My enriching journey with Precog

It all started with a weekend I was free and saw a small opportunity to do something different. I saw a post on facebook for a hackathon organized by Precog. The challenge was to build a sentiment classifier in Hindi. We quickly googled the exact problem and found some solutions which could be implemented easily. Later we realized that everyone else is doing the exact same thing. That was the moment we realized, we need to do something different and out of the box to win. Before that, we used to stay in our comfort zone and rely on external sources for answers. That hackathon was the beginning when I got into machine learning. I am pretty much convinced my life would have been really different if I didn’t take part. After several hours of hacking, we put together a small working prototype and ended up winning the hackathon. During the hackathon, we got a gist of the people and the culture of Precog. Because of that, I ended up doing a summer internship and staying there till my end of my undergrads. Precog is the most selective research group in our college, which was all the more reason for me to be super thrilled to get in.

The internship was an amazing experience for me. It was the first time I started working as part of a team. I learned a lot of cool stuff from my peers. The thing that fascinated me the most was the freedom and trust of others. We used to have open discussions of ideas, where no idea was considered bad. At Precog everyone helps each other; whether it was reviewing a draft, debugging code or getting new ideas. I was with Indira and Kushagra working on solving NLP problems on Indian OSM data. I still recall the long discussions we used to have together. This was the first time I ever had access to massive compute resources. Precog has more servers than any other research group at IIITD, which was pretty cool to know (and still is)!. That enabled me to play with massively large data. I was also involved with Sonal in an image retrieval project. The research was published at SocInfo.  We used to have Whatsup sessions where we all would share our updates with the whole group. To the best of my knowledge, Precog is the only group which does that. We all used to learn a lot about new things from that session.

Precog Interns: Summer of 2016

Fascinated by the work at Precog, I decided to continue working with them after the internship as well. I started working on analyzing sensitive content with indira. We had several discussions with other teams on how to make our project better. Our system finally ended up getting deployed. The feeling of our research work helping others was quite satisfying. Together, we used to brainstorm ideas for several other projects. My experience with Precog changed my perspective. It is a fact that most of the research around the world goes unused, but this is not the case with Precog. The outings, cake cutting events and the dinners at PK’s residence bonded us together as a family.

I always used to be a “how” person, who focuses on the solutions rather than the problems. With Precog, I realized the importance of “what”. Figuring out the ‘what to do’ is much more crucial. We can easily find solutions once we understand the problem. The culture at Precog encourages us to believe in ourselves. My presentation skills improved drastically, thanks to the ‘Deep Dive’ sessions. Due to the absence of any kind of spoon feeding, we all became better at finding solutions. Rather than learning a particular skill, we mastered the skill of acquiring skills. Every Precog alum is extremely successful, and now I know why.

A group photo of our family!

As a machine learning geek, I believe we all are like reinforcement learning agents: trying to maximize our reward (for us fun and learning). For an agent to get an optimal reward, good feedback on its actions is really important. The complete group as a whole provides excellent feedback which results in us improving, being more adept to achieve our dreams and have fun on the way as well!

Looking back, I realize how these small events had such a huge impact in my life. From troubling others by crashing the servers to publishing papers, I realize what all I would have missed by not joining Precog. In my last semester, I interned at Microsoft Research doing research on unsupervised learning on video data.  If you have a desire to do something out of the box, I highly recommend you to should join Precog.