This is my second post in My life at NCTU series. In my last post I had introduced NCTU from
one bailed out’s prospective, this post is from a doubly loaded person’s
prospective! This is the end of the semester and I am going to complete 1 full
year with NCTU. This semester was full of enthusiasm at one end and lot of
frustrations at the other. The average number of sleep hours per day must not
have been more than 4.5, I guess. I watched only 7-10 movies in the whole
semester! I do remember my Bachelors study days, I used to watch more than this
in a week!
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| Some of the 26 Research papers I studied this semester! |
As I had mentioned in my last post, taking even two courses
in a single semester requires one to have full time dedication on studies, and
I had taken three courses (one I dropped, though) the last semester! And, I
repeated the same mistake this semester too! The only difference is that I took
completely practical based courses this time, so that I could avoid the written
exams (I am bad at writing theory and doing a lot of derivations). And now I
can say I have gained an intermediate level working expertise in the domains of
Machine learning, neural networks and Computer Vision! And this has
tremendously helped me at my Internship at ITRI too, I got a new project
assigned to me due to these skills with me.
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| Chinese class handout. Very difficult to remember these words! |
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| Chao Mian, means stir fried noodles |
I have taken Device Design and Simulation Lab course too,
and guess what, my course Professor was Prof. Yiming Li, the co-Author of the
most famous Physics of Semiconductor Devices book, himself! The famous, Prof.
Simon Sze, too is Professor at NCTU and his office is on the same floor as my
lab! This was the first time I had attended a class by such a famous author and
researcher and I was astonished by how enthusiastic the Professor is towards
teaching. He explains each key point in every lab, though he has three Teaching
Assistants to do the job for him. NCTU also got a collaboration with the
prestigious Tohoku University, Japan under his supervision. Any student
interested in doing a research in the domain can get access to the research resources
of both the Universities as well as provision for exchange is also available. I
had taken this course considering only design and simulation grades for the
course, but to my surprise, I have learnt much more device physics than I used
to from my Bachelors studies. I hope to find a research topic in this domain
too since the commercial licensed tools used in the course were very much
compute intensive and their acceleration is possible.
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| Wifi speed in my dormitory |
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| My personal small Worship place |
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| My beloved study room, I spend my nights here. |
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| Laundromat on 2 floors in dorm |
We recently had an End-of-semester Gathering party, I had
attended one for the first time ever. Our Department, Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science, had made wonderful arrangement, we had Indian dishes
served! I had the most delicious chicken biriyani after almost 10 months. Some of
the students who graduated this semester shared their experiences regarding job
search and how they got into work profile they were interested in. It was a wonderful
experience. You can see some of the pictures from the event.
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| My plate of Chicken biriyani |
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| Sea shore visible from the top floor |
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| National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, just 150 m from my dorm |
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| Beware of snakes, a lot of them in the greenery around, I haven't seen any yet though! |
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| Vending machines in the dorm, my rescuers at night |
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| Very efficient waste management |
NCTU has an exclusive barbeque area where one can do
barbeque party the whole night. It is in an open space beneath a bridge. I had
gone there for the first time and this was the first time I roasted chicken on
charcoal. We played Hindi songs and danced too. It was a great relief from the
continuous and tiring technically demanding projects I have been doing the
whole semester. Some pictures from here too.
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| Tasty Kebabs |
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| Barbeque area top view |
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| Common room on my floor, mostly used only by me |
I have bought a second-hand scooter the last month. I used
to have problem going to ITRI twice a week. Scooter is the most commonly used
mode of transport in Hsinchu and one can easily find a reasonably costing
second-hand scooter online. Parking space is very much costly in Hsinchu in
comparison to that in India. Luckily, NCTU provides a free parking space for
the two-wheelers, towards the back gate. It doesn’t require any identification
for being NCTU staff or student, I have seen many of the Science Park employees
parking in there. Most importantly, it is just 100 meters from my dormitory,
Graduate Dorm-2, so I need not walk long distance in order to get to my
scooter. My scooter in the picture below (I miss my Avenger that I used to use
back in India).
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| My scooter |
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| Shortcut staircase from dorm to parking area |
How can I miss the big news! I have been offered from ITRI
to convert to a full time employee from internship! This was a totally
unexpected positive development which I knew would happen but not so soon! I
had to postpone it for the time being and I have affirmed saying that I shall join
full time after completing my course work. I am hoping of a collaborated
project between my lab and ITRI so that I can work with full concentration on
one project at a time. If every thing goes well, I will seek approval from my
Professor for the full time position. This is a great opportunity since this
will count as an industrial PhD. I wish more such opportunity existed back in
India too. This forms a big financial freedom for any researcher and keeps the
enthusiasm high. This surely helps get more output out of the research work.
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| ITRI, my Internship office |
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| A brand new Asus ViviBook 5, bought for me by my Lab. I received it just 3 days after I asked for it! |
Keeping this post short, I would better summarize this
semester’s experience now. I have learnt designing and implementing the most
appropriate machine learning algorithms according to the data set available. I
am now able to design and to develop a deep neural network to recognize
emotions from an image or a video feed. I can also predict stock prices to some
accuracy, though this is in beginning phase and I hope to improve the accuracy
to a level where I can place real time trades on real stock markets.
So you can feel the heat here, I hope. I would recommend any
serious researcher to consider pursuing a semester as exchange student here and
I can guarantee that you would end up pursuing a full time degree! More in the
next post…
