Meet Devesh Mittal — First Self-Driving Car Graduate from India

Lifelong learning doesn’t necessarily have to be always about a career change. It is also about sharpening your skills and growing into your current role. Meet Devesh Mittal , who joined our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree to venture into autonomous vehicle technologies.

Why Udacity Nanodegree?

Devesh is working as a Senior ASIC Design Engineer at Nvidia. In past, he has worked in companies like Intel and Ericsson. He has been working into the area of Machine Learning, networking, hardware acceleration from the past seven years. Intrigued to deep dive into Machine Learning algorithms and further grow his skill-sets, he enrolled into Udacity’s Self Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program.

The Nanodegree Experience

Talking about things that got Devesh hooked to the Nanodegree, he says “My expectation from the Nanodegree was to give me a structured understanding of all the components involved in a typical Self-Driving Car. I found it to be very beneficial because it gives real-world understanding of how these modules are structured and which module does what. Secondly, there’s a lot of hands-on experience that projects give you. I was aware of some of these algorithms from a top-down perspective, but I had not really worked on the details of coding them up myself.”

The communities and slack channel stand out for Devesh as he met some of the interesting industry experts and peer-learning community, which gave him a lot of insights and ideas.

“I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of great suggestions and ideas in the Self-Driving Car slack channel and discussion forums. These ideas in my views are cutting-edge and research level. So, you have access to such experienced professionals across the globe to discuss your ideas and projects”.

Becoming better with Deep learning algorithms

The Nanodegree eventually met Devesh’s expectations growing his skill sets and understanding of the field.

“My understanding of Deep learning, computer vision, and hardware acceleration has become better. Consequently, the Nanodegree even gave me a few entrepreneurial ideas worth exploring”.

As Thomas Friedman puts it correctly “If you want to be a lifelong employee anywhere today, you have to be a lifelong learner.” Re-vamping and rebooting your skill sets are a great way to prepare yourself for future technologies and jobs you cannot envision today. Congratulations Devesh Mittal from Udacity India team. Hope you never leave the pursuit of life-long learning :)