I hail from state called Gujarat. It’s a land where people converse in Gujarati language and they speak rarely in English. My secondary and higher secondary education was completed from Gujarati Medium school.

That’s why I found difficult to adjust to the college life during engineering course. However,this was simply not the time for me to give up. I, coming from an orthodox Gujarati family, had to fight to get the admission into engineering college as engineering was considered a profession meant only for boys. I turned to my classmates and professors for help and they advised me to read fictional novels.This helped me improve my english a great deal as after having initial setback, my academics started improving and my results improved by a good scale year on year. I scored 76% in my final year after having scored 57 % in the first year. I have been able to score 7.5 in IELTS as well.

My point here is I am motivated individual and with a little help can excel in the field if chance is given. All I am looking for is that chance to be given.One day in the morning, I saw a quote on the intranet page of the company that I currently work for. It goes like this “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by what you didn’t do than what you did” – Mark Twain. This quote got me thinking that what is that one thing that would haunt my life if I didn’t try now. Only one answer came to me and that was Further Studies. After working for years in Samsung Research India Ltd for its 11 flagship models(Samsung Galaxy S3,S4,.

.S8) and more than 200 variants, I realized that while business of samsung phones and their quality was going up quarter on quarter, the learning graph of my career was slowly going down. Although my struggle with family continued regarding the profession that I chose, working for a few years and going through breakup in my personal life, I had finally found a courage from that simple quote to do something I want and decide what is best for me.

I, luckily enough, didn’t face hurdles this time.During my undergraduate studies at the Electronics Engineering department of SVNIT College of Engineering, subjects like Microprocessors, Analog and Digital Communication and Digital Circuits interested me the most. However, my interest in digital signal processing was something else. I was awestruck by the potential of image processing, more so by the manner in which its faster and more powerful methods revolutionized the entire movie industry in a decade. I was now determined to focus on image processing and video processing during my final year project.

I elected to do a project on data compression techniques and applied the concepts to two dimensional still images to reduce the data bandwidth while transferring file from one device to another. This project helped me establish connection to real world problems which are still valid at this time.During my first job at Aricent, I had opportunity to work on video codec standards. This work was the highlight of my academic career. I got to explore the various ARM architectures which drive many devices of our day to day life including most of our mobile phones,TVs and tablets today. It also helped me improve my knowledge on basics of operating system, system optimization and what issues real time operating system have.

Next obvious choice for me to apply this knowledge to practical applications. Working in Samsung Research,India gave me opportunity to do that. I joined samsung as a senior software engineer and today I work as a chief engineer and architect for many projects.

I designed and implemented the system for several multimedia and Gallery applications. The system I designed was added to almost all flagship devices that Samsung has released till now including Samsung Galaxy S3,S4 to S8 and in future phones as well in coming years.I was able to work in fields ranging from Multimedia, Computer Graphics and Connectivity and came across various software and hardware challenges in day to day life to develop the product end to end.While my present job has helped me develop a thorough practical insight into end to end system development, the industry environment that I am currently in cannot support my desire for research. I have built extensive experience and skills in multimedia, but I must build on these to achieve my goal of undertaking cutting-edge research with specific reference to Computer vision.

I therefore believe that I must return to the academic world for further growth and there is only one logical destination for my postgraduate studies: the Canada. It is agreed that many of the Canadian higher educational institutions compete with leading and famous universities from other countries. However, Canadians try to understand and appreciate the cultures, customs and traditions of all people whether they are canadians or not. Studying overseas in the Canada will thus give me not only a greater range of academic skills but also teach me diversity and prepare me to take new challenges.

Some of the reasons why University of BC is considered quite successful are the career-focused programmes, curriculum adapted to current events and the needs of the job market and graduates’ high employability rate. Therefore, I am applying to join MSc in Computer Science program, commencing in the fall of 2018. My interests lie in learning the concepts of computer vision and AI and applying the same to multimedia(audio and video) domain. I have seen some great research work going on in UBC and I hope that I would be given an opportunity to work under professors, especially experts in the field of computer imaging for instance Mr Wolfgang Heidrich whose main research area of interest is computational imaging and display.

I found his expertise related to multiplex holograms and convolutional sparse coding in resonance with my research interests in computer vision field. I am also interested to learn under professor Mr Leonid Sigal who has done several patents and papers. For instance, I find his patent on generating story graphs out of online images and youtube videos fascinating because I also have worked on creating stories out of Gallery images as a part of project while working in Samsung Research Ltd. I am convinced that I am well prepared for the challenges of studying in your master’s program because of my extensive academic and practical background, which I have described above.