Beyond
Boundaries.
“Attitude is all that matters.”
Where it started
My journey in computer science started nearly a decade ago. From a young age, I was fascinated by computer technology. The exposure from my high-school project — a football manager simulator using C++ — motivated me to pursue a degree in computer science. Eventually, I got into the College of Engineering, Guindy, at Anna University in Chennai.
The research years
During my second year of undergrad, I gravitated towards the captivating realm of Human-Computer Interaction and Machine Learning. It was at Solarillion Foundation, a non-profit research organization, where this passion took root. As the group leader of four, I led a project centered on creating an affordable static gesture recognition system using microcontrollers and accelerometers.
Witnessing the technology read gestures with over 95% accuracy from a simple glove — all within a budget of under $20 — solidified my enthusiasm. I co-authored our pioneering research, titled “Low-cost static gesture recognition system using MEMS accelerometers”, presenting it at the Global IoT Summit 2017 in Switzerland.
From there, I co-led a team of six researching simple dynamic gestures, where popular devices were not cost efficient. We were able to build a device that came in at less than $10. This work, “A Generic Multi-modal Dynamic Gesture Recognition System using Machine Learning”, was presented at FICC 2018 in Singapore by my co-lead and friend.
Microsoft, and then Geneva
In my third year of college, I was the only student from the computer science department selected for an internship at Microsoft in Hyderabad. We worked on a project called “Shopping on Cortana” — and during this period, I decamped to present my first paper on June 6, 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland.
This was an important period in my life.
The day everything changed
On the last day of the summit, I returned to my room because of a headache, fainted, and went into a coma. My teammates alerted the hotel. Paramedics arrived, rushed me to the HUG hospital, and diagnosed a ruptured aneurysm — a brain haemorrhage.
They saved me at the right time. The surgery left me with severe right-hemiparesis. This incident completely changed my perception of life.
As my family doctor worded it, “my purpose of visit to Geneva was to present the paper and the destiny’s purpose was to save me.”
Recovery and forward
I am still recovering from the effects of the brain haemorrhage, but it has not dented my dreams in the slightest.
After recovery, I returned to Microsoft for a second summer internship, worked as a data scientist at Sigtuple applying generative models to medical imaging, then crossed continents for graduate school at Arizona State University — where I researched few-shot learning for immunology and earned my M.S. in Computer Science.
Today I work at Pacific Gas and Electric in the Bay Area, designing the data platform and ML infrastructure behind utility operations. Pipelines, anomaly detection, observability, and increasingly, generative AI that has to earn its place in production.
The journey from Chennai to Santa Clara was not a straight line. It was an odyssey — shaped by curiosity, cross-cultural leaps, a surgery that reset everything, and the stubborn belief that attitude is all that matters.