Internship -A ship leading to new opportunities
As promised here I come up with continuation of the blog “A walk through journey as an IISC Intern ”.
Well I had stopped by telling about my selection procedure in my previous blog now I go ahead on a complete tour of the fellowship.
Before acceptance of the Indian Academy of Sciences fellowship I was in dilemma as at the same time in June-July 2018 ,I would be having my exams Will I be able to ride both boats ??was my question.Then my mom told as this was a great offer I should take risk accept it and succeed in both exams and the internship.And gave the idea to go and meet the professor .Vishvanadham (my guide) senior INSA scientist , Ex-faculty of worlds top 5 ranked NTU Singapore , who has 145 research papers in his name and is the pioneer in country for Supply chain management,also for bringing Automation first time in manufacturing in India and Ex-chairman of CSA to tell him the problem and ask whether is it allowed for me to take off from internship only during my exam days .
It was easy for us to go IISc as we were Bangalore residents,so we went up to the sir .I was scared as I was going to take a problem to him even before joining but to my surprise he gave me full permission to take off on the exam days and was really impressed that I was ready to take risk for my career.
I was relieved and accepted the fellowship!!!!.
15TH JUNE 2018
On this day of 15th May was my first day as an intern at IISC,Bangalore headed to the campus situated in Malleshwaram 18th cross 15 minutes from Yeshwanthpur City Bus terminal and 10 minutes from Sadashivnagar Police station .The Campus I tell you has its own beauty and charm that would keep you mesmerized and it still remains apple of my eye.I went to the Computer Science and Automation department(CSA) to meet my guide and my fellow interns as under Prof. Vishvanadham there were 3 other interns assigned .
In the first floor of the CSA building in the 2nd last room at the left it was written on the door Prof N. Vishvanadham and I knocked the door (I was new to his room as I had visited him before as told above) and there was a 75-year old dignified man with a welcoming broad smile and he remembered my name and said “Hi Shraddha!! How are you ?”.Then after 15 minutes of friendly chat with him he told me to take a tour of the wonderful campus because I had to spend my next 2 months here and also he had got an sudden invite to take up a international lecture virtually in the morning hour and told me that he would meet me after lunch with my fellow interns .
I had my microprocessor lab exam the next day and took a call to go and in the JRD Tata library,instead of campus tour.
Now I could officially go there to read and had access to the library which was otherwise restricted only to professors and students there.After all the security check etc.,I entered the library and I must say it is one of the best libraries I have ever seen ,the amount of books,the study table all were amazing .Though I was startled and awestruck I came back to my senses and choose a study table to calmly read,then after a wonderful lunch at Prakruti Canteen near CSA ,I headed back to CSA and met my guide and my fellow intern today only one girl had come she was also 2nd year Engineering student like me from AP and from that meet on wards we have turned to be great and best friends of each other till today and in future too.There were other two interns who would join us later our professor told
The next day we two and another fellow intern (girl from AP 3rd year Engineering)were taken to Vijna labs private limited in New BEL road(a startup associated with our professor) where Mr Murali Kota ,CEO of Vijna labs ,an Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and KVPY fellowship holder assigned each three of us projects.And I tell you in the startup there the least qualification of any employee was Mtech/MS Gosh!!!
I was assigned “Face and object Recognition using IR Spectrum thermal camera” it was image processing,OpenCV based project that is in progress that would be later given to Indian Army as during the heavy turbulance conditions at the border the army men are not able to see things properly and face great difficulty so in such conditions IR light only can help them to recognize things properly I am just giving a brief of the project and not more details as I am not supposed to give as it is highly confidential.
I was excited!!That I had a chance to serve the nation.I was excited they gave me details of the technology and at that time it was all Greek and Latin for me
I had to install OpenCV, tensorflow, and Google Cloud for uploading the datasets(images) to cloud as a huge dataset was needed for greater accuracy.
They also gave me the IR Camera Libseek Thermal camera for capturing real life object images.
The images captured needed to be processed by removing different noises like salt pepper,Gaussian noise,Quantization noise etc., and the image contouring needed to be done after identifying the objects, and recognizing what they are and faces needed to be recognized I was completely new to python in my 2nd year then but I used Python only as the base language.
Finally the research project ended and I could attain the milestones as it was required by the company ,All these working all took place in CSA’s lab number 101 ground floor where we could access various research papers through IISC’s Wi-Fi.
Overall it was a great ,fruitful and a memorable experience in my life which further lead me into many new opportunities today.
