8/3/2019 Balli - SOP

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The interest I developed in Computer Sciences and Engineering dates back to the time I was at JuniorSchool. My inherent interest in Mathematics grew through the years. During my final school years, I had theopportunity to represent my school in the National Mathematics Talent examination conducted by The

Association of Mathematics Teachers of India, a body responsible for the National Mathematics Olympiadselections. My commendable performance at the selection stages gave me a good exposure to elements ofCombinatorics and Graph Theory early on. I chose the Computer Science course offered during Grade XI &XII. It enabled me to gain expertise in C++ and I got introduced to basic Data Structures, DBMS and PLparadigms early on.

My desire to understand the nuances involved in the execution of the sequence of instructions defined in ahigh level language internally in a computer drove me to pursue a major in Computer Sciences andEngineering. I gained admission to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Instituteof Technology (NIT) Tiruchirappalli to pursue my Bachelors degree after finishing in the top 1% out of7,30,000 students nationwide in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination. I was fascinated by eachand every course I pursued and was primarily interested in Computer Organization & Architecture, Analysisof Algorithms, Theory of Computation and Artificial Intelligence.

I had the opportunity to work in one of my interest areas under N Ramasubramanian, Professor, Head,

Computer Science and Engineering Department, during my 5th semester which involved defining thehardware logic for a simple accumulator based 16-bit processor and performing functional verification of thesame. I learnt the technicalities & issues involved in designing a processor and gained exposure tostructured project work and development tools. I defined the logic using Verilog HDL, performed synthesisand functional verification of the processor using Xilinx tools.

I followed up this pursuit with a summer internship under Dr. V Kamakoti, Professor, Indian Institute ofTechnology, Madras. At the RISE (Reconfigurable and Intelligent Systems Engineering) Lab, we researchedon implementing Page Functions to serve faster address translation. Since a lot of processor cycles gowaste due to page faults and the infeasibility involved in expanding the content addressable TLB(Translation Look-aside Buffer) memory, I arrived at the idea of implementing such a function. I amcontinuing the research work at my college in the final year and working towards reaching a solution for thisproblem. I have run simulations for generating a polynomial function whose domain is a set of virtualmemory addresses and the range is the set of physical memory addresses and the function is adaptive, thatis, the coefficients of the polynomial changes after every page allocation and eviction.

Apart from working on research projects related to architecture I constantly participated in coding contestsduring my undergraduate years. And as a finalist in one of the contests I was challenged with the 15-numbergame amidst tight time and space constraints. It further hooked my interests in solving such problems inSPOJ, UVA, USACO problem sets. I also chose `Advanced Algorithms` course in my junior year, ending upin the top five of the class. In my senior year, I chose `Artificial Intelligence` and the topics related toKnowledge representation & Machine-learning algorithms interested me in this field. As the designatedevent coordinator for War of the Bots, a National Level AI bot event in Pragyan '08, I am developing a bot to

judge the contestants' bots in a two-player game.

I have always maintained a balance between my academics, co-curricular and extra curricular activities,right from actively participating and winning in coding contests to word power events. During my sophomoreyear, I was designated as the coordinator of the Technical committee of Vortex 06, a Technical Symposiumconducted by my department and I organized a C-debugging contest. As an active member of GNU/LinuxUser Group, Trichy, I have delivered lectures on Package management in GNU/Linux, Shell Scripting,Socket programming and Python. I handled Mathematics classes for Grade VIII students in REC MiddleSchool after my college hours during my junior year. The pleasure in imparting the knowledge to others wasa thoroughly enjoyable experience.

It would be extremely gratifying for me to contribute towards the field that has given me immense pleasureall through these years. I intend to pursue a career in research and teaching. A good research careerwarrants a solid foundation in the subject and I intend to do a MS in Computer Science, to further my realmof knowledge in my fields of interest. I am fully aware of the kind of dedication, resilience and resolve that itcalls for and I feel that am adequately prepared in having the technical qualifications. I am eager to continue

my pursuit at your esteemed University.