Achievements

Academic achievements

• University of California, San Diego
  M.S in Computer Science and Engineering (In Progress)
• National Institute of Technology Karnataka(NITK), Surathkal
  B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering. GPA: 9.26/10.0
• Engineering entrance exams
  1. Consortium Of Medical Dental and Engineering colleges of Karnataka (COMDEK) 2005
     Conducted by the management of various private colleges in Karnataka state.
     State Rank: 6 out of 20,995 students
     
  2. Karnataka Common Entrance Test (CET) 2005
     Conducted by the state government for admission to almost all colleges in Karnataka state.
     State Rank: 280 out of 87,020 students
  3. All India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) 2005
     Conducted by the Central Board for Secondary Education, New Delhi (CBSE) for admission to National Institutes of Technology and other deemed colleges
     State Rank: 18
     National Rank: 427 out of 3,97,178 students
  4. Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Exam (IIT-JEE), 2005
     Conducted by the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) for admission to their degree program
     Screening exam - National Rank - 723 out of 1,71,118 students
     Main exam - National Rank - 2893 out of 15,319 students
• Fellowships/Internships
  1. Software Engineering Intern, Apple Inc. Cupertino, (summer 2010)
     on computer vision and machine learning based solutions.
  2. Research Intern, Microsoft Research India, (summer 2009)
     under Dr. Amitav Das on speech, speaker & character recognition and face-image based user authentication.
  3. Summer Research Fellowship, Indian Academy of Science (summer 2008)
     under Prof. L M Patnaik in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on Epileptic EEG Detection using machine learning
  
  Was also selected for
  1. Summer Research Fellowship, Indian Academy of Science, New Delhi (summer 2009)
     under Prof. L M Patnaik, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
     One among 70 students selected in the engineering stream across India
  2. Visiting Student's Research Prog., Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai (summer 2009)
     under Prof. Samudravijaya in the School of Technology and Computer Science
     One among 6 students selected in the engineering stream across India
• Scholarships
  1. National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) scholarship (2003-2009), with 12th rank in state level.
  2. Institute merit scholarship, NITK Surathkal (2005-2009)
• Schooling
  
  1. XII Grade Exam, 2005 (Equivalent to High School Senior)
     All India Senior Secondary Certificate Examination. Conducted by Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), New Delhi
     Aggregate : 94.4% (Physics: 99%, Mathematics: 99%, Computer Science: 96%)
     Certificate of merit in Physics by CBSE, for being in the top 0.1% of candidates across India
     Certificate of merit in Mathematics and Physics - highest score among all CBSE schools in Bangalore
  2. X Grade Exam 2003 (Eqivalent to High School Sophomore)
     Indian Certificate of Secondary Education. Conducted by Council for the Indian School Certificate Examination, New Delhi
     Aggregate: 90.5%
     
  
  Consistently ranked within the top 4 students of the class from grades 1 to 12, awarded certificates for the same.
• Silver Merit Certificate (top 10% of all candidates), Second National Cyber Olympiad, 2003
• Selected for Indian National Mathematics Olympiad 2005.
• National Rank 38 (2004) & Rank 54 (2005), National Level Science Talent Search Examination.

Non-academic achievements

ENGINEER
The annual technical-festival of NITK Surathkal - believed to be the third largest in Asia

• 2006
  
  1. 2nd prize in Rectify - a C++ debugging contest.
  2. Appreciation prize in Enigma - a turing machine designing contest
• 2007
  
  1. 1st prize in Mushaca. Developed an OPEN-GL based program to utilize the three degrees of freedom offered by the Mushaca mouse (designed by Prof. Timothy Poston, NIAS, Bangalore) to handle manipulation of 3 dimensional objects.
  2. 1st prize in Foxhunt. Built a short-wave radio antenna and used it to track down a "fox" - a radio transmitter placed discretely on the college campus.
  3. Member of the Computer-Science events organizing committee. Helped conduct 4 events
• 2008
  
  1. Member of the executive Office committee. Helped in the general planning, logistics and conduction of a few events
  2. Finalist in Rectify - C++ debugging contest
• 2009
  
  1. As Events Co-ordinator, was part of a 12 member ENGINEER core committee directly responsible for the fest.
  2. Oversaw all 40 events in various disciplines. Was responsible for ensuring that problem statements were of a high standard.
  3. Shared responsibility for schedules, logistics and budget for all events.
  4. Guided the design of a problem statement for Automata - an autonomous robot building contest.
  5. Initiated the idea for a new event CodeRBot - where participants had to code a robot's micro-controller to complete a certain task
  6. Conceptualized, designed and conducted AlphaVision - a web-cam image based character recognition contest on MATLAB. Programmed the judge in C# .NET and also wrote MATLAB APIs to provide an interface for participants. The event was sponsored by The Mathworks
  7. Built a MATLAB distributed judge server for evaluating submissions in Simplicity - an online international MATLAB programming contest.

Robotics Club, NITK Surathkal

• Executive member of the club from 2006-2009
• Chairman and Convenor for the year 2008-2009
• Involved in the design of all-terrain search and resume bots.
• Built an autonomous line-following robot for Pragyan - National Institute of Technology, Trichy's annual technical festival in 2007.
• Won an event Gridlocks in NITK Surathkal. The event involved building an autonomous line-following maze solving robot.
• As part of the club activities, oversaw the conduction of workshops on Micro-controllers, motors, chassis and sensors - each had around 100 participants

Indian Society for Technical Education, NITK Students' Chapter

• Executive member of the club from 2006-2009
• Secretary of the club for the year 2008-2009.
• Conducted LaTeX & C programming workshops with 50 participants each including students pursuing their Masters and PhD
• Conducted Matlab workshop (30 participants) and C# .NET workshop (75 participants)
• Hosted "War Of The Branches" two years in a row. The event was a friendly debate in which students from different branches of engineering tried to prove that their branch was the best. Was part of a team that had won the event during my first-year of under-graduation.
• Conducted and supervised debates and elocutions

Web-enthusiasts club, NITK Surathkal

• Executive member of the club from 2006-2009
• Gave a presentation on Machine Learning and demonstrated the working of Neural Networks to students from 1st and 2nd year of B.Tech - to spread the excitement of this field
• Involved in a Linux install-fest as part of the activites for Software Freedom Day (19th Sept. 2008). The initiative saw around 200 Linux installations on laptops and desktops across the campus.
• Involved in planning and conducting an online puzzle hunt in 2007

Stargazing Club, NITK Surathkal

• Executive member of the club from 2006-2009
• Technical coordinator for the year 2008-2009
• Involved in four bi-annual workshops on basic astronomy for high school students. Specifically, delivered a lecture on the Solar System in one such workshop.
• Designed the present club logo in 2006.

Other activities

• Participated in various quiz and debate competitions in school and in college. Was the school debater. Won many inter-school competitions. Notably, won second place in the Frank Anthony Memorial All India Inter-School Debate Competition, Junior Group.
• Won several programming and debugging contests in 11th, 12th grades and in under-grad college.
• Placement co-ordinator of Electronics and Communication Branch for the year 2008-2009. Was an interface between students and companies visiting NITK for recruitment.
• Selected during campus recruitments by CISCO Systems, Bangalore. Chose to pursue my Masters in UCSD and hence was unable to join the company.