HackMobile, Qualcomm

I first participated in HackMobile in 2017. We developed a recipe suggestion smartphone app that used a pre-trained neural network to identify food in your refrigerator.

In June 2018, we participated in HackMobile for the second time. This time, we developed an ultra-low cost, low-power, line-of-sight data transfer system using visible light (essentially, a data transfer system using visible light instead of bluetooth or radio-frequency). We managed to achieve top 10 in the first round, becoming a finalist. Unfortunately, we were eliminated in the voting stage of the competition.

The third time was the charm in June 2019. Our team combined Bose's AR glasses and Azure speech SDK to develop a low-latency speech-to-speech translation system. The final product was gesture-enabled sunglasses that automagically translated foreign speech into a language of your choice. We won Judge's Favorite in the first round, passed the voting round with a large margin and were selected as the top team in the Shark Tank style pitch stage by top Qualcomm execs.

Artificial Intelligence TA

Over Spring 2019 and Summer 2019, I was a teaching assistant for Prof Ansaf Salleb-Aouissi for the course COMS 4701 Artificial Intelligence at Columbia.

It was a well-established course - so, on one hand, course materials were quite streamlined but on the other, assignment specifications, starter code and grading scripts had become quite outdated. The first thing I advocated for involved completely migrating the course to Python 3. Python 2 was nearing end-of-life. With agreement, I rewrote and streamlined skeleton code for all legacy assignments. Besides, I also designed the specifications, started code and grading script for a completely new assignment as a simple introduction to Keras.

Besides design and migration to Python 3, I also actively tried to improve responsiveness throughout the course logistics. The average Piazza response time improved to 19 minutes in Summer 2019.

Programming Challenges

BlindData

Achieved perfect scores on the BlindData adaptive programming test to win the $5000 grand prize (99th percentile)

Microsoft Last Slice

Finalist for Microsoft’s Last Slice challenge (top 1000)

Poker tournament

CIE A-Levels

  • Top in the world in AS Math (2016)
  • Top in Nepal in A-Level Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math (2017)