Here is a non-exhaustive list of my non-research experiences. These experiences have given me new perspectives in my area of interest (viz. Communication Theory and Systems), and also have prevented me from overfitting to just one area :’)

  • IIT-B Mars Rover Project
    Student Technical Team, Faculty Advisor: Prof. PJ Guruprasad
    I worked with the IIT-B Mars Rover team for a fair share of my undergraduate life. We were humbled to represented India at the intl. robotics competition URC-2018. I joined the team during my sophomore year, working with the wireless communications subdivision (’15-’16), and subsequently, controls and GUI subdivisions (’16-’17). Working with multiple subsystems helped me serve as the "Team Head, Electronics and Software" (’17-’18). During my final year, I served as the “Team Mentor”('19-Present), a role which I assume even now :)

    My main technical contributions were setting up & and interfacing a 5.6 GHz wireless link from the rover to the base station, writing the control systems for the steer & robotic arm, developing an android app to give GPS & IMU readings from an onboard smartphone and spearheading the shift of complete rover software written previously to ROS

    I also got a chance to present the project to the PM of India, Mr. Narendra Modi in an RnD exhibition (Aug'18), and was awarded “Institute Technical Citation” for my technical contributions in the project

  • Inter IIT Tech Meet 2017
    Soldier Support Team
    Part of the contingent from IIT-B to take part in the "Soldier Support Task" in Inter IIT-Tech Meet 2017. The tasks included wireless localization in a P2P network, incorporating bio-sensors in soldier suits, Gesture recognition via hand signals, and a secure long distance wireless video link, to upgrade the modern soldier's armoury. The problem statement was designed by people from DRDO, and it was really fun to work with the problem statement. We concoted a new algorithm for wireless localization in a P2P netowrk, which I further pursued as a research projetc in the upcoming semester, and tried our hands at designing a video link upon the Ettus USRPs.

    Although we didn't end up winning a medal, it was a great experience. Coincidentally, two people who participated in the same tech meet (Raghav and Aman), are also my labmates at UCSD! The world is indeed a small place, and tech meets like these facilitate a lot of information exchange!

  • Software Engineering Internship, Microsoft IDC-SO, Hyderabad, India (Summers 2016)
    Broad Project Title: Distributed Graph DB and Graph Analytics
    During Summers 2016 (May'16-Jul'16), I worked with the Business Intelligence team at Microsoft IDC-SO, Hyderabad. My project revolved around exploring NoSQL Graph Databases, and if it could potentially help the team in offering smart analytics.

    As part of my project I modeled the original data which was stored in RDBMS as a Graph, incorporating ACID properties, causality of updates and minimization of storage required. Implemented a custom recommendation algorithm to utiliz. I also received a PPO for my project work, alongwith a certification on using "Distributed Computing Frameworks with Azure".

  • I pursue making memes as a hobby :P and have been a regular content contributor to meme pages and groups like, `High Impact PhD Memes' and `ML memes for convolutional teens'.