Statement of Purpose

Suraj Agarwal, Computer Science

Having been brought up in a small village of two square kilometers area, scarcities were always at peak and
opportunities minimal. However, with each limitation serving as an opportunity to surpass the expectation,
circumstances taught me to work under constrained environments. The paucity of good coaching facilities inculcated
in me the habit of self-study and dearth of good colleges in the vicinity motivated me to compete with the best brains
in the country, thus securing a seat in PES Institute of Technology(PESIT), ranked 1 st in the state and 18th in India in
the field of Computer Science.

My penchant for technology dates back to school days where projects like School Library Automation System
strengthened my technical base. Having topped the school for 12 consecutive years, along with a reward in the
district level science seminar and the highest percentage in the district in the higher secondary exams, helped me bag
the best outgoing student award. My curiosity in the field of Science grew faster than my age and the urge to find
answers to questions like how does communication take place over the phone, how does the hard disk store data, etc
made Computer Science a natural choice.

I pursued undergraduate study as an opportunity to find solutions to my childhood curiosities and the profound
understanding of the concepts fetched me a CGPA of 9.54, placing me among the top 2% in the department and top
1% in the batch of 800 students. My consistent performance earned me the best student of the department award in
the 3rd year and Prof. MRD scholarship for 4 consecutive years.

My alliance with research commenced as early as in the second year when I started to work as a research assistant
for SAP Labs’ 1st Research and Innovation Award, under the guidance of Mr. A. Srinivas, Professor, PESIT. The
project was aimed at developing data mining tools for rural health management and disease prevention. My
responsibilities encompassed implementation of SVM kernels, mathematical and statistical data analysis, developing
data cleaning algorithms, implementing SQL loader, developing mobile application for central data storage and
Oracle Apex applications to predict the output class of the data record. Our relentless efforts culminated in the
installation of this application in PES Medical College at Kuppam, India.

My first brush with research further bolstered my interest and I engaged myself in a 6 month operations research
project “Diet Scheduling” under the guidance of Prof. N. Guruprasad. It entailed self-developed algorithms to
educate the rural people about healthy food habits and to provide them with a minimum cost balanced diet based on
their food preferences. This project won the best project award in the Intuit Code Carnival and the third prize for
implementation in the Synapse Competition at PESIT. The idea was published at International conference of Euro
2010, Lisbon in June 2010.

In order to inaugurate a research lab at PESIT, Nokia selected me to represent the college at QT training in Mysore
under the eminent trainer Kirill Krinkin, Professor, Petersberg University. After the training, I undertook a project
called GPS Tracker, a local search engine to retrieve data based on location. It included supplementary features like
weather information, conference alert, offline data retrieval, emailing the data, etc and was awarded the best project
idea by the University of Finland. As a token of appreciation, Prof. Kirill exalted me an opportunity to work with
him on the open source project called Health Monitoring Network that was aimed at developing mobile solutions for
tracking health, which resulted in a paper at Fruct International Conference, Finland in November 2011.

My technical flair helped me get a 6 month internship in the ‘Network Implementation Plan’ Project at Cisco. It
involved automating the process of router configuration. The individual automation steps were intelligently
collecting customer requirements, feeding to appropriate design phase, configuring the router to provide desired
functionalities and performing performance conformation tests. A full time offer from Cisco came as a reward.
Subsequently, I interned at NetApp for 6 months to develop a synthetic client for CIFS protocol. This client is being
widely used in NetApp to reproduce customer issues corresponding to CIFS protocol. Impressed by my skills, my
manager recommended me to the best team (File System Team) of NetApp, where I have been working since July
2011 on developing algorithms for creating and deleting snapshots of the file system.

My insatiable desire for research led me to do my final year project in Indian Institute of Science (IISc) under the
guidance of H. S. Jamadagni, Professor, IISc and Kavi Mahesh, Professor, PESIT. The 6 months of dedicated efforts
culminated into significant results in the field of Chirp Recognition, wherein we successfully identified 20 birds in
highly noisy environments. Further, it served as a platform for language identification and language independent
speaker recognition. The project was guided by the motive of calamity prediction based on birds migration pattern
and was adjudged the second best final year project in the national level JED – I competition.

Apart from academics, I have organized 2 major college fest events, served as a class representative, worked as a
student assistant and was also appointed the placement coordinator. I believe knowledge is best used when imparted
to others, thus I conducted placement training for juniors and assisted in placement training for batch mates. Hence,
I bring with me qualities that are imperative for any academician.

My ever augmenting desire to learn has abetted me to confidently explore the breadths of Computer Science. My
fair exposure to research drives me even further to delve into the depths of Computer Science, particularly in the
field of Systems and Networking. My recent works in the field of protocols, networking, file system and storage
have helped me realize my interest of exploring efficient storage solutions for ever expanding data by thorough
understanding of systems and networking concepts. Thus, MS with thesis is perfectly the next cogent step towards
my long-term goals of rendering my services to promote the culture of research in India.

My interest in Stanford University arises from its eminent research environment, adept faculties and dedicated
academic culture. The pioneering work being carried out by Professor John Ousterhout on RAMCloud project and
Assistant Professor Philip Levis on full duplex wireless project has further whetted my research appetite. I
thoroughly understand what it requires to be a part of the top ranked graduate programs in CS and all these years I
have been preparing for the same. I am sanguine that I possess the dexterity, passion and motivation to contribute
significantly to the research being carried out in the institution and I eagerly look forward to join your coveted
institution that houses people with diverse intellect and provides an ideal ambience for learning.