Personal statement for MSc Finance in Rennes 1 France

during the fourth semester of college, I decided to enroll for Andrew Ng's famous Machine learning course on Coursera out of curiosity for the most trending field in computer science - artificial intelligence. I was hooked by the time I finished half the course. I couldn't stop thinking about the various applications that this could be used for.

I was enrolled for B.Tech. in information and Communication technology at the Institute of information and computer technology three years ago. during that year I suffered from an illness that got me hospitalized and later I had to drop out of college to take care of my health. I joined college again for B.Tech. in computer science and Engineering with Cloud-based applications as specialization (a different one from the first due to the way education system works in my home country India) once I started feeling better but the string of bad luck would not leave me and I was hospitalized during my finals in the first semester and later throughout my second semester and went through tens of operations. Fortunately, I recovered well enough from my third semester. but these issues have left me with an interest in healthcare. I am working on a time Series Analysis of Swine Flu data.

however, the major area I would like research is how to apply the concepts of artificial intelligence to help unwell people. I would especially like to see how progress in these fields has impacted the healthcare of women and we might increase the influence and make it better. how we can use these to detect problems, alleviate symptoms and generally just make people's lives easier. my key focus in this area is mental health and how we can instill beneficial behavioral practices and change the outlook by tailoring self-improvement practices based on the person and how we might be able to evaluate and flag harmful behaviors and detect which disease they have and the treatment that would benefit them the most based on their profile. this is a huge issue in psychiatry and sometimes finding the right treatment for a patient might take ages.

With my interest in artificial intelligence, I decided to apply for an internship in this field. At my internship in WeblineIndia, I first learned neural networks and then worked on a project to detect crooked teeth from a picture of face and then replacing it with healthier teeth for a client who was a dentist. I worked on the detection part which was achieved using RCNN and learned how to improve accuracy and the importance of good data. we had to recollect some data and clean it better to achieve our desired outcome. my mentor and project leader Mr. Priyank Solanki complimented me on my quick learning and a good understanding of the algorithms and my ideas on how we could implement it better. it was working at this internship that I got interested in Deep learning and computer vision. I would like to join your program to learn more about computer vision, especially under Dr. Tom Goldstein whose project on Invisibility Cloak has been of great interest to me.

since I enjoyed tutoring my peers, I decided to get a teaching Assistantship. I am the teaching assistant for a professor at my university in my current (fifth) semester for Probability and Statistics. I have always been passionate about this subject and enjoy tutoring students in the same. I chose this subject in the hopes of making the students more interested in these fields and to be able to appreciate and enjoy them the way I do. The professor is researching Natural Language Processing and we have had various discussions regarding current research in these fields. He has asked me to conduct research under him which is a project I will take up in March once I have gotten somewhere my current projects.

Other than this I have taken up various projects like making the game hangman in C during my first semester. I made a system for pharmacies using java during my third semester. I started making it C++ during my second semester however getting hospitalized made me unable to complete it. I preferred java so I decided to implement the system in that. later during my fourth semester, I learned Node.js and ReactJS on my own to create an Enterprise Resource Planning web application for my mini project along with my teammate. I also made an online store for healthy food using .Net and C# during the same semester with the same team. during my fifth semester, I learned various concepts of Virtualization and implemented them with Redhat and also Hyper-V. I also made an Attendance Management system along with my team in java and implemented concepts of User Experience Design to make it friendly and I and my team are working on adding face recognition to it. I also implemented the telnet protocol and learned computer networks during that semester. In my current semester, I am studying data Warehousing and Mining, information Security, Theory of computation and Parallel computation.

I like teaching and helping children and I volunteered as a teacher for Mathematics and English for poor children. I also volunteered to survey the public toilets in our area that are frequented by the poor to make sure that hygiene standards are being maintained so that fewer people get sick. I also enjoy learning new things especially in biology and lately, my focus has been neuroscience. Robert Sapolsky and Damasio's books have especially gotten me interested in the subjects. I have also been an active member of the science and technology Club at my college and have organized various competitions in Fests.

I want to join this pre-doctorate research program under your universities because I would like to learn new things and see what research is being conducted so that I may use them in my projects. I would also like to have an idea of what graduate studies and research might be like since I will like to join the graduate school. I have already given GRE and scored 336 in that and hope to get accepted by the university of Maryland where I hope to apply by the end of the year and I believe this program will be very helpful with that. I hope to prove an asset to the same.