paavanVasudev

I have worked on the following positions:

I have been on a 100% tuition waiver Graduate Research Assistantship at Georgia Tech at Center for Geographic Information Systems under Dr. James Tsai and Dr. Zhaohua Wang. I am currently working on developing a web-based application to predict pavement's durability and reliability for Georgia Department of Transportation. The project involves modeling the life-cycle of existing pavement structures, recording serviceability parameters, and combining them with the climatic, regional and soil metrics and traffic data to compute the working stress at various levels and finally predict a pavement's durability and reliability.

In other words, a lot of applied mathematics. I loved this project as I got the opportunity to work in close contact with our clients to develop applications that not only exceed current accuracy standards, but also have a user interface appealing to end users.

Another component involved creating software for hand-held PDA devices that would enable pavement engineers working "on-site" on the road to record their observations and suggestions on the database server, which are then made available to design engineers to make their recommendation.

The following technologies were used:

• PDA Sync: C#, SQL,  Oracle, ActiveSync, ESRI MapObjects, Windows CE
• Web Application: Java, JavaEE Web Technologies, SQL,  Oracle, Crystal Reports, AJAX, DOM

Finally, my responsibilities: we worked as a team of two graduate students under two supervisors.

• Design the database
• Design the applications
• Design the access levels
• Program the system
• Act on the suggestions of our in-house HCI expert
• Communication with end users

This was a project started as an experiment by three sophomore students, me included, which went on to become a large establishment in itself.

In the second year of our Bachelor's degree at G B Pant University, two of my Computer Science friends and I decided to create an enterprise application that would help students with registration in the university. When presented to the university administrators, it got them excited and they decided to purchase it and fund further additions. To make the process easier, the Chair of Computer Science Department offered his help, and "Software Development Center" was created. Tools for university automation, financial accounting, administration, fee management, digital library, examination and result analysis, timetable management and report creation was created. In the process, hired students to assist with all this work, and we would train them as well.

There were many interesting stories here, ask me about them when we meet and I promise you will greatly entertained.

Technologies used: for many reasons, we decided early on to deep the development as close to Microsoft platform as possible: C#, Visual C++, Visual Basic .NET, ASP, SQL, Oracle, Crystal Reports - they were all used at different levels. My responsibilities: I was the co-founder of this "revolution", I can't say more than that.

If you have lived in India, it's hard to not to work for the TATAs. I did an internship here that involved developing a moving object tracking software for infrared road image processing system. Apart from me, the software developer, the team included a project manager, an electrical engineer to provide camera interaction interface and a MBA grad to perform the feasibility analysis.

When I reached Pune for this internship, I realized that my success in this group will depend on how soon I can turn out the whole application so that there is ample time for testing and further improvements. During the first stage, we decided on the algorithms - the medians, the Laplacians etc., the technologies to be used, the library interfaces and final shipment. Then we programmed the system, reporting to the project manager every two days. I completed the system well before the deadline. At the end, I gave a presentation at the passing-out conference in the company explaining my work.

Technologies Used: C#.

At IIIT Allahabad, I worked on the Universal Digital Library project which was started by Carnegie Mellon University, and was running in many universities across many nations. The project (I quote) "seeks to digitize books of common interest to different Communities of Interest (COI) and make them available in a manner that is independent of language, location and time."

While the actual internship had to start in May, I started to work on this project under Dr. Sudip Sanyal well from February 2006. I developed segmentation and recognition modules for the optical character recognition engine for an Indian script (Devanagari). I would receive cleaned imaged from the planetary scanner technology developed by CMU, and segment the images into vowels, consonants, conjuncts, accent marks, punctuation, and numerals. These segments would then be fed into the recognition engine. I worked on recognition of constructs, which can be really convoluted in Devanagari.

Dr. Sanyal was the best supervisor I have worked with. This summer I spent at the traditional city of Allahabad will always remain in my memories.

Technologies Used: C++ (segmentation), Java (OCR engine).

At IIT Roorkee, I worked on a research project with the aim to study various effects of an array of image processing algorithms such as histogram processing and support vector models on MRI images. Aim is to research on comparative advantage of these methods and employ them into a medical scan recognition application. Our target area was Gall Bladder. It is not a good thing to look at for long periods.

Technologies Used: C++, Matlab.