I love to code and so while I’m not playing computer games, I spend time on other coding projects. In the past, Oliver and I have worked on a constrained world generator for games. I’m also trying to get my quadcopter to fly and am working on a Wavelength clone so people can watch videos together.

My ongoing hobbies include coming up with ways to improve the classroom experience by synchronizing slides between the teacher and the students while also incorporating features so students can ask questions on the slide and have them answered by the teaching staff. I’m also trying to build a system that will make key distribution among all my machines and Github easier.

Occasionally, I participate in hackathons where I use the time to build things that I would like to use. In the past, me and Anand have won an award for hack with most economic impact at the UB Hackathon (2014) for our hack on cloud storage. Scott Haseley, Kushal Bhandari and I won second place in the Google Developers Group(GDG) Hackathon conducted in 2015 for AudioShare, a way to broadcast and share audio across Android devices.

My tryst with computers began when my father took a huge loan to purchase a PC spec’d at 166 MHz having 32 MB RAM and a 1 GB HDD running Windows 95. Games were soon to follow with Microsoft’s Pinball and Midway’s Mortal Kombat 3. Me and my dad had this cat and mouse game we would play wherein he would find new ways to prevent me from playing—​BIOS lock, hidden folders, etc and I would be forced to bypass these measures. I spent a lot of time working on OpenKore — a bot for Ragnarok Online, a popular MMORPG. Most of my work was on trying to ensure that the bot remained undetected while still going out and playing on my behalf. Since a lot of this was tailor made (hard-coded) for my purposes, I never made any push to the OpenKore source.

I did my undergrad in Computer Science at SRM University and joined the Masters program at the University at Buffalo in 2011. I started working with Geoffrey Challen in the fall of 2012 and was quickly drawn to research. This was what I had always wanted to do - build complex systems of my own. I joined the Ph.D. program in 2013.