Ayush Mukherjee

UG Computer Science and Engineering

Fall 2016
STATEMENT OF PURPOSE
I grew up in a megacity like Delhi which is also one of the most populous cities in North India,
apart from having the distinction and privilege of being a political capital of the Indian
republic. From my early exposure to real world engineering and technology, I have
experienced a positive change in the availability of private cabs and radio-taxis in and around
the national capital region as well as the adjoining suburban towns. The marked improvement
and the resulting increase in demand for rides by the urban passengers indicates the change
in perception brought about, fanned, and encouraged by advancements in mobile
technologies, namely, the Android powered devices and android applications that simplify
understanding of passenger needs. An indispensable layer in this needs generation and
fulfilment cycle are the GPS or the Global Positioning Systems and computer-powered
satellites that enable the provision of services like GPS. Typically, a GPS System depends upon
24 satellites, and at any time, a GPS receiver on earth will receive from at least three
satellites to triangulate and display the position that also includes a carefully calibrated
margin for error at least in the civilian versions.
The GPS is just one of the several other advancements that have impacted billions of lives
across
the
world.
The technological applications branching out from advancements in their underlying sciences
and engineering have multi-directional and cross-domain outreach, for example, the synergy
between Android Platform and GPS systems benefits not only those industries or applications
that depend upon satellite navigation, but also in other contrasting industries and applications
like geological studies, oceanography, tracking and monitoring for various purposes for
example in the tracking of change in mangrove cover in a coastal region or in scenarios like
conducting search and rescue, locating people, calculating distance, calculating fuel
consumption economy, mapping transport congestion, and so on and so forth. The list is
practically endless.
Across the world, engineers and scientists are talking about evolution of computer
architecture which in turn will impact associated information systems that can be utilized for
practically endless list of tasks, for example, in revolutionizing our transportation systems,
and introducing features and breakthroughs like intelligent machines that run on an invisible
grid powered by information systems, complete with sweeping powers like decision making
abilities, situational awareness, automation, safety, and economy to name a few. These
artificially intelligent machines of the near future will change the way humanity approaches
travel, whether for work or leisure.
When noted technological hero Elon Musk presented his firms plans on an Interplanetary
Transport System (ITS) for possible future travel to our nearest neighbour in the solar system,
the Mars, he wasnt visualizing an imaginary concept that lay far beyond our current
technological capabilities. Of course the scale of the staged launch vehicle being considered
for this interplanetary space adventure is far in excess of the current league or even of the
last great human-rated expendable rocket deployed between 1966 and 1973, the Saturn V.
The SpaceX the most successful privately held enterprise has witnessed stellar success
ever since its inception in June, 2002. The firm has been systematically deploying launch
missions and achieving milestones in their efforts towards improving the existing rocket
systems and technologies. In their series of most recent breakthroughs, SpaceX has
successfully achieved multiple flights with partially reusable rocket stages that have the
ability to return to earth and achieved controlled landing, even on drone ships floating in the
oceans.
Interestingly, a little sneak-peak on the background of SpaceXs founder, Mr. Elon Musk
reveals his early childhood passion for Computer Programming on Commodore VIC-20, an 8bit home computer. He developed his first video game using BASIC and sold it to a magazine
for an impressive USD 500. He went on to work with some of the leaders in the domain of

Ayush Mukherjee
UG Computer Science and Engineering
Fall 2016
internet technologies and payment networks like PayPal, web software venture like Zip2, and
automobile giant Tesla Motors, among several other innovative projects of substantial scale
like SolarCity, HyperLoop, and OpenAI.
In our modern generation, all things that are great or magnificent, they owe these virtues to
achievements that are a convergence of several interconnected disciplines. Running across all
such
interconnected
specialties
and
super-specialties is a super-fine imprint of computer assisted technologies. For example,
through supercomputing which is considered as one of the super-specialties of Computer
Science and Engineering, scientists and engineers have achieved breakthroughs that were
previously considered unthinkable, inconceivable, and therefore entirely unrealistic.
So great is the potential of supercomputing that in India, the state-owned Indian Space
Research Organization (ISRO) has dedicated substantial resources, facilities, personnel, and
funding to evaluate and develop powerful supercomputers that can attain peak performances
(in-theory) in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second. The Indians intend to
use such computing power in solving complex problems related to fluid dynamics in the realm
of aerospace, for instance, in simulating the conditions inside the combustion chamber of a
turbofan jet engine. In advanced cases, they can scale up the computing power to address
more complex challenges in the realm of space flight with speeds that are far in excess of the
hypersonic flight speed range. India is definitely not the first country to do so in the
developing world, and it most certainly will not be the last one either.
In the western hemisphere, a different genre of scientists leveraged the power of
supercomputing to study the cosmos and trace our history back in time to the hypothesized
Big Bang event. Another genre of scientists working in the domain of biological sciences and
molecular dynamics have utilized the power of a customized supercomputer in 3D simulation
of protein structure; they managed to track the transformations occurring over the duration of
a millisecond. To achieve this, the custom made massively parallel supercomputer developed
jointly by the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh took almost 100
days. At this scale, we have barely managed to scratch the surface.
Each passing day, our scientists and engineers are pushing the limits and achieving newer
breakthroughs while building up on what was yesterdays achievement. In this iterative cycle
of continuous improvement, and as a budding enthusiast of the physical sciences group with
strong inclination towards working in the subject areas that lie in the convergence between
computer sciences and engineering, I am thrilled and excited to begin my academic journey
through admission into the undergraduate program in Computer Science and Engineering at
the ______ University.

Ayush Mukherjee