Re: HELP NEEDED! Please review my Master Statement of Purpose
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06 Oct 2018, 12:12
Hi I'm currently doing my undergrad in electronics and telecommunication engineering and am planning to apple for ms in ECE. Here is my SOP, it would be of great help if you could review my sop. Posting it here -Two years ago, when I was performing and writing streetplays to spread awareness about issues like eve-teasing, women’s rights, menstruation hygiene and marital rape, what really bothered me was that there was little I could do to actually provide logical solutions to these issues. Further, when we conducted a survey for women, I realized that only 46 out of the 1256 subjects owned a women safety device. So, I further added a few more questions to the survey and circulated it. What I analysed was that the main reason for their loss in confidence in such devices was the fact that these devices were not user friendly and they were not sure if they will able to activate it at the right time. By now, all I knew was that I had to make a device which overcome these drawbacks, but there was a lot to learn before I could actually dive in.
The first step towards making the device was gaining in-depth knowledge of Machine learning and IOT - the technologies that would form the backbone of my product. I took up a course in IOT from coursera, where I learnt hands on programing of the Arduino and Raspberry pie. While coding the Raspberry pie using python, I got acquainted to the world of coding. Also, I realized that to master any technology, I needed to first gain proficiency in data-structures and algorithms. So, I also took courses in data-structures and algorithms from coursera.
In addition to women safety, another grave concern is healthcare for women. In the recent times, the cases of women suffering from heart attack, especially pregnant women has been on a rise. As per the statistics, it is the cause of death in one out of every three women. This inspired me to make a “heart disease risk predictor” using IOT and machine learning. This project made its way to the top three projects from the 265 projects presented at a departmental competition. As per the recent the studies conducted by World Health Organization, 90 percent of deaths due to cervical cancer occurred in under-developed countries. This was the motivation behind writing a survey paper on cervical cancer prediction using machine learning.
Along with advancement in technology another factor that helps to increase usability of a product is its user interface. No Matter how good your product is, for the product to reach the right audience it should be user-friendly. Chatbots is one such technology that is revolutionizing the user experience. To understand the eccentricities involved in the making of a chatbot, I took up an internship with “ AppiVa Software Pvt Ltd ” as a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Intern. This internship helped me learn how to deal with data that is uncertain in nature, a skill which I used further to deal with medical data also.
In the summer of 2018, I decided to take the knowledge I acquired in NLP forward by working with “Smart Medic”. My work as the “Machine Learning Intern” was to develop an automated system to classify the various queries received into their respective specialities. The main challenge I faced was that along with english the queries received were 6 other languages. Thus, after going through the research carried out in multilingual natural language processing, I came to the conclusion that I will have to create my own dataset using past records from the server and train a neural networks model to perform the classification. The was a long process but the results were promising, and an accuracy of 98.86 percent was achieved.
In the midst of all this, I also managed to find time to pursue my passion for teaching through “IcodeIcreate - a Seek2Share initiative”. I am a part of the founding team and CTO of this program that aims at getting students from grade 7 to grade 10 to improve their logical skills and put their creativity into action using coding. Sharing my knowledge of programming with these young minds gave me an immense sense of fulfillment.
After gaining all the skills required to build the women’s safety device, it was not time to bring the plan into action. Thus, I decided to take this as my final year project. Further, on researching a realised that so that the device does not send any false alarms, the activation of these devices could not be kept very user friendly. I then began to join the dots and realized that I could increase the reliability of the band if the device adjusts its activation system based on the crime rate of its present location. Machine learning can be used to classify the areas based on their crime rates. The device can be smarter if it performs intelligent data analysis. That is if the devices collects data at all times and act upon only the relevant information. The processing of this kind of systems has been survey by Prof. Sarah Ostadabbas in her IEEE publication, and I have got in touch with her for guidance regarding the same.
Northeastern University’s programe in electronics and computer engineering offers a specialization in machine learning and computer vision, thus being a perfect fit for my academic interests and career aspirations. In addition, the biomedical research and collaborations with the Boston-area medical community carried out by the ECE faculty is of great interest to me. I would like to be a part of the work being done on disease detection and tracking and brain-computer interface.
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