DEV Community: Anisha Biswal

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni: Episode 11- Research is formalized Curiosity.

Anisha Biswal — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 08:45:44 +0000

The SPECTRUM club is one of the core technical societies of the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneshwar founded in 2015 by Mr.Bikram Keshari Panda(2015 graduate), scrutinizing on the sole motive of Instrumentation and Electronics Engineering branch having a club of its own.

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The goal is to bridge the gap between the current and previous batches of our college and increase the awareness of students in terms of work that one does in college, exposure, jobs, higher studies, and of course networking. These interactive sessions are a small shot at helping college students to step out of their fishbowl life.

The first episode was first hosted on the 17th of October, 2020.

The 11th Episode was hosted on 20th March 2021 and the speaker for the afternoon was Neeraj Sharma.

Neeraj Sharma has completed his BTech in Instrumentation and Electronics from the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar in 2009. Curiosity to ask and answer unknown questions made him join the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for a Masters and Ph.D., both in the area of Speech Signal Processing. Following this, to broaden his research interests, he worked at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and studied aspects of Auditory Neuroscience. Currently, he is working as a CV Raman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, exploring speech and audio processing in humans and machines.

Mr.Neeraj Sharma made an admirable start to the evening. Firstly he made us dive into a vast acknowledgment of the term Spectrum, its meaning in the dictionary from the 1820s with good rich history, and its technicalities with a graphical representation.

Further in the session, he discussed his interests and hobbies which included playing cricket. He spoke about his fascination in the field of science and the life of scientists. He mockingly addressed that playing cricket was tougher than IIT-JEE so he pursued his dream to become a Scientist. He said us about his score in IIT-JEE and his thoughts about dropping a year but it was unadvisable, so he joined CET in 2005. He felt providential in meeting a diverse group of friends in college who belonged to different regions of the state and different parts of the country. He also thanked his teachers for being a constant support and encouragement for higher studies during his college life.

He introduced us to a very pleasing thought of his own that
"If you find yourself bounded and lack resources to accomplish goals, then your interest and freedom of mind can keep you accelerating." Freedom of Mind is the sole factor to keep on driving the vehicle called professional life.
He also thanked the library mam of his time who was supportive and made good suggestions in books. He talked about the syllabus and some good author books found there. He cleared the prestigious GATE exam with a rank of 501 and joined IISc after clearing the interview process for Masters and Ph.D.

He detailed the meaning of a degree with an absolute reference. Could be represented as the theory of career in a circle.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

He further discussed the usage of spectrum over time. He described the white light spectrum and its splitting after passing through prism, light spectrum, Maxwell Electromagnetic Spectrum.
Further, he briefed about Signal Spectrum and breaking the signal into parts.

Signals:In simple terms, a signal can be referred to as a description of how one parameter varies with another parameter. Signals can be in different forms such as Sound Signal (which include speech, animal sounds, etc) Images, Seismic signals, and so on. He primarily focused on sound signals with the idea of breaking them into parts.
But again, Why do we need to break signals into parts? This question was justified by the explanation of the Signal Processing Pipeline.
He found sound signals fascinating in several ways. He provided us with numerous examples from our daily lives such as speaking over the phone, blowing of the wind, animals making sounds, and so on to justify that sound wave gives the information of the source and enable us to understand the message. We can not only hear sound but also create sound. It's not very easy in the case of images because if we are asked to sketch an image we have seen recently we cannot do it immediately. But in the case of sound signals, we can respond, remember and create easily. He also made a great effort to let us visualize the spectrum of speech.

The main aspect of the session was his research work which indeed uplifted the levels of curiosity in the attendees.

https://coswara.iisc.ac.in/

Can a microphone hear COVID-19?
While visualizing the present Covid scenario and the usage of various temperature-controlled sensors to monitor symptoms in different places, he came up with an advanced idea of involving sound signals to detect whether a person is suffering from covid or not.
The main idea is to build a diagnostic tool based on respiratory, cough, and speech sounds.
Talking deeply about his research work he began the discussion with examples of various testing methods which are followed to identify the viral infection.These included Molecular Testing and Serological Testing.These testing methods need supervision to be accurate and cannot be carried out in bulk amounts as they are prolonged.
But, How can sound detect covid-19 while it doesn't carry any virus?
When a person is infected, there's a change in his/her speech whose biological reason is inflammation in the bronchi or blockage in the respiratory passage. This affects the general sound signal and the intensity of speech. The change in the pattern of regular speech changes the spectrum of the speech signal and thereby helps us to identify the viral infection.
If a person coughs, there's an increase in the amplitude of sound which was practically shown by our speaker during the live session.

We had a great session and we wish him all the best for future endeavors.

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni: Episode 10-A transition from Engineering to Civil Services

Anisha Biswal — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:21:18 +0000

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The first episode was first hosted on the 17th of October, 2020.

The 10th Episode was hosted on 28th February 2021 and the speaker for the afternoon was Mr.Arghya Patnaik.

Mr.Arghya Patnaik has graduated from CET in 2017, and is from the I&E branch. He is currently working at Indian Railways Traffic Service. He has secured an All India Rank of 361 in the UPSC Civil Services Examination. He formerly worked as an intern in DRDO and worked on the Agni-V Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Project. He has gone Nationals in the Indian National Academy of Engineering Essay competition and also in a case-study competition organized by IIT Kharagpur.

Mr.Arghya made a very unique way to start the session. He began with a question to the audience "Why are we here?" and turned it in a short figuration continuing with "Free advice anybody?" "The funny thing is we have to stay"(as we are here let's use this time to something useful) *

He laid down the agenda for the session by describing himself, college life, the reason to choose Civil Services, and more.
At first, he considered himself as "confused atma". While elaborating more about his college life he began with the interactions with his friends, clubs, cricket tournaments, studies, fest, bunking class, and many more. He talked about the contributions he made to the literary club of CET i.e "CETADEL".He advised us to make our college life as diverse as possible and learn from each segment.He stressed on the fact: "Soft skills are as important as hard skills" And about his future plans, he described its uncertainty by saying "Picture abhi baki h mere dost".

Why Civil Services? He answered this question distinctively by another meme. It was a dialogue between a UPSC aspirant and his friend.

Par yeah nasha kyun h?-He explains this briefly by a mix of 3 attributes.
Diversity-He explains this point by relating it to the life of the district collector.The way the entire schedule is divided and how his importance is felt in every sector.
Public Service-He shared his outlook that if he could help someone to get their aadhar done, or getting ration done or save someone from getting their chain snatched then that's quite good and he would like to join civil service.
Perks and Privileges-He briefed about the accommodation facilities, salary, standard living, comfortable and satisfactory life with great pride and recognition.
He also shared a glimpse of some civil servants in action such as Kiran Bedi, Ananya Das, and more.

Engineering and Civil Services-A love affair better than twilight?

He shared an anecdote from his life. His batch at Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie consists of 450+ engineers out of a total batch size of 700+.This enlightened the fact that engineers are excelling in the Civil Service sector.
He also presented many articles depicting the success ratio of the engineers.
Moreover, he reminded us again of all the UPSC aspirants from our college who have successfully established themselves as reputed officers and we cant be much prouder.

He shared some major mantras to crack CSE from his life. These were not only for CSE but also for all spheres of life.

Understanding yourself- Mr.Arghya believes that identifying our own strengths and weaknesses and then working on them makes us win the very first phase of the battle. He advises us to be our own doctor, diagnose ourselves well and choose the right path. He recommends us not be trapped under peer pressure and parental pressure. He gave the example of an Indian Cricketer VVS Laxman where his father suggested him to excel in whatever field he chooses. He had biology in his 12th and could have chosen medical stream, but he followed his dreams and the rest is history.

Perseverence- There's no shortcut to hard work. We have to brush up on all our skills to reach our goals.

Setting Targets- He shared one of his personal mantra that he follows in his life. "Drift is the nemesis of success". As long as we keep drifting we cannot reach anywhere. We have to make our own choices and complete our life exercises soon. He advised us to set long-term, mid-term, and short-term goals wisely and work on that.

Consistency- He says consistency is the key to all life goals. He gave a beautiful comparison between Haile Gebrselassie and Usain Bolt. Haile Gebrselassie is a world champion in marathons and Usain Bolt is a short-distance sprinter. He told us that most tests in life require us to be as consistent as a marathon runner and not just a sprinter.

The end of the session was a question-answer round. All our attendees asked their queries about UPSC, Civil services Examinations, and other related questions.

We got to know a different perspective towards life, career, and our goals in just an hour.
We wish him all the best for the future!

Chit-Chat with Alumni Episode-9

Anisha Biswal — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 06:56:58 +0000

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The first episode was first hosted on the 17th of October, 2020.

The 9th Episode was hosted on 14th February 2021 and the speaker for the afternoon was Dr.Dharanidhar Dang.

Dr.Dharanidhar Dang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Boolean Lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where he works with Prof.Debashis Sahoo. His research is focused on designing next-generation computing systems for exascale computing tasks such as Cancer prognosis. He has published 20+ papers in notable venues such as IEEE TPDS, ACM DAC, ACM GLSVLSI, IEEE ICCD, and etc. Dr.Dang is an AAI fellow, past Teaching Fellow, and a member of IEEE and ACM. Prior to joining UCSD, he completed his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering under Prof. Rabi Mahapatra from Texas A&M University in 2018. He has won several prestigious national/international competitions such as Intel Embedded Challenge, Schneider Innovation Challenge, and Intel Youth Enterprise. Dr.Dang’s research interests include silicon photonics, neuromorphic computing, computer architecture, network-on-chip, and deep learning, and bioinformatics. Apart from academics, Dr.Dang spends his time dancing, cricket, cooking, and traveling.

In this session, Dr.Dharanidhar discussed Neuromorphic Computing which implements aspects of biological neural networks as analog or digital copies on electronic circuits, and gave a brief insight of Deep Learning with its diversification.

He also highlighted the fact that by 2022 market value of Deep Learning can cross 100 billion dollars and more.

He briefed his research on Deep Learning by explaining the actual scenario of computer performance. He explained this as:
A computer has memory and processor and we want to analyze its performance. But the Deep Learning process is very fast while memory is tiny/low. We are designing an extra fast processor but we don't have a fast memory. Also, there are tons of layers and the CPU interacts with memory in every cycle which makes the task cumbersome. The entire discussion was on reducing the gap of Memory-Processor.

There has been a lot of improvement in the transistor size nowadays. We can find multiple transistors in a single chip. But the problem of adding so many transistors in a single chip is leakage power(which is more). Active power is the power used to do computing. But here we are trying to show the world an extremely powerful chip with a lot of transistors that consume more power. This contradicts our goal, thus we have to think beyond C-mos.

Next Dr.Dharanidhar explained the process of neuromorphic computing and talked about VLSI systems containing analog circuits mimicking human brain behavior. He compared the difference between how a human brain processes data compared to circuit processing. A human brain is able to process way more amount of information consuming very less amount of power, which is way lesser than how a CPU processes data.

So he came up with the idea of Memristor , which is fast and energy-efficient and does in-memory computing. Basically, he tried to merge the power of data storage and processing into a single chip, i.e., memory and process together, to do very fast in-memory computing, consuming comparatively very lesser power than our today's state-of-the-art mechanisms.

He adapted the technology of Silicon Photonics for the same. Silicon photonics is an evolving technology in which data is transferred among computer chips by optical rays. This enables the data to travel much faster and in more volume than electrical conductors, which is how data is transferred in today's world (CPU routing).

Silicon photonic systems consume 6 times lesser energy and are 12 times faster compared to today's electrical interconnection data transfer units. Then he explained how silicon photonic architecture works and how he implements the concept of deep learning to make the chips more power-efficient to make them consume as much power as required, and not more.

Towards the end of the session, he shared glimpses of his journey so far. Dr.Dharanidhar belonged to a village named "Dangpali" , which is situated on the banks of river Mahanadi, in Bargarh district of Odisha. The village "Dangpali" was named after his great grandfather who was a renowned person in their village. He has done his B.Tech from College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneshwar from 2006 to 2010. After passing out from college he was involved in his research at Intel, Bangalore(2011-2012). He then completed his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University (2012-2018). He is currently doing his post-doctorate at the Boolean Lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

He described his fad for Cricket and is known to be a great bowler. He shocked us with his dancing moves. He also added that he has been dancing from his childhood and assured us once he comes down to India he will shock us with his research, his journey, and his moves.

Many attendees got clarified about publishing a research paper, studying abroad, and cracking GRE exam.
We learned a lot from his session and wish him all the best for future endeavors.