The Anatomy of a Precog Internship!

It all began in September 2016 when I saw a big informative picture (image below) in my Facebook feed. In big bold blue letters the picture said “Internship 2017” with Precog’s logo on the right side. I had heard a whole lot of awesome stuff about Precog from people in IIIT-D and didn’t think twice before applying. The selection process itself was quite rigorous and after a few interviews I got selected for an Internship at Precog in the summer of 2017!! Add to that the fact that PK told me I could join right when my semester gets over and my joy knew no bounds!

I distinctly remember my first meeting with the group was at 4 PM on 2nd December 2016. Introductions were shared and I got to meet my mentor Srishti Gupta. She told me all about the work going on at Precog and what all projects were on offer. Then came the difficult but cool part, I got to choose which project I want to work on! Given my interest and background in mathematics I chose a project which involved modelling the spread of information across online social networks. I worked throughout the month of December and the winter semester. In fact I got course credits for my work throughout December. My college’s faculty were intrigued to know the kind of work that I did in that period. To some disappointment our research on information flow did not reach a conclusive end. And here I realised another thing from Precog, getting feedback about your work and then striving ahead is something that’s part of the research cycle. Disappointment is meant to strengthen your desire to achieve more. Officially beginning my internship in June 2017, I worked on identifying malicious users using modern graph theory concepts across the humungous graph of an online social network. Part of the work cycle at Precog are the regular update meetings where one gets to learn about what others are working on and also get some help about issues anyone is facing. This accompanied by fortnightly sessions know as DeepDive which as the name goes, allow the team to get acquainted with all the projects at a more detailed level. The openness of the group is strengthened by the fact that anyone (even PK) can be reached out to for help. With such amazing ly versatile people working in a group, there’s very slim chance that you wouldn’t find help about something that you’re struggling with.

If by this line you’re thinking that Precog is all about work, work and just work, get ready for a change of thought. The regular get together is aptly named #PrecogSocial. There’s only one rule about this get together, don’t discuss work related stuff. And the location can vary from Barbeque Nation to PK’s own home. Yes you read that right, PK invited all of us to his house for a feast. Get together aside, the interesting part about #PrecogSocial was the stories and anecdotes that everybody shares. The jokes, the games, the food, all of it will be cherished for a long time. Sir/Ma’am are a thing of the past at Precog, in fact everybody insists calling them by their name. If you try to associate the common academic stereotypes with this group and it’s people, you’d fail miserably.

If you’re a hardware fanatic (I am too :p), you’d be even happier at Precog. Want to run a deep learning model and want the results fast? Why not, use one of the many Nvidia GTX 1080s. Want to run it even faster and feel the raw power of GPUs? Go ahead and use the Titan X Pascal, awarded to Precog specially by Nvidia. And even if you’re not the GPU type, one of the many high performance servers are at your disposal. This is backed up by really fast NAS servers for all your storage needs. Although I haven’t been able to use the GPUs till now because my work doesn’t entail their use, I wouldn’t miss any opportunity to play around with them.

The Precog experience has been absolutely amazing for me right from the beginning. There was no shred of doubt in my mind when I decided to continue my work here after the official internship period ended. As many Precog alums say, Precog is not just a research group, it is a family. A family consisting of people who are awesome at what they do simply because they absolutely love doing it. As the great Randy Pausch once said “Follow your passions, believe in karma, and you won’t have to chase your dreams, they will come to you.”

Here’s a picture of the team at Barbeque Nation for one of the #PrecogSocial