Statement of Purpose

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the

pattern.

------ A. N. Whitehead

Career Plans
Pattern Recognition has been a major dominant research field in the Computer Science discipline for quite a long time due to its wide application in almost every field, from Biological Sciences to Mechanical Engineering. Research and application of soft computing approaches in Neuroscience attracted a vast number of researchers from diverse fields. It has been often said that Neuroscience will be at the pinnacle of the next computing decade. The desire to become the part of this next era has motivated me to opt for a career in research in the field of Pattern Recognition and Neurosciences. In order to fulfil my research goals, the next step should be to pursue doctoral study, whose effect in a successful career is paramount.

What I want to contribute I am looking to learn pattern recognition domain thoroughly as well as developing novel algorithms to deal with real life problems. One of these problems is classification of hand movement (Left or Right). Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) is that kind of an application, where the problem is to develop a model captures the movement, gathering information from the EEG signal. Now, I am currently applied Sensor Selection approach to this CSP problem. But I think this area is of worth researching which motivates me to do thorough research on this problem. What I have learnt is that Biological Science is a mixture of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science and there are a lot of possible directions. My interest is inclined to this domain of Neuroscience where I can apply my knowledge of Pattern Recognition. What I have My keen interest in Pattern Recognition domain got ignited from the very first interaction with my undergraduate supervisor Dr. Sanjoy Kumar Saha. After an introductory course on Pattern Recognition in my undergraduate curriculum, I met Dr. Saha without any clear knowledge about the undergraduate dissertation topic. I had no knowledge whatsoever about what to do in my dissertation. Dr. Saha gave a brief and motivated speech regarding research opportunities in Computer Science majorly focusing in Signal Processing area. By himself, an Electronics graduate, he made me understood some of the very basics of signals in a lucid way. At the end of that interaction with him, he asked me to do a survey in signal classification problem. After half a year, we wrote my first paper in an IEEE symposium (IITA 2009) on speech/non-speech two class classification. My first journal paper got accepted in International Journal of Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (IJSIP

2012) on speech/music/song classification. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Audio Classification which won the best B.E thesis Medal. I continue my work under Dr. Saha which is now left with song genre classification. We had six international and national conferences (in chronological order) (IITA 2009, ICECT 2011, ICIP 2011, SIP 2011, CUBE 2012, ICACNI 2013) and two journals (IJSIP 2012, Springer Plus, 2013) together. Recently, we had submitted a paper on International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies . Dr. Sahas enthusiastic and tireless motivation towards soft computing area helped me to choose
my career goal as a researcher. I want to pursue masters in this area, so I have joined Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, one of the pioneering institution in the area of pattern recognition. I got some excellent and renowned professors like Prof. Mandar Mitra, Prof. Bhargab. B. Bhattacharya, Prof. Bhabani. P. Sinha as my teachers. I did my masters dissertation under Prof. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, who introduced me to the Multi-Objective Optimization problem. I wrote my masters thesis on Incorporating -dominance in MultiObjective Optimization: A study in AMOSA under Prof. Bandyopadhyay. Our assiduous effort results in a Applied Soft Computing publication and another journal submission in Information Sciences. During summer 2011, I got the opportunity to do my internship in Yahoo! R & D labs, Bangalore. My mentor, Sourangshu Bhattachrya, a Indian Statistical Institute graduate, assisted me to learn web mining. I contributed to an ongoing work on word segmentation which bought us a publication in 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2012). During my Masters final year, I met Prof. Nikhil. R. Pal (Fellow, IEEE), ISI Kolkata. I found myself lucky enough to get Prof. Pal, a renowned scientist in fuzzy and pattern recognition domain, as my guide. I went through some original papers of Prof. Pal, some on dimensionality reduction and others with Prof. James Bezdek on fuzzy learning. We had written two manuscripts, one is on Feature Selection submitted to IEEE Transaction on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (Minor Revision, Resubmitted on 12.05.13) another on Sensor Selection together with Prof. C. T. Lin (Fellow, IEEE) which is submitted to International Journal of Neural Systems. I have acquired 1st rank in masters curriculum and selected for ISIAA gold medal. After my graduation from Indian Statistical Institute, I have joined Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit, ISI Kolkata, as project linked personnel under Prof. Bidyut. B. Chaudhuri. I engaged in solving Inpainting Problem using multiobjective approach. Then I joined Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata as Visiting Researcher. I worked with Prof. Pal on manifold learning techniques. We have developed a novel Sammons Error based dimensionality reduction technique for manifold unfolding. But, unfortunately we found a similar work was already done some years back. After that, I moved on to Fuzzy Rule Selection.

Why UChicago?
University of Chicago is one of the top notch universities in the world with renowned faculties in my intended research domain. Prof. Yali Amits 2D, 3D image matching, object recognition work motivated me. On the other hand, Prof. Rzhetsky and Prof. Stevens work on bioinformatics precisely molecular interaction networks and prediction of gene expression respectively got me interested in this domain. Prof. Hinrichs research on protein folding and Prof. Kindlmanns image analysis and visualization work are really challenging. Working under these notable researchers not only fulfils my dream of becoming a successful researcher but also my research potential would be adorned and flourished.