How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.
I am applying at U of Chicago in the computer science program. My activities have revolved around CS with multiple CD courses, summer camps, website development, coding club, hackathon and two summers of internship in Contiq, a Bay area content intelligence startup. I have interest in AI and machine learning.
Here are some additional details re my Contiq experience…
I interned with Contiq, a Silicon Valley based enterprise content intelligence startup, during the last two summers. Contiq uses artificial intelligence to discover and reuse the most impactful PowerPoint and PDF content at the micro level to boost productivity, quality, and impact.
My trepidation of being the only tenth grade intern, with whatever Java and Python skills I carried, in a high velocity startup was quickly dispelled with a warm welcome from the Contiq team. I was assigned a mentor, who patiently walked me through the intricacies of the design thinking, technology concepts such as RESTful APIs, TensorFlow, Amazon Web Service APIs, and security authentication, and set expectations for collaboration, communication, and task execution.
I provided input on user experience design that the Contiq team valued, debugged code, and automated population of the content lake for testing purposes.
From this experience, I took away a world view far bigger than my involvement in the product development life cycle. I learned that all concepts, no matter how perfect they seem, could be improved. I had grown up using Google, which epitomized the simplicity of search. Contiq amplifies that experience in the world of enterprise content. I witnessed the dream, the self-belief and palpable sense of purpose in every member of the Contiq team. That is a culture that I would always like to be part of and build.
Some other interests in this blurb…
I am excited about what the upcoming advances in technology, particularly human-machine interaction and artificial intelligence (AI), have to offer society, but am concerned about ethical AI and sustainability. I am inspired by the leadership role Columbia has taken to actively deal with climate change, regenerative medicine, the pandemic, and the myriad burning issues of our generation.
I will have an opportunity to learn from the best minds in academia, such as machine learning concepts from Professor David Blei, the pioneer of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, and Algorithmic Game Theory from Professor Christos Papadimitriou. I would collaborate with Columbia researchers to pursue research interests close to my heart, and the Columbia Engineering Entrepreneurship program to take those to market. For example, my grandfather had a difficult few years with Parkinsons during which his quality of life suffered hugely. I would like to work with someone like Prof Sunil Agrawal to combine knowledge from neuroscience, biomechanics and artificial intelligence to predict instability with physical movement and coordination and apply biomechanics to offset it.
