Research Statement

Ishan Misra
As an undergraduate at the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H),
I have had the opportunity to obtain a well-founded background in Computer Science and be in
a mentally stimulating research environment. One of my first research experiences came when I
pursued an internship at a startup, working on the back-end of an online gaming system. With
limited information and instruction, I was challenged to assess the most optimal contribution I
could make to the team. This experience made me confident about my ability to visualize
structures before they existed and work towards crystallizing them. I was able to appreciate the
complexity of real systems and the difficulty of robustly integrating diverse technologies and
sub-systems like control logic, game servers, distributed data servers, and load balancers.
I maintained a perfect academic record, getting straight A’s, which urged me to challenge myself
beyond coursework and explore the areas in research. To be acquainted with new ideas, I
started reading one or two research papers every week on any topic in CS. The paper on “Eigen
Faces” by Turk and Pentland piqued my interest in visual-data processing. I then saw a lecture
on “Automatic Photo Pop-up” by Dr. Alexei Efros. I was amazed at how using engineering, math
and a few realistic assumptions, they recovered a lost dimension of projection and obtained a 3-
D model from a single image. Intrigued by the combination of geometry and statistics in spatial
understanding from images, I joined the Center for Visual Information Technology, IIIT-H under
the guidance of Dr. P J Narayanan as an Honors student.
During my work on Vision, I learned about the concept of “Structure from Motion” and realized
the importance of using High Performance Computing (HPC) in Vision to extract useful statistics
from large data. This motivated me to take a course in Cloud Computing, wherein I combined
my knowledge of computer graphics, to work on a novel algorithm for distributed rendering of 3-
D models in the Map-Reduce framework. Of late, I have seen these areas come together in
applications like Google Street View and cancer research studies in protein folding (also aided
by machine learning and data visualization), helping us lead better lives.
While exploring high quality image displays I read about the Floyd Steinberg algorithm for
dithering. Finding it slow, I discussed with Dr. Narayanan about developing a parallel way to
implement it. We realized our major challenge was that the problem belonged to the class of
algorithms most difficult to parallelize due to a long chain of dependency. We identified the trick
of effectively splitting the work between an inexpensive CPU and GPU, making them work
concurrently. Thus, we demonstrated that High Performance Computing could be removed from
its traditional confines of super computers and made available on laptops. The work was
accepted as a full research paper at the International Conference on High Performance
Computing. I applied my knowledge of space filling curves, human visual system and hardware
architecture as we formalized our approach. During my work, I realized that I was stimulated by
investigating problems from new
perspectives, applying knowledge from diverse fields and finally organizing this to come up with
a solution.
Even though I never formally studied distributed systems, joining a weekly discussion group
spawned my interest. My quest to satiate my curiosity led me to Yale University, as a summer
intern under Dr. Bryan Ford in the Decentralized and Distributed Group. I primarily worked on a
deterministic, distributed and parallel operating system that builds upon various projects like
MIT’s Exokernel and JOS instructional OS. I felt a sense of accomplishment in working on the
diverse code base and being able to grasp and apply concepts from this field. Observing the
methodology of world-class researchers, I realized that it is through collaboration and by
confluence of different spheres of knowledge that technological marvels are born.
I had the opportunity to apply my theoretical knowledge in Vision to real world projects, as part
of my Computer Vision course. I worked on automatic summarization of news videos and image
classification on a subset of the Caltech- 101 dataset, both of which were in the top three
performers in the course. To get a deeper insight into Computer Vision, I took a course on
Machine Learning. My current project is on character image classification using the MNIST
dataset. While researching on this project, the talk on Restricted Boltzmann Machines by Dr.
Geoffrey Hinton really impressed me as I saw a simple and theoretically sound generative
model that works on practical data.
As research and teaching go hand in hand, I became a teaching assistant (TA) for the Pattern
Recognition course. I particularly enjoyed explaining concepts by giving an intuitive explanation
rather than just mathematics. I was able to effectively communicate my ideas and resolve
doubts. This offered me the chance to polish my teaching and presentation skills.