Hello people. I am Ayushman Dash and I am a Master student at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. I will not boast about my academic achievements here because you can find it in my CV. I would rather tell you who I am as a person.
I was born and brought up in a small city called Bhubaneswar in India. It is the capital city of the state Odisha, but I still call it a small city because for me it is still a small city. I spent the first 22 years of my life in Bhubaneswar, in which I found my best friends, learnt to play the guitar, played in multiple bands, and found the love of my life. I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering in 2013 and then I left Bhubaneswar and moved to Hyderabad to start working in a company called TCS (TATA Consultancy Services Limited).
At a very early stage in my professional career, I realised that I was not made for working in a multinational company. I hated the stereotypical cubicles and felt claustrophobic in the ODCs (Offshore Development Centers). I left TCS in 5 months and joined a startup called Reverie Language Technologies in Banaglore. When I joined Reverie there were less than 15 full-time employees (this includes the CEOs and the CTO of the company)[Ahh! I feel nostalgic while writing this]. People asked me “Why did you leave a well-paying job in a multinational company and joined a startup?”. To be honest, I had nothing to say to them. I just knew that I belonged somewhere else and not in those huge glass buildings. I am glad that I chose the road not taken.
In Bangalore, I stayed in my elder brother’s apartment with him and his roommates. Every single day in Bangalore was amazing, mostly because of the people I was around. The work at Reverie was extremely challenging and I was loaded with responsibilities. My mentor/brother/very good friend Bhupen, who was a colleague of mine at Reverie once told me that he was not going to join Reverie at first. When he denied the offer, Reverie’s CTO/founder Vivek Pani told him
“Do you want to climb someone else’s ladder or do you want to build your own and let someone else climb it?”
These words moved him and he decided to join Reverie and he is happily working there till date. This story moved me in a way that is difficult for me to put in words. This was exactly how I had always felt, but sadly, I am not as good an orator as Vivek is that I could put this thought into words. In Reverie the experience that I gained was, in my brother’s words “equivalent to 4-5 years of experience in a multinational company” (he used to work in Infosys back then).
The craving for knowledge has always driven me. The same craving drove me towards going back to academia. I realised the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Reverie, where we dealt with challenging problems every day, which required the knowledge of AI to solve them. As a part of a small startup, we were already loaded. We used to work day and night to build the basic framework that the company is built upon. By August 2014, Reverie had grown quite a lot. There were many new full-time employees. The best part was that it was in its final stage of VC funding. By then, I had already decided that I will leave for Germany to pursue my academic career and do a Masters in Computer Science specialising in Artificial Intelligence. My colleagues were not very happy that I was leaving (of course), but were extremely supportive and understood my craving for knowledge.
In August 2015 A new life began for me in Germany. It felt fresh and at the same time slightly overwhelming. I had a lot of subjects that I could take and I had all the freedom in this entire world to do whatever I want. It took me a while to get used the environment and learn a little bit of Deutsche, but I got used to it in a few days. To be very honest, I spent most of the time in labs studying or working. I did not even miss out on anything. Till date, in my free time, I read scientific papers and enjoy every bit of it. I worked on many projects. Some independently and some in collaboration with colleagues. It did not take me a lot of time to get a student job and I started working again. I made sure to take every AI lecture that was being offered in my university (University of Kaiserslautern) and by the beginning of Winter 2016 I had already found what I wanted to pursue further, that was Machine Learning. Unlike a lot of other people, I took up Machine Learning and Deep Learning very early during my Masters (because of my experience in Reverie). I wrote two papers by the end of March 2107 and currently I am working on 3 projects that might turn out to be good publication material.
I love to do research for the science involved in it. I like to explore new things, understand how things work, and program a lot. I am currently working on my thesis, which is on Visual Question Answering. I plan to further specialise in Natural Language Understanding using Deep Learning. I am lucky to have found equal minded people here who share the same passion as me. Prof. Marcus Liwicki, my mentor/supervisor here has started an independent lab called MindGarage and I, as a part of it am helping him in building its foundations in our university. I have worked in 3 companies in Germany while studying and I have made a lot of new friends. I am working in the Deep Learning Competence Center at Insiders Technologies now, and I am also helping Reverie in bootstrapping their very own Machine Intelligence team.
If you want to collaborate with me then please send me an email with your project idea. I would be more than happy to be a part of something new and exciting. MindGarage believes in open minded research and welcomes anyone who is interested in Machine Learning too. So feel free to contact us.
