Letter of Motivation

I am currently pursuing Integrated Masters of Technology in Mathematics and Computing from Indian Institute of
Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad. My prime area of interest lies in the field of Machine Learning and
Artificial Intelligence, in general and using Machine Learning techniques to solve real world applications by building
concrete mathematical models in particular. I am also deeply interested in working towards a general Artificial
Intelligence which is the result of my fascination with Science Fiction and my love of Mathematics.

I am largely self-taught in the fields of both computer programming and Machine Learning. To hone my coding skills,
I have been a regular participant and organiser of various coding events in online platforms like Hackerrank,
Codechef, Spoj etc. I also found the Project Euler set of questions relatively early when learning coding and they
have captured my interest ever since, appealing to my interest in mathematics and programming both. I am more
than proficient in Java programming language but I know various other languages such as C, C++ and Python. Having
a strong foundation of the basic concepts behind programming languages and various algorithmic techniques, I also
am very comfortable with understanding and working with new frameworks and technologies towards the
completion of any project I am working on.

My strong desire to pursue research and contribute to the fields which so deeply interest me is the biggest reason I
am applying for this research internship. My decision of opting for a 5-year Integrated Masters programme instead
of Bachelors programme largely due to the research opportunity it affords me. Ever since then, I have been focused
on learning the basics of Machine Learning and trying to implement the basic algorithms or use them in a real-world
application. What particularly interests me is the elegant mathematics which underpins all of Machine Learning and
how it can be manipulated to form such strong models. I successfully completed the Machine Learning course by
Andrew Ng from coursera and received a verified certificate for the same. Not only did it give me a basic
understanding of the concepts used in Machine Learning but also gave me a lot of project ideas to work on.

I implemented almost all of the algorithms which were in the coursework such as implementing a neural net for
hand written digit recognition or a spam classifier using a support vector machine in MATLAB. I was impressed by the
Keyboard Biometric Authenticator courser uses to verify identity of students during online tests, and having learned
of Anomaly Detection in the ML course by Andrew Ng, I went on to implement my own Keyboard Biometric
Authenticator using multivariate Gaussian Distribution. I built up on the work done by Eskin, Eleazar. "Anomaly
detection over noisy data using learned probability distributions." In Proceedings of the International
Conference on Machine Learning. 2000 to build a model with 87.3% accuracy.

Currently I am working on building a Photo OCR application using the TensorFlow framework and have made
significant progress. I am also following the book The Elements of Statistical Learning by Trevor Hastie, Robert
Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman to further enhance my knowledge and understanding of the concepts involved in
Machine Learning. I am also doing Stanford Universitys specialization on Probabilistic Graphical Models. Until
now, I have been trying to work and learn mostly on my own and the opportunity of working with a mentor would
give me the guidance which I had been lacking so far. My hope from this internship is that it would allow me to
better explore and understand the topics of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence which has captivated me
from childhood since I first read about JARVIS an artificially intelligent butler in the Ironman comics. Working with
a research team will also give me a taste of working on an actual research project and to contribute in my own small
way.

My biggest desire from the internship is the knowledge and the experience I will gain by working under the guidance
of a mentor so I could further refine my own interests and work towards building a career in research along the way.

Referee:
Abhisheik Kr. Singh,
Department of Applied Mathematics,
Indian Institute of Technology(ISM), Dhanbad
Email: abhi.5700@gmail.com