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Precog Thrills: My Epic Ride with an Amazing Academic Crew!
Hey, I’m Amul Agrawal, a B.Tech CS graduate from IIIT Hyderabad’s batch of 2023. Currently, I am working as an SDE at Uber. My college life was an unforgettable experience, filled with many lifelong friends. Throughout my college life, I passionately engaged in two distinct but equally fulfilling pursuits: research and competitive programming (CP). While I was initially drawn to CP due to my fascination with logical problem-solving, I quickly excelled in it and was lucky enough to lead the Programming Club and represent my college at the ICPC World Finals. However, I had limited experience with research and was unsure about its appeal to me. Despite this, I decided…
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A Fascinating Journey with Precog
By the end of my first year, I knew that I wanted to pursue a Masters from a prestigious university like CMU. This meant I needed to build a stellar profile with adequate research experience and strong recommendation letters to have a chance at achieving such a goal. Thus began my research into the various labs and professors of IIIT and this is when I came across Precog. I had heard great things about PK from my seniors at Precog like how he not only looked after your research progress but also concerned himself with your personal growth and development. Moreover, Precog provided a unique opportunity to work on academic…
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Precog: A stepping stone to a brighter future
Intro When I decided to pursue higher studies, I knew I had to make a prolific research profile to get into top-notch graduate schools worldwide. I needed strong letters of recommendation from the best possible professors in my field to achieve this goal. I started searching for professors who could guide my research journey. That’s when I heard about PK from some of my seniors who had worked with him. They spoke highly of his expertise and mentorship style. Joining Precog, PK’s research lab, was a dream for me, and I had planned to work in the lab for two years as an honours student to gain valuable research experience.…
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Disentangling the mysteries of research via PreCog
Research can be daunting, but with the right tools and resources, it can be a rewarding experience. One such resource is the research group Precog, led by Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru or as he likes to be addressed — “PK”. As a research undergraduate, I had a unique experience working with PK for over two years. I say this as throughout my journey; I only met PK “once” in-person towards the end of my second year at PreCog. One of the reasons for this was when I joined, he was a faculty at IIIT Delhi but it was COVID time and by the time we were allowed back on campus, he…
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Power of Teaching & Taking courses on NPTEL!
Fall 2016: I offer the Privacy & Security in Online Social Media course on NPTEL. Dipjyoti Bisharad (B.Tech. #Classof2018 student in NIT Silchar, Assam) takes this edition of the course. He is one of the toppers of the course. We decide he will come and spend the summer 2017 with Precog. I strikingly remember the interview that I did with D for the summer internship, he was not able to connect to the call, he had Internet issues, was trying to move his phone around to get better connectivity for the call. Summer 2017: D comes to Precog, spends the summer (see the pic below with the internship Tshirt), including…
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Precog: You’ll look back and be proud
My journey at Precog began during my third year of college, in December 2020. It’s been challenging, rewarding, humbling, and importantly, the most defining endeavour of my undergrad days. It’s a research group I can’t not mention when talking about my background; it’s the group that doesn’t just grow on your resume – it grows onto you! This blog is a likely inept attempt at the (mammoth) task of summarising the many experiences, learnings, and aspects of the group I value. Growth, whether you like it or not While there’s no shortage of opportunities to grow in college, Precog has been the most multifaceted. It was while working at Precog…
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Passion, Purpose, Precog
I joined Precog as an honours student at the end of my second year of college (summer 2020). I worked on Computational Social Science related research problems, under PK’s purview. My journey has been meaningful and rewarding in many ways! Through this blog, I will share my experiences and detail the aspects I valued the most. Here are some things I loved about being at Precog: Purposeful Work The research done at Precog is very applied and practical in nature. I worked on analysing the spread of Islamophobic hate-speech online and identifying malicious actors. I appreciated that we worked on a current-world problem which made the research timely and pertinent…
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Excerpts from “Will” by Will Smith with Mark Manson
Thanks to a book stalls in airports 🙂 Was browsing through books, was looking for something else, did not find it, but stumbled on the book Will, thanks to the colourful cover I guess! [Page 42] I trust God. And I am so thankful for his grace in my life. I know that every single breath I take is a gift. And it’s impossible to be unhappy when you’re grateful. [43] Some combination of hard work, education, and God would topple any and all obstacles and enemies. The only variable was the level of my commitment to the fight. [64] Truly intelligent people do not have to use language like…
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Excerpts from “The Alchemist: A Fabble About Following Your Deam” by Paulo Coelho
While reading the book Will by Will Smith, he mentions [my blog on excerpts from the book] one of the influential books for him was The Alchemist. I decided to read it. Keeping the recent tradition of buying one book per travel [not sure how long will I be able to continue doing this :)], bought this book. It was a fantastic decision, I am going to rate this book very high in my reading list recommendations. [Page 10] It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting. [14] It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to…
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Learn, Bond, Grow @ Precog!
Back in 2020, I was as perplexed as any other second year student when I had to make a choice for a lab and an advisor to pursue my honours. My interests lay in working on applied NLP and real world problems that could have a direct impact on people’s lives and society. After elaborate considerations and weighing my options amongst the many brilliant labs at IIITH, I decided to work WITH Prof. PK at Precog. I’m sincerely thankful to my really cool seniors at Precog who introduced me to the lab, explained to me about the spectrum of work that happens, and guided me in making the right choice.…