I believe that a person remains a student all his/her life. Each person is unique. Each person has to offer something new, something that we can learn. What I am today is largely because of the people who touched my life, most of them being my teachers from previous academic institutions.I completed my schooling from Paranjape Vidyalaya, a small school in Mumbai, that still does not have a web site. It was this school that transformed a brat like me into a sensitive person. It was here that I participated in my first play, first dance, first elocution competition, first science exhibition and also the first nation-wide scholarship exam. This school aroused in me an interest in mathematics and sciences as well as the love for social and cultural activities. I then entered the Sardar Patel Institute of Technology for a Bachelors degree in Information Technology. I wrote my first "Hello World" program there :)
But perhaps what I am today is largely because of the Computer Science department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India. I received a Master of Technology degree from IIT Bombay. At IIT, I got to interact with brilliant students and faculty members. I learned a lot not only academically, but also otherwise. I learned how to deal with time and stress management issues. Learned the confidence to try out anything out of the ordinary. IIT does make students ready to take on the world. It also gave me a vision and an idea of what I want to do with my life.
As part of my Masters thesis at IIT, I worked on automatically retrieving similar images based on the actual content of the images. (Check out this Google Video to understand the process of image retrieval.) The problem of retrieval was pretty exciting because I could relate it to the next generation image search mechanism for giants like Google, Yahoo, etc. and also because it is a boon for the Internet users. This is what also brings me to the IST at Penn State. My adviser, James Wang, is a great researcher in the field of multimedia analysis. With his guidance I want to be able to understand the syntactic and semantic nature of images and videos. Fingers crossed :)
The I in Academics continues to meet new teachers and learn from them. Amen!
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