Ravindra B Gadde
Artificial Intelligence Research Engineer
5 years work-ex (2.5 yrs academic + 2.5 yrs Iindustrial)
Research engineer @ LG IRIS ID SYSTEMS INC.
Something about your background !
Bachelor’s Degree - ECE from VR Siddhartha engineering college, Vijayawada
Master’s Degree - Electrical Engineering with a major in Signals and systems and specialization in Biometrics from West Virginia University in USA
Note : All electric and electronics majors comes under one umbrella in USA
My father worked an Assistant engineer at V.T.P.S(now NTTPS). So, I grew up watching big machines produce electricity. This fascinated me and I was drawn towards electrical engineering.
Tell us about your work in layman’s terms
OK. I will give it a try.
Computers as we know, can only understand the instructions we humans provide. If a video taken by camera is fed to the computer, it can just play it but can’t interpret what’s happening in the video. My role as an Artificial intelligence engineer is to develop algorithms and write code to make computer understand what’s in the video and take decisions without any human intervention.
Videos are nothing but a series of images/frames. I use machine learning, computer vision and image processing techniques to analyze these series of images. Indirectly, we are responsible for providing vision to the blind processors. Making computers see is just one subset of artificial intelligence.
Similarly we can make computers hear, smell, taste and touch ( Check out Apple’s Siri )
Have you always wanted to be an AI Research Engineer?
Yes I have. My project on “108-Emergency Vehicle Fake call identification” laid the foundation for me in this field. Dealing with fake call was a major concern for the staff of 108. That was the first research problem I took up. I started analyzing speech signals from the call to identify the fake ones. Back then, I was not aware that it is called Biometrics. This project secured me admission into one of the renowned universities for biometrics in USA and there is no looking back from then on. I am happy to be doing what I love to do.
How does your typical weekday at work look like ?
My day starts at 7:00 AM. I listen to some music while I get ready for my office. My office starts at 8:30 AM and ends at 5:30 PM with one hour lunch break.
As I am into research, I read a lot of research papers the entire day to come up with an engineering solution for the problem assigned to me. If I find a solution you will find me sitting in front of the computer coding the solution, else it hard to locate me in the office.
Example Problem Statement -
After 5:30PM, I hit back to gym. Yes, I am a fitness freak.
7:00 PM to 9:30 PM, is the time I spend for myself - make calls to India, cook my food or watch some videos on youtube.
After 9:30PM I spend most of the time on my side projects. My day ends at around 1:30AM.
I am located in the suburbs of New York City (NYC). I spend my wednesday evenings travelling to NYC to attend meetups that resonate with my work or other interests. This is the best part of my week schedule because I feel meetups bring together similar kind of people with similar ideas to share and socialize with.
What are some of the most exciting and challenging things about your work.
When you are assigned a new task for research, the task itself is a challenge. This applies to any kind of research. You will sometimes end up in a state what I call as a “Black out” state, where every other solution of yours doesn’t seem to workout. That’s the dangerous part.
Apart from this, one other major challenges is Time Management. In research, it is difficult to define hard deadlines when the project is first proposed. You never know whether you can meet the deadline or not, also you will not be confident enough of finding the solution. Most people use the “try fast, fail fast” technique to handle this challenge.
The most exciting part about my kind of work is when you find a solution for the research problem. That day, you will feel like you conquered the world.
How do you spend your weekends ?
When I am with my friends, I just hang out and try to be more spontaneous rather than sticking to a plan. Rest of the weekends, I spend time for my self. I attend Hackathons. It’s fun and a good place to meet different people. If not Hackathons, I just relax. I go to library or explore new places on my bicycle. I am not an avid reader but I do read some inspiring novels if they are compelling enough.
What are the skills required?
As you can see, I talked more about research and less about my work as an artificial intelligence engineer. The role of “AI Research Engineer” involves a lot of research. So, most importantly, you just need to have patience and perseverance to see the task through to its completion.
To be an artificial intelligence engineer, you should be good at coding, probability, mathematics and statistics.
If you want to do what I do - provide vision to robot, in addition to the above skills, you should also have the knowledge of Signal processing, especially Image processing. With the knowledge of probability,coding and image processing you can start solving the computer vision problems.
Tips n Tricks to wannabes
Who ever wish to take this path, can get in touch with me through linkedin.
I will try my best and will be more than happy to help you.
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