When I was in my second year of BE in Nitte University, I had an unusual opportunity to work with a research group consisting of my seniors working on a Machine Learning problem for a biomedical application. I was the only junior member in the team with zero experience in scientific computing. I did not have the functional knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings of machine learning or data science. Yet, for some reason, I was specifically asked for by the then head of the computer science department, Dr.Nileema Reddy.
My job was simple, I was to learn and teach the mathematics behind algebraic topology to the remaining members of the research group. Several presentations were done. I learnt algebraic topology well and delivered my understanding of the topic to the best of my ability to the team. As I recall now, they were some of the best months of my life in Nitte where I really learnt something.
Although, owing to the rest of the members in the team being in their final year (And only some of them interested to continue the research), I guess the project was left midway. I still do not know what happened with it. It was unfortunate for me specially since I found no gratification in terms of publishing out of whatever little efforts I had put in.
Today, I’m working on my master’s thesis at IIT-Delhi. My research is in Celiac Disease identification using Deep Learning. Recently, I was posed with a problem in my work to develop a differentiable loss function that would incorporate the clinically relevant information in the learning path of the DNN. I was stuck for months with this problem and just a couple of weeks ago, I revisited algebraic topology and its application in representation learning.
Couple of weeks later, I have succeeded in designing my experiments based on the principles of algebraic topology and I’m waiting for their results from my super-computing node.
Looking back, I don’t think even for a second that all the knowledge I gained on algebraic topology as a novice engineer has gone to waste. If anything, it is coming back to help me in ways I never imagined. That’s the end of this story.
Read more about my research and books at: www.ajeypaik.com
