Lekha K
Featuring Lekha K for our Saturday Shoutout Initiative. Read on to hear her views on being a Pythonista, winning Hackathons including Smart India Hackathon 2019, interning with HP, being an Amazon ACMS Mentee, and being a woman in tech.
Which domain are you interested in and why?
In my 3 years of BTech, I have worked on various domains in computer science. I was attracted to the domain of machine learning in my first year when I started learning about this domain on my own through online courses. In my second year, I interned with 3 organizations in this domain. Meanwhile, I had joined a tech-team at my college, which is a Robotics team. As a part of that team, we worked extensively on IoT and Robotics. In my third-year semester vacation, I got intrigued about the domain of BlockChain, thus I dwelled into this domain too by doing a few online courses. And recently, during this lockdown, I got my hands on Web Development and App Development too. Actually, I had decided that I would be doing a bachelor's in computer science when I was in class 7, and my plan back then was to spend my four years of bachelor's exploring as many domains as I can. I wanted to understand computer science as a whole. I believe that knowing a single domain doesn’t help an engineer, in the long run, one should be able to use a combination of 2 or more domains to solve a challenge at hand completely. And I feel I am still in a very early stage to settle down at a particular domain, so I’ll keep exploring domains wider and deeper, and this is what keeps me going.
When did you first use Python and how did you find it better than other programming languages?
I started to code when I was in class 5. My mother used to teach me personally at home and I love the way she teaches!! Back then she taught me coding in C and C++. Only in my class 10, that is, in 2015, python was gaining momentum in India and entered into the syllabus of bachelor's degree. My mother also started teaching me python that time, and my first question to her was, “This is so easy, why didn’t you teach me python first!?!?”. Later, at Competitive Coding too, I found python to be easier over other languages since we don’t need to concentrate much on the syntax which gives us more time to work on the logic part of the question, in addition to which, there are a lot of libraries that help in simplifying the logic. Even in various domains like ML and IoT, I find python as the major option used by a lot of people as there are so many libraries developed for python which makes the work even simpler.
As a part of the Amazon ACMS Mentee program, what did you get to learn the most?
As a part of the Mentorship program at Amazon, the one major thing I learned was to see challenges in the bigger picture. I learned that even a simple problem statement like designing a vending machine has a lot of depth to it, we had to keep in mind the issues that may happen in the transactions, the load that the server has to tackle, the amount of data that needs to be stored at a database, analyzing the data generated due to each and every transaction and a lot more. One more major take-away from this mentorship program was to follow certain principles while developing any technological solution. For a company like Amazon, their customers are their everything, thus all their products, services, and every employee’s individual work was customer-oriented. Giving an app or a service that does wonders but at the same time is utterly simple for a common person to use them is their motto. They trained us towards this by making us think about how we could simplify the working of our project that we made as a part of this mentorship program. My mentor fine-tuned our project on an AI-based app so much so that it is holistically complete to the point of directly launching it.
How would you describe your experience as an intern at HP?
I interned with HP through the Global Academic Internship Programme(GAIP) where I got to get trained from both the National University of Singapore(NUS) and Hewlett Packard(HP) at the same time. We were trained on Artificial Neural Networks by NUS professors and Big Data Analytics by HP professionals. This was my first internship which acted as an entry point to industry culture and experience. To talk particularly about the training given by HP, it was a tight-packed 7 days of hands-on training on big data analytics. We were taught from connecting to a remote server to making a cluster of 5 nodes to applying the map-reduce algorithm on a file to calculate the number of words present in the file.
How do you think college clubs have helped you shape your personality?
To be honest, the tech team that I work in is the one that molded me at college completely. This was the place where I first understood and applied things I studied at college without understanding much of its applications. This is where I could first see tangible outputs to my work, this is where I gained more practical knowledge compared to my college classes and this is where I understood how well we can apply things we study in classes. Another beautiful thing about tech teams are the interactions and working along with our seniors. I got to learn a lot from them than any teacher ever, from the team’s technical knowledge to doubts on academic subjects to queries on career choices. I got to see very closely my first set of seniors sitting for placement when I was in my second year. They used to share their interview experiences with us that very day in the evening at our team’s lab. All their inputs from the very beginning of my college life played a great role in me deciding things in a more informed and knowledgeable way. We work together day in and day out, we members of the team see each other more than we interact with our other friends, so this set has definitely had a major impact on my life and my personality. We discuss from startup ideas to the culture of people from different parts of the country to chilling with music. Though my journey in the team has not been completely smooth, that was exactly what made my personality strong enough to withstand any problem and keep going ahead, that was what prepared me to adjust and flourish in any kind of work environment.
Tell us about that one cool project that you worked upon using python?
One cool project that I worked upon using python would be my work for the tech-team I work for. I worked on a problem statement where our system had to recognize a given object in an open field through cameras using computer vision. I went with the approach of feature extraction for this problem. I took an image of the object to be identified, extracted and collected its key features, mapped it to the frames of the live video of the field to check if the required set of features existed somewhere in the frame. I tried out different image matching techniques like SIFT, SURF, and ORB to get a comparison of what works perfectly for our scenario and found that ORB works best since it gets key points faster than the others and the orientation of the object doesn’t affect the identification.
What project did you work upon as a part of the SIH 2019 hardware edition?
Our problem statement was a smart payment solution convenient which is cost-effective for second and third-tier cities. The problem statement was provided by Kotak Mahindra Bank. We made a low-cost payment terminal that can be used to accept ALL modes of digital payments (Online banking, QR, Card, NFC, Aadhaar) including transit payments for smart cities. We used raspberry pi running Linux as the central board for the payment machine, to which we connected a pi camera for scanning QR codes, a touch screen to display information and QR codes, a fingerprint scanner to authenticate for Aadhaar Pay, and an NFC Sensor to facilitate paying from the phone by just tapping the phone on the machine. The raspberry pi needs to be connected to the internet to make the transactions from the customer to the merchant. In the 5-day hackathon, the judges felt that our machine is on a little pricier side for tier 2 and 3 cities. Thus we made another simpler version of this machine reducing the cost to half. The simpler version had raspberry pi 0 to which a 16X2 LED screen, NFC sensor, and keypad were connected. It was developed with a focus to make it accessible to all users where they don’t have to bother familiarising themselves with any payment methods that they don’t currently use.
What are your views on the low participation of women in tech? What according to you can be done to bridge this gender gap?
The world was seeing women enter the tech field for the first time a few years ago, it was almost a revolution back then. But now that’s not the case, a lot of women are at great positions in this field, though not equal participation there definitely is a great share of women employees in many companies. Somewhere down the line, our patriarchal society did definitely play a role in not pushing women into tech fields, which I feel is still having its effects. Even though women are currently working in this field, they aren’t bold enough to challenge or spot errors of their male colleagues’ work, they do not give in inputs thinking their opinions don’t matter much. And even male employees are sometimes not so comfortable working with a woman. This gap can never be changed overnight, it needs active support from both men and women to bridge this gap. Men need to be more open in their thinking and accept that women are nowhere less. But more than that, women should believe that they are nowhere less than men, and there’s a lot of value to their expertise and opinion. They should understand that nothing big comes very easily, but at the same time, they should understand that they deserve equal opportunities and equal treatment.
What advice would you like to give students who have just stepped into their CSE degree?
The advice I would give to students joining CSE would be to explore as many domains and technologies as possible in their earlier years of the degree since one never gets this much of time anywhere in one’s life after college. I would advise to keep hustling, never stay stagnant, keep working towards one’s passion whatever it may be, keep the fire burning in them to keep growing and blooming. I would encourage them to do activities other than attending classes, in my opinion, academic classes should be just 40–50% of one’s college life, and a student should indulge in so much other enriching activities that give her/him the remaining 50–60% of knowledge and experience. Attend workshops, participate in hackathons, try out coding contests, be a part of a tech team, work on projects, try your hands on everything possible. You will lose at many such competitions, but the experience you gain the major takeaway here. Fail more, fail high but get back up even higher should be one’s way of life.
