Stanford Statement of Purpose
...Foundation Scholarship Examinations held in March (‘01). The subjects tested were Engineering Mathematics, Computer Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Civil Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. These examinations are meant to be particularly challenging as they test the ability of the student to demonstrate knowledge and application skills considerably beyond what is traditionally expected of in the classroom. Over the past three years, the projects I undertook centred primarily on the development of software applications. This allowed me to develop rigorous programming skills in JAVA & C++. Other software packages include MATLAB, PSPICE and Erlang, a concurrent programming language developed by Ericsson. Most of my programming initiatives in the Junior Freshman year involved JAVA applications. Among the ones undertaken, two were quite challenging .One was to design and implement a fully functional (graphical) Geographical Route Finder and the other was to develop a JAVA implementation of the popular game CoreWar. Another major project I undertook was to design a GUI based MiniGolf program, done entirely in C++. Last summer, I was selected as a Research Assistant to work on a project aimed at implementing a Wireless Ad-Hoc Network (WAND) test-bed in Dublin, under the supervision of Dr. Vinny Cahill (Head of Distributed Systems Group (DSG), Dept. of Computer Science, Trinity College). It was a joint undertaking between the DSG group and the Dynamic Interactions Group (headed by Dr. Paolo Dini) of MIT’s Media Lab Europe. During this period, I was able to learn in detail the working of Wireless Networks. My responsibility as an Ad-Hoc Protocol Tester and System Administrator gave me invaluable hands-on experience in the field and I was able to learn in a very explorative manner. Consequently, in a departure from the first three years of undergraduate software design considerations, I decided to concentrate more on computer networks in my final year. In fact, the WAND project piqued my interest in learning more about Wireless Networks, through research or otherwise. As my final year project, I decided to implement a ' Sensor based ad-hoc network' under the supervision of Dr. Linda Doyle, a lecturer in the Dept. of Electronic Engineering, Trinity College and also a Collaborating Research Scientist at MIT’s Media Lab Europe. The project involves using different types of sensors to collect useful information to be shared among the nodes of an ad-hoc network. I have also begun to think more analytically about the existing limitations of contemporary wired networks and also some non ad-hoc wireless networks. I am interested in ad-hoc networks particularly because of their ease-of-use and potential of ubiquity. I hold the opinion that ad-hoc networks have tremendous capacity to eliminate many obstacles faced by the existing ‘wired’ communication routines by providing an opportunity to integrate the various segments and modes currently employed. Geographical independence and redundancy of centralised monitoring are only two privileges I envisage ad-Hoc networks will offer. Progressing through my final year, my growing interest in Wireless Networks has cemented my decision to venture into postgraduate studies in the field of Networks; Wireless (Ad-Hoc) Networks in particular. In my graduate studies, I would like to focus my research on optimising routing protocols and communication stacks for wireless systems. My research would include, but not...