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title: "Interview with google" |
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draft: true |
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type: "post" |
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--- |
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- Where were you born? Were you exposed to computer science growing up? |
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Any interesting facts about how technology (or lack thereof) led you to |
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want to want to become a developer? |
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I was born in New Delhi, India. I was formally exposed to basic computer usage as part of the curriculum at my school and to computer science only in High School after I chose it as an elective within the Science Stream. I had access to a shared computer at home but I got a personal computer only in middle school thanks to my parents when they saw my desire to program. Although, my major interaction was when I used to hangout at my Mother's University and Tuition center where she used to teach after hours while she used to teach students there. There was a typist hired by the tuition center with whom I used to sit and see him type and use basic Macros on Microsoft Excel. This was one of my starting steps to programming. Also, thanks to my school, I got to visit inter-school programming competitions in the New Delhi area where I won a few awards and that motivated me further to keep making small projects now and then and even now as I have started a software engineering intern role at Dell EMC technologies. |
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- I hear you're self taught (bravo!!) How did you learn? |
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One anecdote I remember is me trying to grasp recursion, which was fascinating to me back then in middle school and in those days access to Internet in India was very limited so we used to rely on books. I had access to a book at my school level but there was little to no mention of complicated topics such as those which I was trying to learn. I was writing Visual Basic code back then. So I pursued my teacher to teach me and she suggested a book that is used at the High School level which had these concepts. I then moved on further in middle school itself to learn C/C++ and object oriented programming. By the time I was in high school I made my own Brick Breaker clone in C++ without the help of the internet by just reading the documentation in the IDE. Here is the link to it: https://github.com/rhnvrm/brick_game |
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The PDF (https://github.com/rhnvrm/brick_game/blob/master/BRICK%20GAME%20MANUAL.pdf) has a few screenshots. |
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What inspired |
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you to participate in the Hackathon where you made "Foodify" and what made |
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you interested in that program and nutritional information of food? What is |
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your ultimate goal with Foodify? |
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I was invited to participate in the hackathon at NSIT, a college in New Delhi area, and there I teamed up with a senior from my university and two friends from another university. We brainstormed for an hour to solve the pain any person who tries to log their calories faces. There isn't any simple way that one can log what amount of calories he has consumed. So, we decided to find out solutions and API we could use to resolve these issues. We ended up trying to integrate a few of the APIs that would enable us to fix this issue. We found an ML based API that can guess the food item from the snap, another API that tells the nutritional values of that item and finally an API that gives recipes based on the specified food items (to enable suggesting recipes based upon your fridge's content and daily calorie limit left) |
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- Can you tell me a little more about Tensorflow and the program that |
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allows a person to categorize galaxy shapes? |
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I wrote a program that guesses the type of the galaxy from the image provided. It uses tensorflow's transfer learning and I was responsible to retrain the model on a dataset made by me. This was written as a solution for a challenge posted on a YouTube series by Siraj Raval where the challenge and intention was to utilize transfer learning to create a tool which can be used by scientists to help them in the process of labeling the galaxies. |
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- What does the future hold for you? Where do you see yourself in 5, 10 |
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years? |
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I am currently in the final semester of my undergraduate studies and have currently moved from my home town to the silicon valley of India, that is Bangalore. Here, I am interning with Dell EMC and Pivotal Labs, and writing my undergraduate thesis under the guidance of a mentor from the same organization and a referee from my university. After the internship I aim to join a solid product based company. In 5 years, I see myself in the role of a solid engineer and an open source contributor to multiple communities. I aim to be a well respected member who is known for sharing knowledge and empowering other individuals. Where as 10 years down the lane, I wish to be someone who has impacted the lives of millions of people through the code I would have had a hand in writing. |
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- Aside from the hackathon, were there any use cases for Foodify? We'd |
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love to see/learn about any success stories someone has had using the app! |
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Well, aside from success at the hackathon, we got a lot of applause within the community at our university where we distributed the app among our friends until the API keys and licenses lasted. Afterwards, due to the cost of maintaining and burden of education of the team members, we did not get to proceed further with the app. |
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- How exactly do you use machine learning? |
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Although, here we did not use machine learning directly, we used vision API that were powered by Machine Learning that helped us to make a Proof of Concept that would help us solve a genuine problem that is faced by calorie conscious people. |
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- Why did you decide to use tensor flow? Is it because of its |
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accessibility? |
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I have used tensorflow in other projects which I used for doing projects in various other domains. I helped a professor to improve the plotting time of a complicated 3D plot by using machine learning as a general function approximator for a computationally intensive task which helped him visualize the relationships faster. I also used it while solving the projects in my Udacity Machine Learning nanodegree where I also made a capstone project which guesses the next 5 destinations an individual might end up visiting based upon his actions recorded on AirBNB. Another recent project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnUbnOvWobI |
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