Hi
, My name is Abhishek Jaiantilal. I am a grad student doing my
Masters in Computer Engineering at NJIT. I did my undergraduate at
DDIT. Anyways feel free to explore the links, Most of them should be
working, though updating them is a little slow as I am hard pressed on
time as always.
Currently that is because of all the projects I am involved in PLUS a big time goes in doing the thesis. Oh by the way my thesis (for my masters) is on Neural networks and usage of Radial Basis functions to cluster data of all shapes and sizes!
By the way I am rightmost in the picture. It was taken at a place near Baroda, India.
I
did all my education back in Daman, India. The most beautiful place
in the whole world as seen in the below page. My alma mater was 'Lady
of Fatima' aka "Convent school' in Moti(Big) Daman. And the
above screenshot is from the bridge between Nani(small) Daman and
Moti(big) Daman. BTW the bridge is long gone. I graduated from my
alma-mater in 1999 and moved on to Nadiad for my Undergraduate in
Computer Engineering.
As I stood first in the union territory of Daman and Diu in both 10th and 12th It was simply a choice of whether i wanted to pursue Medicine as my parents or do Engineering. Albeit due to lot of support from my parents i finally got into Engineering and it was the most goodest decision i ever took.
BTW college was boring. I used to be in the top 5-10% of the class, but it was more a pendatic knowledge which emphasised sometimes more on theory than practice. But though this practice is almost followed everywhere, its not so much emphasized in DDIT at that time as a result when there were no exams all. I did was play, with comps and games. And that was a simply gr8 time in life. I garnered knowledge of Linux, C/C and other than. My final bachelors project was using OpenGL and MFC. And though i am very apprehensive of using M$ products anyways i liked MFC and have a 1 year experience in it, and my biggest project than was abt 15000 lines of code to simulate lighting effects of a bulb in real-life conditions like fog, rain etc. By that time i also delved more into how to program an OS from scratch. It took time but worth the effort. I managed to make a simple bootloader and a corresponding stupid OS that locked up the computer as a mini-project. I also loved Sys-administration and so also made a small home-cluster back than using Redhat 6.0, with a lot of help from an OReilly book on that.
Did I mention I have a easily 1000 hours experience in playing Age of Empires. Its a damn good game and if someone needs a player, I am all ready.
To pursue my Masters in Computer Engineering, I moved to US in Spring 04. BTW I loved software than and had an average knowledge of Electronics than. It was more like i shunned electronics back than. BTW it was a real fluke that i got into my masters in Computer engineering and not Computer science. I just ticked the wrong option in my admission form! Though today i think it was a gr8 non-mistake, cos I love computer engineering. My apprehension were somewhat right and wrong. First semester, though i read a lot of electronic subject and *ahem* maths i really found that i was a quite strong performer in them, and suddenly i started loving Maths, which is quite surprising to me too. Did I mention i am a great fan of Asimov and the star trek series and i think it was one of the reason i chose Intelligent systems as my major, the other reason being that the other 'popular' options like networks were disinteresting. Disinteresting, because at that point of time i already was doing kernel programming and my knowledge as a Sys-admin, made network not such a challenging task. Another viable option was Microprocessor, I loved programming OS's and would do if Sun hires me to work for the Solaris team( a dream job) not programming microprocessor. I felt i am little duller when it comes to extreme smaller. So both the option were out of the windows. The other options were so bad that i didn't give them a second thought at all. So this was it and I chose Intelligent systems as my major.
By Summer 04, I was determined to do a PhD, and also started working under my first professor here Dr.Perl. I stood first in his class CIS610 and joined his research on Ontology and Semantic Web. Though at that point i was not sure whom i would do thesis under. By quirk of luck i mailed and got reply from my future-to-be masters advisor, Dr.Dhawan. By October I was also got involved in the Grand Challenge Project at my school and I was involved in Hardware and the sensor fusion team. I handle dual-processor Power blade beauties. Currently I have installed, and migrated(why migration? see PowerPC faq) the whole system to the best OS in the world Debian.
I also help regarding the intercommunication of processes running on our setup of 3 Desktop class machines and 2 blades. Though we were chosen for the site-visit but we didn't qualify for the final race to be held in October, I am very much optimistic about next year which we will enter with a great Bang!
Right now for the past 11 months, I also work on-campus as a Administrator's assistant handling the CS dept machines. Its an interesting though sometimes boring job. All work for days sometimes and now work for weeks sometimes.;-)
