2025 and it's a wrap!
2025 and it's a wrap!
Wrapping up my first semester at IIT Bombay and here are my learnings..
🎯 Why ML? I chose to give more weightage to ML courses in the very beginning of the M.Tech program so I could get my hands dirty early, as I hadn't got a chance to touch these academically before.
📚 I picked 3 subjects: 1 from Computing Systems Pool and 2 from Intelligent Systems along with a core course: Software Engineering.
Here are my learning from these courses:
🖥️ 1. Design and Engineering of Computer Systems
🔍 Systems Thinking: This course started with a single node view (Hardware + OS) and zoomed out to see how multiple systems interact in real-world situations (a theoretical perspective of what I have already worked on @ Simpl). We also read classic systems papers, including GFS, Dynamo, and Haystack.
🛠️ Hands-on: The final takeaway was understanding fork+exec process creation and getting our hands dirty with multithreading and concurrency using the POSIX library in C.
🚀 Project: I built a simple key-value store with a multi-threaded HTTP server, tested its performance for various workloads, and identified bottlenecks. This course gave me a profound view of OS internals and building real-life systems for different performance requirements.
🤖 2. Foundations of Machine Learning
🤓 Classic ML: This course covered classic ML algorithms including Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, SVM (and its dual formulation), clustering, and a touch of deep learning and attention mechanisms.
🧑💻 Project: My team and I reproduced the classic LeNet-5 architecture on the MNIST dataset, running experiments to compare its convolutional architecture against a standard feed-forward network.
🧠 3. Foundations of Intelligent and Learning Agents
🎲 Reinforcement Learning: This course introduced us to the other dimension of the ML family—reinforcement learning! We explored Bandits, Regret Minimization, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and algorithms for learning optimal policies like Policy Iteration, Bellman optimality operator, and LP Solver formulations. We also covered TD-lambda algorithms and control algorithms like Q-Learning, Sarsa, and expected Sarsa.
🧩 Mini-projects: The coursework included multiple assignments, each like a mini-project, giving us hands-on experience with these concepts.
- Reward maximization (hence regret minimization) in a poisson environment: Assignment 1
- MDP Solver to play a varient of Black-Jack game: Assignment 2
- An agent to Play Micro-Chess: Assignment 3
🛠️ 4. Software Engineering
🛠️ Toolbox for Developers: This course focused on essential tools every software developer should know: Shell Scripting (with sed and awk), Python Scripting, Version Control (Git), Web Scraping (BeautifulSoup), Data Analysis & Visualization (Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn), Flask as a backend framework, ORM, and LaTeX.
🌍 Societal Impact: Weekly assignments culminated in a project to serve society—my team built an airline review platform: FlightMate: Review before you fly.
On top of weekly assignment on every topic above Repo Link here: https://github.com/pujith22/iitb_coursework/tree/main/software_lab_cs699, the course included a project component that used everything that we learning in the coursework and aimed to serve society. For this one, me along with my teammates built an airline review platform: FlightMate: Review before you fly
🎓 MOOCs & Online Programs
Along with these courses, I was able to complete 2 of 5 MITx MicroMasters® Programs:
- Probability - The Science of Uncertainty and DataCertificate
- Machine Learning with Python: from Linear Models to Deep LearningCertificate
These MOOCs helped me get my hands dirty with writing math on paper after a long time and supplemented my exploration and deep dive into the world of ML, understanding it from first principles with the help of the math behind it.
Other somewhat Notable credentials/progression during this Semester:
- Global Rank 656 in Meta HackerCup 2025 Round 2: [Certificate]
- Rank 10 in Coding Circuit Contest organized by WnCC club, IIT Bombay: [Contest Link]
- Completed Piano Lessions till Essensialts-III on Simply Piano
- Working on release a puzzle game to both IOS/Android, you can have a preview @ [Demo Link]
Overall Career Progression: Lazy ----> Less Lazy :-), can't wait to experience what's ahead in Semester II.