2023

• theater_comedy [hobby] Improv
  I did 6 months of Improv Theater this year and completely fell in love with it. I've always wanted to be able to think up witty comments on the spot, and be able to go up on stage fearlessly. I practised with Rice Cookies and ImprovStar, and became a part of a house team of 8, named A Void in Improv.
• school [edu] German, B1
  I got my German B1 certificate! I chose to learn German with a 1:1 tutor online. Though expensive, I've realized hiring a tutor is a very effective tool to keep myself consistent. I'm far more confident with the language now, and would say B2 is within reach.
• code [hustle] Crearo is Back!
  I started working on side projects again! More than anything, I've missed thinking of new ideas, implementing them, iterating over them, and releasing them. More so without having to write documents and getting approvals. The digital detox / mindful phone use space interests me. 600+ (private) commits.
• work [work] Tech Lead, Android Auto Receiver Connectivity
  I led a team of 4 working on the Android Auto car connectivity. We worked with a number of car OEMs.

2022

• work [work] Top 5% at Google
  I was promoted to L4 at Google. I was rated in the top ~5% of the company during the yearly performance reviews.
• directions_run [sport] Half Marathon
  I ran my first half marathon in 1 hour 52 minutes.
• local_airport [travel] Travel, Leisure, Music Festivals
  I traveled around Europe properly for the first time after moving here post lockdown. I attended multi day music festivals for the first time - Primavera Barcelona, Superbloom Munich. I also set foot in America for the first time.

2020 + 1

• work [work] Android Auto Connectivity
  Dedicated a significant percentage of waking hours to work. Worked on the Android Auto app for Android Automotive. I played a key role in improving connectivity between Android phones and Android cars.
• school [work] Patent
  I patented two ideas! The ideas are in the Android for cars space. Automated wireless connection for operating system projection in vehicles and Defensive publication: Gracefully Recover Wifi.
• directions_car [edu] German Driver's License & Trainings
  I received my German Driver's License (which might I add was a little more effort than being trivial) and passed BMW's Driver Training B1 program where I learnt to drift cars (link).

2020

• school [life] Exercise and Food
  Spent ~4 months living with my brother, and the remaining part of the year alone at home in Munich. I learnt to run my spaceship.
• school [edu] German A2
  I spent ~3 months, 9 hours a week learning German. I can now have everyday conversations limited to a certain topic, and watch movies in German.
• home [life] Apartment in Munich
  Rented an apartment in the heart of Munich. Bought my very own furniture for the first time in life, and also live alone for the first time.

2019

• work [job] Google Munich
  Started a job at Google Munich in the Android Platforms and Ecosystems team!
• local_airport [life] Munich, Germany
  Moved to Munich, Germany.
• linked_camera [work] Cuda, C++
  Got over my fear of working on C++ and Cuda. Worked on the Nvidia TX2 platform to run real time fusion of thermal and visible cameras, detect vehicles in a video feed, run a thermal imaging pipeline to convert 14 bit image to greyscale 8 bit output, and build a GUI using QT.
• linked_camera [work] Thermal Pipeline
  [WIP] Worked on building an image processing pipeline to convert 14 bit thermal data to an 8 bit grayscale / 24 bit false colored output, making a scene independent imaging pipeline that gives good contrast. A lot of the algorithms were already written by my colleagues, but there was no unified codebase where we could experiment.
• school [edu] Data Structures, Algorithms
  If you want to win the game, you have to follow its rules. I decided I'd like to experience working at a big company, and all FAANG companies need their employees to have strong CS foundations and problem solving abilities. I dedicated a major chunk of my personal free time solving questions on interviewbit.com, and leetcode.com. I did about 300+ problems in total.
• linked_camera [work] User Management on Cameras
  User management was one of the biggest challenges for an offline first camera system. This was necessary because customers wanted to manage and use their cameras from our website. I designed and developed ground up the mechanism and flow for a secure offline first user management system.
• local_airport [life] Vilnius, Lithuania
  Moved to Vilnius, Lithuania, to be the first members setting up the Tonbo Imaging UAB European office. This is a research and development center, where my will work will involve creating a sensor package for autonomous driving.

2018

• location_searching [hobby] Autonomous Quad, Camera
  Fly a cheap chinese quad and eliminate drift + stabilize + direct it using a camera placed on top and a simplistic PID model. Using an nRF module to send serial commands to the drone, and aruco markers for pose estimation.
• linked_camera [hobby] Graphics, Android
  Created a graphics library on Android for custom rendering, applying OpenGLES filters, fast transfer of frames between the CPU and GPU, and streaming. I also ported my previous work on video stabilization to use this library.
• linked_camera [work] Camera-Client Architecture
  Rewrote our entire Snapdragon platform application layer codebase at Tonbo Imaging to standardize communication between different camera variants and various clients/softwares. This also included creating an SDK for vendors to create custom clients to communicate with the cameras. I also created libraries out of the re-usable elements within the software.
• local_airport [life] Month-long Travel
  Took a month off of work to travel North India and Bhutan. I also spent 10 days skiing in Auli during this period.

2017

• work [work] Hiring, Tonbo Imaging
  I hired a full time Android Engineer and a Python webdev intern, and boy was it difficult. I've always stressed on a company is only as good as it's people, but it's an insanely difficult challenge to hire good engineers with the right mindset.
• linked_camera [work] Real Time Video Stabilization using an IMU
  Worked on real-time 30 FPS video stabilization using an IMU and rendering using OpenGL. I learnt 3D geometry and camera modeling during this period.
• work [job] Tonbo Imaging
  Joined Tonbo Imaging, a camera company, in May as a full time employee. My work here will be to bring up the Qualcomm Snapdragon platform at the application layer, creating a base for vision problems, streaming, and fast image operations such as false coloring and video stabilization.
• linked_camera [work] Real Time Streaming
  I used Gstreamer on Android to stream real time video. During this period I understood how videos are stored, streamed, interact with displays, and a little bit about codecs and muxers, and various video color formats (RGB, YUV and the conversions between them). I also created a GStreamer Cookbook in C and Python for anyone trying their hand at GStreamer.

2016

• linked_camera [work] Thermal Face Detection
  Spent my first month exploring face detection in thermal video on a low-end mobile GPU. The limited GPU computation ability and limited facial features at a distance forced me to use a HoG feature descriptor and feed its results to a linear SVM. I detected once every 10 frames and used a KLT tracker, tracking points in the detected faces as it was computationally faster.
• work [internship] Tonbo Imaging
  Started interning at Tonbo Imaging, a camera company that designs and manufactures advanced imaging and sensor systems for military reconnaissance, infrastructure security and transportation safety. My work here will be to explore possibilities of building a camera on Android, perform vision analytics, explore OpenCV-CL-GL and validate real time streaming.
• book [research] Social Ties in Spatio-Temporal Data
  Co-published a paper on studying the role of temporal diversity in inferring social ties based on spatio-temporal data. We created a rich spatio-temporal dataset of 0.7 million datapoints of continuous location data logged at an interval of every 2 minutes by mobile phones of 46 subjects.
• local_airport [life] Hill Hacks
  Spent two weeks (May '16) at a hacker space in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh - HillHacks. I learnt a lot about hacker spaces in India and in Germany. I also met and interacted with a lot of people from diverse fields - architecture, space tech, design, animals enthusiasts, hacker space owner, and several others.
• school [edu] Udacity Nanodegree
  I won a scholarship by Tata Trusts and Google Scholarship to take up Udacity's Nanodegree program and chose to take it up because I never formally learnt Android through a course or theory.
• android [hobby] Perplexy
  A general quiz platform I made for the Google Admob challenge '16 in a team of 4. Our core focus was on the interface and design. I'm really happy with the way it came out, and is probably my favorite group college project - mostly because it was self-initiated; no one asked us to do this, but the 4 of us had an itch to do something.

2015

• android [hobby] Lifehacks
  Developed an Android application that now has over 750K+ downloads on Google Play (4.6 stars with >9K ratings, and over 25% active users, as of Aug '18). It is the top app in its category on the store, and is growing at ~1-5K downloads per day.
• work [internship] Graviky Labs
  I spent 3 weeks with Anirudh Sharma, an MIT Media Lab graduate in Fluid Interfaces, and Nitesh Kadyan tinkering around in their lab in Bangalore. I worked on a whole lot of small projects during this period - varying from monitoring ECG on your bi-cycle handle to making a voice controlled interface to control the crazy-flie nano-copter to transferring data over the audio jack on your mobile phone.
• work [volunteer] Kumbhathon
  At Kumbathon for 10 days as a participant, where I worked with Ramesh Raskar towards bringing technology to the Kumbhmela. We visualized changes in population movement on heatmaps, using telecom data.
• work [internship] Tesseract Imaging
  Spent 3 months at Tesseract, an MIT Media Lab spinoff working closely with Kshitij Marwah, where I co-developed an Android application to capture and view 360 degree image+video with the hardware built there.

2014

• android [hobby] DAWebmail
  Conceptualized, designed, programmed, and published on Google PlayStore a GMail like e-mail application based on android that is now used to view my university’s emails and receive notifications on android mobile devices.
• android [hobby] A LOT of Android projects
  I worked on a lot of Android projects in my second year. From one idea to the next, making things on Android felt a lot like playing with Lego Mindstorms. To list a couple I'm proud of, Andro-Mouse, Knight's Tour, and Alarm For Snoozers.

2013

• school [edu] Undergrad at DA-IICT
  I took up an Information and Communication Technology undergrad at DA-IICT. I took up electives in IoT and Software Architecture, made friends that I'll keep for life, and played a lot of football. This was a great place for me because the college gave us a lot of time and space and let us be - which is why I could experiment so many different things and figure out what I like to do most.

2011-13

• book [edu] Study, Study, Study
  I spent 2 long years preparing to get an Engineering admission. I really did nothing other than study super fat books thicker than my thighs - I usually had them cut into multiple pieces just so they wouldn't look so scary. I ranked in the top 0.5 percentile of AIEEE.

2010 and before

• looks_two [hobby] Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0
  My father bought me a second Mindstorms kit when it came out in 2009. Even more pieces, and I made even more creations! I remember I stopped playing PS2 altogether because I enjoyed playing with Lego and making things so much more. Click on the title to view all my Lego projects.
• looks_one [hobby] Lego Mindstorms NXT 1.0
  My father bought me a Lego Mindstorms NXT 1.0 kit in 2006, and I boy I built a whole lot of things and published them all on the NXTLog. The first thing my father and I made together was a tri-wheel car that could extend its neck. Since then I've made a lot of Lego creations. Click on the title to view all.