Standing on the shoulders of giants

Hey there.

My tryst with PreCog happened in my second semester at IIIT Delhi. I had been catching up with Megha Arora (PreCog Alum now MS CS Candidate at CMU) about what she had been up to, and I was pleasantly informed about this cool research group she works with. She also kept on going on and on and on about this professor who likes to call him PK. That same day, I went online and looked up PreCog and I was awestruck. My jaw dropped to the floor when I saw PK’s CV. I had to work with the coolest professor in town. I had to work with these guys!

After gathering a decent amount of exposure in doing research with the Program Analysis Group at IIIT Delhi, I applied for a PreCog Internship in the Summer of 2016. I was exhilarated with the task given to me as part of the interview process. It was a perfect fit! I have always wanted to build systems which help others in some or the other way, and my task at hand was to build a social engagement calculator for Facebook pages (apologies for the Jargon! :P). While doing this, I learned about writing a technical report as to how the system works, the perceived shortcomings of it and some exemplary statistics of popular Facebook pages. I advanced further ahead in the process and met Prateek Dewan and Anupama Aggarwal for the technical interview round. I remember being extremely overwhelmed yet anxious when I was told that I had advanced to the final round and I have a meeting with PK. I am thankful that they found me competent enough to join the group!

I have had the tremendous honor of working on 2 projects which boast of really nice disruptive technology that can change the way people use social media. One of them is in the domain of Privacy in Social Media on Mobile Platforms whereas the other project is in the domain of social computing, data science, and HCI.

Killfie was a god-send for it allowed me to explore and finalize the subfield of Computer Science that I wanted to specialize in. It was a humbling experience to work on never-done-before things aimed at saving lives, hence the term disruptive. What seemed impossible at first took a lot of toiling, mentoring from great people, and a collective effort of the team working on the Killfie project for it to come to a realization. I am proud that I was able to contribute and solve a problem faced by the youth of the world at the moment, and thankful that I was given a chance to work on the same.

Have you ever felt a warm fuzzy feeling when you look at a group of people and just absolutely adore them? That’s what PreCog was to me from the outside. Now, take the outside perspective and amp it up by a thousand factors and you have got the state inside. We all like to hang out, discuss interesting anecdotes, take advice from each other … you get the picture. The good part for me in this scenario was that I could ping any of the pillars (the Ph.D. students in PreCog) and bricks (everyone else except the Pillars) and they would be happy to guide me on the right path, be it personal or professional life.

I have had nothing but positive takeaways from my experiences at PreCog. There have been times when I have crashed the server and yet, I was just let of with a strict warning to be extremely careful with the same. I have had sleepless weeks with just me getting 2-3 hours of sound sleep per day, showing me that I can still push my limit in working. People have properly heard me out, and given me proper constructive feedback. I have been scolded and got back on track if I was deviating. I have been pushed to experiment and let my creativity run wild as well.

We are always reminded of Randy Pausch’s famous quote in the group:

The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.

I can surely say that I figured out how badly I have wanted some things in my life and how can I actually achieve those things. If somebody offered me the chance to start working with PreCog at an earlier point in my life, I would definitely take it in a heartbeat.

Below is a picture of happy PreCog-ers after having had a sumptuous lunch in the month of June of 2016: