The Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering organised a webinar on ?Journey from Nirma B Tech EC to Apple USA? was delivered by Mr Bhavin V Nayak, the alumni of 2014 batch of BTech EC from Institute of Technology, Nirma University) on July 10, 2020, from 8.30 to 11 pm. It was attended by 106 participants including the Head of Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Dr Dhaval Pujara, Dr Mehul R Naik, Dr Sachin Gajjar, Dr N P Gajjar, Dr Vijay Savani, Dr Ruchi Gajjar, Dr Mangal Singh, Dr Dhaval Shah, Dr Manish Patel, Prof Dipesh Panchal, Dr Piyush Bhatasana, Prof Jayesh Patel. The laboratory staff Ms Snehal Bhavsar, Mr Vipul Darji and Ms Vaibhavi Pandya also attended this webinar. The EC students of semester V and VII and the current students doing their internships in final year benefitted the most by this webinar.
The webinar started with a brief speech on the sad demise of Dr Tanish Zaveri. Dr Dhaval Pujara, Dr Mehul R Naik and the speaker of the webinar Mr Bhavin Nayak paid tributes to him and a two-minute silence was observed.
At the beginning of his talk, Bhavin shared the list of subjects which shaped and changed his career. Some of them were – Fibre Optics Communications, Embedded System, DSP, Computer Architecture and Multimedia System. Bhavin?s key experiences during his BTech in Nirma University were doing an internship in the SAC-ISRO and doing side projects in Image Processing. While doing his internship at the SAC-ISRO, he was guided by Dr Tanish Zaveri. Bhavin was able to contribute to the Mars Orbiter Mission of the ISRO by his project Colour Image Processing Pipelining. Bhavin pursued his MS from Arizona State University (2014 – 2015). He focused on Computer Architecture and Image Processing and also had experience with interning at Intel Corporation and doing research with School of Earth & Space Exploration (funded by NASA). He published two papers based on his work during the MS study. Bhavin shared his viewpoints when pursuing his Master?s Degree and acknowledged the opportunity to study a variety of subjects from different areas like VLSI, Communication Systems and others during his B Tech in Nirma. He emphasized on the necessity of having clear fundamentals. Bhavin shared that during his Masters, he improved his programming skills, research paper reading habits, research paper writing skills and being well versed in research and development of cutting edge technology. Dr Mehul R Naik also grabbed the opportunity to brief Bhavin about the revised and improved academic curriculum of EC 5th semester students where new electives were introduced. A Student Research Club in the EC department was also formed where technical skills about Research Paper reading and writing were taught to students.
In 2016-2020, Bhavin joined Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA as a Machine Learning and Imaging Algorithms Researcher. He shared his work on developing Imaging and Computer Vision Algorithms for ISP and Machine Learning Algorithms. He mentioned his work experience on geometric distortion correction for Fisheye Lens, HDR Imaging, Vision ISP, SemifreddoNets, FIR-IIR filters and Eye Contact Correction. He achieved three publications and three patents.
At present, Bhavin is working with Apple, Cupertino, CA as a Machine Learning Engineer and working in Computer Vision and Deep Learning. Bhavin inspired the B Tech students to have a wide range of knowledge in all domains and to master one area which can be followed passionately. He supported this statement by his T-graph which he followed for his career.
The last part of this webinar was the Q&A session where EC students and faculties interacted with Bhavin. Bhavin interacted with students and answered their questions satisfactorily. He shared how he got the opportunity to intern in ISRO during his final year B Tech. He also explained various areas of Computer Vision, Image Processing, Neural Network. He also guided for getting good resources to get started with these areas. On being asked about the latest research in his field, he touched upon the research topics like fisheye lens Distortion Reduction, Designing Neural Network for hardware, Object Detection, 3D Object Detection and Autonomous Driving.
Bhavin advised junior EC students to work on soft skills as well. In his 2020 interview, he had a non-technical round which was aimed to check soft skills like how would the candidate deal with his team members, as a leader how would the candidate divide work. He also mentioned the ?Bar Raiser? round in Amazon which was very crucial for getting into Amazon. According to Bhavin – ?EC is everywhere?. Bhavin also shared some tips on how to read Research Papers. He emphasized that it?s good to know at least one programming language and the key focus of a student should understand the programming concepts.
The webinar was concluded with Bhavin expressing his gratitude to be invited as a speaker for the webinar. Dr. Dhaval Pujara and Dr Mehul R Naik appreciated Bhavin?s efforts and expressed their desire to remain in touch with him for conducting future webinars for imparting his knowledge.