After working for two and a half years as a research associate at Cognizant, a leading MNC in the field of Information Technology, I want to return to an academic setting to enhance my knowledge in the field of Computer Science. The following essay provides an outline of my experience and motivation to pursue graduate study at Arizona State University. I always had a strong fascination with Mathematics and Physics, which led me to take them up as my major subjects in high school. Relentless effort in high school got me into the top 0.5% candidates who appeared for Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), which secured me admission into Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. With the support of my mentors and further exploration on the field, …show more content…
One of them is building a Natural Language Question-Answering System using Knowledge Graphs. Inspired by Google’s implementation of knowledge graph, we built our own domain specific QA system with a knowledge graph as its answering source. This helped me delve into the depths and limitations of the methods currently available in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and also introduced me to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning(KR) and Graphs. Commending my skill and enthusiasm in the aforementioned areas, my manager offered me an opportunity to work for a client, a leading retailer, on building an Intelligent Merchandising Hierarchy Graph. I worked alongside a team of five building a robust semantic data model solution leveraging the advantages that a graph database holds over a more conventional relational database, which improved my understanding of graphs and databases. This also strengthened my conviction that graph, with its simple structure and fast traversal capabilities, can be efficiently used to implement a Knowledge Representation. While teaching me a lot, my time at this company also made me realize that there is a lot more to learn and a graduate study would be an ideal step for my