Pallavi Vudatha

[email protected]

Statement of Purpose
I am a Research and Development engineer at ​Media.net (Directi)​. After two years of industrial
experience, I would like to advance my career by pursuing ​Masters​ in ​Computer Science​. I am
interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence and wish to undertake research in the same.
I have always been very inquisitive, interested in learning new concepts and applying them.
Hence I wanted to take up a career that is challenging and which deals with real-life problems,
that are ever evolving. This lead me to work diligently and stand in the top ​0.3%​ among ​468,280
students​ who appeared for ​IIT JEE 2011​, Joint Entrance Examination for all the IITs and
pursue Electrical Engineering at one of the most coveted engineering colleges in India, ​Indian
Institute of Technology, Delhi​. At IIT, I got the opportunity to learn amongst the brightest
minds in the country, which helped me expand my horizons.
Early in my undergraduate studies, I took ​Introduction to Computer Science​ and ​Data
Structures​ courses. In these courses, I learned analysis and design of algorithms, and to improve
performance using different data structures. This induced in me a budding interest in the field of
computer science. To gain experience outside of the coursework and also to get an exposure in
the industry, I interned at an IT and services firm, Mahiti Infotech Pvt Ltd. At Mahithi my
project was to design an ​automated school timetabling system​, with various constraints. After
some literature survey, I found a few approximation algorithms for similar NP-Hard problems
and implemented a solution using ​graph coloring heuristics​. It was fulfilling to craft a
time-efficient solution for such a problem. This experience provided the motivation for me to
work on more projects.
Post my internship I continued my learning by taking up courses like ​Operating Systems,
Database Management Systems​ and I also attended the classes for ​Discrete Mathematics ​and
Algorithms Design and Analysis​ courses. At this point, I decided to delve deeper into a specific
area of Computer Science. Fascinated by the applications of Machine Learning I undertook a
project in this field under ​Prof. Sumeet Agarwal​. In this project, I worked on a ​movie and book
recommender system​. I built a cross-domain recommendation system using semantic
knowledge queried from DBpedia, and formulated user profiles and predicted user ratings using
collaborative filtering​ and ​cosine similarity​. During the project, I studied various research
papers and scientific journals on Machine Learning, which not only aided my project
significantly but also introduced me to the exciting research going on in this field.
I have also taken courses in Linguistics, viz. ​Systems and Structure: An introduction to
Communication Theory​, and ​Fundamentals of Language Sciences​. Among other things I
have learned in these courses, I was most fascinated by ​language acquisition​, particularly on
how native speakers learn their language. I also learned about ​syntax trees​ and was intrigued by
their application in the field of ​natural language understanding​. This led me to take up my
B.Tech Project under ​Prof. Brejesh Lall​, in which I worked on ​mood prediction from mobile
usage pattern​. During this project, in addition to performing sentiment analysis on text data, I
have also trained algorithms to detect mood from speech signals.
Besides academics, I am a good swimmer and served as the ​Vice-Captain​ for the girls
swimming team and represented IIT Delhi at ​Inter IIT Sports Meet 2013​, held at IIT Guwahati.
Being vice-captain of the team taught me to manage diverse people to attain a common goal. I
also volunteered for AINA, An Initiative for National Advancement, and ​taught
underprivileged kids​ in the nearby slum areas. I seek to participate and take responsibility in
Pallavi Vudatha
[email protected]

similar endeavors at New York University. Apart from these, I actively participate in competitive
coding. This helped me to land a job in ​Directi​, which has one of the toughest algorithmic
rounds of all companies.
My role as a Research and Development Engineer at ​Media.net​, a ​Contextual Ad Network​,
primarily deals with the improvement of the current state of Ad serving architecture. In my first
project, I have implemented data pipeline for logging Ad views and clicks that can deal with
very high throughput. By using ​Cassandra database​, I have also made sure that the system
wouldn't have a single point of failure lest any downtime impacts the revenue. In my next
project, I have built an application that emulates live HTTP traffic for testing purposes. For this,
I have designed a distributed multi-process system using ​Producer/Consumer design pattern
that can scale horizontally to handle heavier traffic.
Currently, I am leading a team of three, building an ​Entity Management System​ for Header
Bidder, a Programmatic bidding product. We have developed a highly available and fault
tolerant request stream processing system that follows ​Kappa Architecture​ pattern. We have
also ensured all the database operations, across Redis and MS SQL data clusters, satisfy ACID
properties as the data requires strong consistency guarantee. I serve as the point of contact for
this project, one of the heavily used internal tools in the company, and I have garnered great
reviews for my work.
Throughout my academic and industrial experience, I have worked on different domains of
Computer Science but I have always been keen on developing intelligent systems, that can
perceive and learn. The cutting-edge research going on at NYU, especially in the area of
Artificial Intelligence, makes it a good fit for me. I am interested in the work of ​ ​Prof.
Kyunghyun Cho​, particularly in the field of Natural Language Processing. His publications on
improving Neural Machine Translation by providing source sentence context and performing
unsupervised learning on just monolingual corpora align with my interests. I am also interested
in the works of ​Prof. Satoshi Sekine ​on relation extraction from large corpora and his ongoing
projects on Question Answering and Summarization.
I believe that life at NYU enriched by diversity, interdisciplinary interaction and industry
centered learning would help in my holistic development. I am confident that my strong resolve,
passion for the subject, eagerness to pursue challenging problems, self-motivation, along with
my previous research experience makes me a suitable candidate for admission into New York
University for the graduate program in Computer Science.