I have a total of 6 years of IT industry experience, and I am currently working as an EAI developer in IBM India Pvt Ltd, Bangalore. Before this, I have worked for 2.5 years in Cognizant Technology Solutions. My entire experience is in EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) domain, so I have no prior background in Data Science or Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning. However, I have worked on projects in BFSI, retail, and healthcare domains.
Before joining the Great Learning’s PG program, I was working in IBM as an EAI developer, which involves middleware tools like IBM MQ, IBM DB2, IBM Integration Bus, etc. These tools are basically all-in-one mediators for communication, for the transformation of messages, routing of messages, protocol conversion (for., E.g., SFTP to MQ), making backend Rest/ Web service calls, etc. I am currently looking for job opportunities in this field.
My first inspiration to learn AI/ML was when I owned Alexa. I got curious about how the system/algorithm behind Alexa works, how she is able to capture our voice, interpret it and give us accurate responses. Other than this, almost every day, I could read articles or hear about advances that AI/ML has made in Medical, educational, or automation fields.
The capstone project our team has implemented includes detecting and classifying the make and model of cars. We witness many cars on the road that we may not recognize or that are new to the market. This project will help us recognize and classify those. This can be used in traffic cameras where a moving car can be detected, and its class can be recognized.
During the project, one of the pain points was the training time a model took. Next was to manage between office hours and project hours. During the week, we used to implement and experiment. We made sure that we would meet up once a week virtually and update our progress, discuss the next approach and resolve if we are facing any issues.
Mentorship is important for both during the entire course and during the capstone. Since you are new to the concepts, you must be thorough. Mentors help you understand these concepts with detailed explanations and help in solving queries that might arise during the mentorship sessions. They also help you with case studies, extra study materials, references where one can refer for further clarification, etc. During the project, we can say that with the guidance and expertise of a mentor, we can learn a lot more. Capstone projects help us to bind all the concepts learned throughout the course and implement them as required. Mentors guide us where we can find academic resources, technical implementations, how to proceed / what we can experiment with to get the best results. These experiments and implementation help us learn a lot more and thus help us build technical competence.
The Capstone project certainly gave a rough idea of the real-time implementation scenario. In addition to technical skills on modeling or training or enhancing the performance of the model, it gave us a collaboration experience with other team members; since the thought process varies from person to person, one might be able to approach differently next time as opposed to current, when learning from peers. Also, this project gave us some insights on where we can take our next steps in the professional career path.
My advice to people who are just starting with learning AI/ML:
Learn, read, and implement every day for at least 15-30 minutes.
