the committee allowed me to become the
Deputy Convener of the committee. Additionally, I was a member of the Research club at my college.
We as a club worked to create a research environment at the institute by conducting different sessions
on new technologies. I was also a speaker in a session on the topic “IOT with Machine Learning”.
As a part of my summer research internship, I worked on Convolutional Neural Network and
designed and developed an architecture, which detects plant diseases from the captured images and
suggests the required pesticides. In India, there are many farmers, who are not aware of plant diseases
and spray pesticides illogically, and such a model when brought in to use practically would act as a
boon for them. In my final year, I undertook a project that assists hearing and speech impaired people
to communicate with other people using Mobile App that classifies gestures based on data received
from a developed glove. The noteworthy part of this project is 1D-CNN and MLP trained models are
deployed locally in Android App thus avoiding network calls to the server for prediction. The models
achieved accuracy of 98.06% and 98.72% on 6 dynamic and 9 static gesture classes respectively. This
work on dynamic gestures is accepted and presented at IEEE ICOEI-2020 conference and is further
published in its proceedings.
I am currently working as a software developer in fintech at The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation (HSBC) Technology India. Here, I am developing an automated tool in Nodejs to publish
System API metadata on Anypoint Exchange Portal for socialization purpose. This tool helps
developers bypass manual effort required for creating metadata file for APIs and triggering the Jenkins
pipeline for CI/CD. My curiosity and my desire to give society something useful has helped me to
successfully undertake many of the described projects. My previous role as teaching assistant in
Database Systems and Analog Circuits encourages me further to contribute in academia. I wish to
achieve my ambition to work on the latest technologies and find innovative solutions to challenging
problems, and this has sparked a motivation for doing a Master's course. The Master of Engineering
in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carleton University is imperative to accomplish my goal.
Studying at Carleton University would mean prospects to study under the guidance of world-
renowned faculty in academia as well as industry professionals. My interest in working on mobile and
ubiquitous sensing and applying Machine Learning techniques on that data resonates with the research
work of Prof. Thomas Kunz and Prof. Mohamed Ibnkahla. Moreover, if given an opportunity to work
in Sensor Systems and The Internet of Things Lab, it will complement my theoretical understanding
by providing exposure to cutting edge technologies and solutions like sWall for IOT data visualization,
IOT enabled e-health, etc. Learning about integrated databases under Prof. Samuel Ajila would
advance my knowledge about databases and help undertake challenging projects in this domain.
Moreover, I am particularly looking forward to some courses such as Mobile Computing and Object
Oriented Design of Real-Time and Distributed Systems. Completing my Master’s degree from
Carleton University, would provide me with numerous opportunities to help me augment my
knowledge base along with other life skills as well.