I am writing this blog entry after an incredible period of 2 years of work at Precog, which has surely given me a multitude of tangibles to talk about. But, it will be the intangibles that Precog has left me with, which will be the hardest to pen down on a single blog. My time working full-time at Precog has had an overwhelming impact on my life and career. It is undoubtedly the differentiating factor in my life, which has placed me into the Masters program at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. It is difficult to describe the feeling I have for my advisor, my fellow lab mates, how each…

Earlier this summer I got selected in Google Summer of Code to work with VideoLAN on the Project VLC macOS Interface Redesign. It has been a blessing to get a chance to work on one of the highest impact open source projects. I had a phenomenal experience. Let’s have a look at my contributions 🙂 You can have a look at my GSoC Project Page and Proposal Feel free to jump right to the code Our Team Jean-Baptiste Kempf (President of VideoLAN) Felix Paul Kühne (Mentor) David Fuhrmann (Mentor Vibhoothi (Student at Amrita University) Daksh Shah (Me, Student at IIITD) Left to Right: Vibhoothi, Daksh(Me), Jean-Baptiste, Felix, David Workflow Let’s start by looking at our workflow…

How the journey began: My journey with PK started long before I was actually a part of Precog. In the sixth Semester of my B.Tech. (I am a Dual Degree Student), I enrolled for the Designing Human Centered Systems (DHCS) course which was taught by PK. This was one course which is said to be different from all the courses you’ll ever take at IIITD, and so it was. Owing to the way the course is planned, it is a different experience in itself where you pick a problem and work on it all semester long. You build systems which have the capability to solve problems of the real world.…

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…

“The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts” This was just another saying for me until the day I joined Precog. It all began when my friends convinced me into taking part in OSM-Palooza, a hackathon organized by PreCog in Spring 2016. The task was to perform sentiment analysis on Twitter code-mixed data. The experience was fun: learning basics of machine learning, text analysis, APIs, web scraping, automation, and what not. Finally, after working for several hours, our team made a submission that ended up winning the first prize! While munching on pizza slices with the prize money, I started thinking about this experience, and how much I loved it. After…

The summer break after graduation is when one realizes that IIIT has changed their life forever. It’s too soon to say whether it’s for the good or bad, but “sitting idle”, “not learning”, or “not chasing something new” become the biggest worries of life. Fear not, the bouts of peaceful wondering (and guilt-free procrastination) catch up soon, but for me it was the former set of feelings that saw me hunting for something to do in the summer. I got a glimpse of what working at Precog would be like during PK’s DHCS course that I took in my final semester. It was meant to be a light course that…

Testimonials Where do stories begin? With that suitably philosophical opener, I begin my Precog story. Did mine begin when I joined IIIT Delhi for a Masters? Or when I joined Precog for an Independent Project? I think my Precog journey started somewhere between the two, kickstarted by this post on Quora. In my first semester at IIIT Delhi, I didn’t know which area I wanted to work in. Having read Prof Ben Y Zhao’s glowing praise of Prof PK, I decided to take the ‘Privacy and Security on Online Social Media’ course in the hope that I would make an impression on PK and get an opportunity to work with…

I feel ecstatic to write this blog post today as I complete an year at PreCog. I would like to use this opportunity to write about my journey till and through PreCog, with all the fantastic and memorable experiences I’ve had during this time. Jump to section III to know why I think PreCog is the ‘Google of Research Groups’. I. Getting In It was late 2015 and I had barely started my second year in college when I decided I wanted my UG life to have as many diverse experiences as possible. So, I started participating in various activities in college, which included founding and heading a student chapter…

My journey at IIIT-Delhi started back in July 2010. To put things in perspective, that was the year when Steve Jobs introduced iPhone 4 and the first ever iPad. Game of Thrones was a TV series unheard of. Sachin Tendulkar scored the first ever double hundred in a one day cricket match. Barack Obama had just completed 1 year as the president of the United States. And Tinder and Instagram did not exist. The past seven years have taught me more about myself than I could ever expect to learn probably during the rest of my life. I learned what I want to do in life. More importantly, I learned…