Statement of Purpose

The Midnight Jog

Focusing on my jogging stride on a Saturday night, all I could see was heavy rain droplets
pouring down my sweat-shirt, with earphones plugged in I was listening to the World War II
audiobook that’s where the name “Alan Turing” first struck me, the man who cracked the
German enigma code and led the Allied forces to victory. On further researching about him I
learnt he invented the Turing test, which laid the foundation of the modern-day Artificial
Intelligence. Turing also proposed that all human psychology and philosophy can be represented
through math. Early on in life, I had figured my inclination for mathematics and logic, and knew
that I wanted to explore the potentials of technology today. I had figured that computers, over the
years have done a commendable job at solving pre-defined problems, although it’s the human
mind’s adaptive thinking ability which has driven the force of advancement in civilization. A
large part of capital till date is spent on human labor which makes automation of “humans” and
replication of “human intelligence” a necessary ingredient towards progress. It is hard to think of
a domain that is going to change the world as much as advanced computing will, in the decades
ahead. I want to be a part of this change and pursuing masters is one of the critical ingredients to
complete the recipe.
I understand that strong technical knowledge forms the prerequisite for every successful
profession, and my undergraduate program provided me with the opportunity to explore the
amazing world of subjects like Machine Learning, Big data analytics, Data Warehouse and
Mining. Under the guidance of professor Pranita Mahajan and Varsha Patil I started working on
some basic Machine Learning projects like Object detection, text analysis and Natural Language
processing. To further hone my skills, my teachers recommended me to enroll for online courses
by Andrew N.G, and read books written by John McCarthy. During my winter break in
sophomore year I enrolled for a Student Development Program in my college, after the program I
was given an internship in my college where I applied my knowledge to develop my first Neural
Network based classifier to detect plastic garbage of different brands.
Over the course of my undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering, I actively took
part in various college events to develop my personality as a whole. I was an active member of
the Computer Society of India (C.S.I.) Student Chapter in my college. During my tenure I
developed the C.S.I. website for my department, also being a part of the marketing team, I raised
funds for the college fests. As an NSS (National Service Scheme) volunteer for two years, I have
taught underserved school children, run vaccination drives, attended a 7-day camp in a remote
village in Maharashtra and built 2 small dams for the villagers, been a part of safety drill with
local municipal corporation, and organized blood donation camps besides raising funds through
marathons to support an NGO working for HIV/AIDS awareness, prevention and patient support.

I owe it to N.S.S. for instilling in me the motivation to serve the community around me,
one of my undergraduate theses involved studying and monitoring forest areas over
geographically challenging locations utilizing satellite images. My research there was fixated on
building a stand-alone system capable of detecting deforestation over a region of interest and
capturing all the essential topological information. My second research went about under the
guidance of professor Varsha Patil, this research aimed at curbing the quandary pertaining to
plastic waste. I designed a Neural Network model which could map litter on a map and generate
a litter profile for the same. Further, I have presented both these findings in in the 3rd
International Conference on Computational Vision and Bio Inspired Computing (ICCVBIC
2019) held at Coimbatore, India. As the winner of Smart India Hackathon organized by
A.I.C.T.E (All India Council for Technical Edification) I had the opportunity to utilize my skills
as an engineer to avail boost the market of Varanasi artisans, the deciding factor for acquiring
victory the competition was Machine Learning. We instilled machine learning algorithms in the
website which exponentially incremented the selling rate for the artisan, they included
recommendation, collaborative filtering and content-based filtering algorithms.
During my final year I worked for an American healthcare revenue cycle management
company. R1 had the issue of attrition of high-quality people and they wanted a model which
could help them to recruit the right talent. In the absence of structured and robust analytics, R1’s
business was having mixed successes in addressing these two risks and it was looking to
leverage technology to be able to provide proactive alerts to help them manage these risks better.
During my tenure as a Data analyst I developed two Machine Learning models which could
address the above-mentioned issues. The initial module could foresee employee attrition and the
later would give suggestions to HR thereby increasing efficiency. I learnt about system
architecture while working there and was able to experience corporate culture.

I now wish to understand more than the rudimentary basics of Computers from one of the finest
institutes in America and do believe that a master’s degree from the University of @@@@@@@@,
with its famed faculty, highly thought out and systematically approached curriculum and diverse talent
pool of students will help me greatly in achieving my career goals. I look forward to learning
@@@@@@@@@@ and @@@@@@@@ from highly renowned faculty such as Prof.
@@@@@@@. I believe that my goals are closely aligned with those of your program, and would
give me the opportunity to grasp latest happenings and innovations in this field. I eagerly look forward
for an opportunity to learn at your esteemed University.

Apurva Mhatre
Fall 2020