Aditya Majumdar

High School

I grew up in the Silicon Valley, attending Lynbrook High School in San Jose, CA. I was drawn to the sciences in general, participating actively in Lynbrook's Science Club, the Junior Engineering Technical Society, and the FIRST Robotics team. Robotics had the biggest impact on me, as it taught me important organizational and communications skills, in addition to understanding different approaches to engineering a complex system from design through construction. Beyond these STEM-related activities, I served as president of Lynbrook's nationally ranked speech and debate team, as well as VP of the National Honor Society, activities which reinforced my communications, critical-thinking, and leadership skills.

College

I decided to attend Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York City. I initially entered college as a Chemical Engineering major based on my research interests from high school, but in my sophomore year, I decided to switch to Computer Science. In my Junior Year, I declared my intent to pursue the Artificial Intelligence track within the CS major. Classes I've taken in Robotics, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning have really solidified my interest in AI-related fields, in addition to some research work I did in the Intrusion Detection Systems Lab involving machine learning techniques. I'm also working towards a minor in Entrepreneurship & Innovation, a curriculum within the Engineering school that combines coursework across multiple business, finance, and engineering disciplines to instill the foundations of entrepreneurship. In taking these courses, I've particularly been interested in hearing from various entrepreneurs, technologists, and venture capitalists associated with both Silicon Valley and Alley.

Extracurriculars

I mainly focus on developing these interests by serving on the executive boards of the Application Development Initiative, as well as Columbia's ACM chapter. Both organizations seek to nurture student creativity and technological aptitude by holding workshops, bringing in speakers from various tech firms, and by hosting other public events where student developers can come together to learn from each other. In addition, I've been participating in hackathons throughout my time at Columbia. I've been to around 15 hackathons in the past couple of years, mostly in the NYC area, but I probably had the most fun when I traveled to UPenn and Yale for their mega hackathons (1000+ hackers). I tend to learn the most by diving directly into new things, and that's why I've enjoyed hackathons so much. They provide a great learning environment with hundreds of other students and mentors who love working with similar technologies. I've met students, startups, and mentors from all over the world, been able to develop on new platforms and APIs that I'd never get to play with otherwise, and generally had a ton of fun at these events. Several of my friends have successfully launched companies as a result of products they've developed at hackathons, and I hope to be inspired to do the same someday. Some of my hackathon projects can be found below in the Projects section.

Projects

SheetSnap

Spring 2014 - CV/ML for Mobile Platforms

Android app that lets you take pictures of classical sheet music, and will tell you the piece's title and composer. Uses various computer vision methods to process the pictures from various angles and levels of noise. SheetSnap was the final project for my Computer Vision & Machine Learning on Mobile Platforms seminar at Columbia.

Teammates: Robert Ying, Andrew Mercer-Taylor
Presentation and Report

Pebblin'

Feb 2014 - PennApps IX

An "air violin" that you can play using an Android phone and a Pebble watch. Pebblin' won for the best use of Philips hue technology, and was also a finalist for best Pebble hack. We submitted Pebblin' to a separate contest held by Pebble, and we were voted as a top 16 app among hundreds of apps in Pebble's store.

Teammates: Kevin Heh, Alexander Lin, Robert Ying
Website and Code

WhenCan'tIMeet

Feb 2014 - Columbia Devfest

Chrome extension that extends the when2meet utility by automatically importing events from your event calendars. Hacked together at Devfest with a few friends in a few hours (this hackathon was hosted by ADI, which we're all members of, so we were definitely multitasking throughout the night). Ended up winning Venmo's "Makes life so Easy" prize. Full details at our website.

Teammates: Derek He, Parthiban Loganathan, Robert Ying, Justin Zhao

SPWAG

Fall 2013 - Programming Languages & Translators

Built a Simple Presentation Web Page Generator as the final project in Columbia's compilers class. This was my first foray into functional programming, as we were required to use Ocaml for this project. This language ended up being an easy way to programmatically design slideshows and presentations, as it compiles down to HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Teammates: Richard Chiou, Aftab Khan, Yunhe (John) Wang, Lauren Zou
Resources: Code, Presentation (created through SPWAG!), and Report

VisionAlpha

Nov 2013 - Y-Hack

Built at Yale's mega-hackathon, VisionAlpha is an Android app that lets you take pictures of handwritten equations, processes the images using Canny edge detection and Hough transforms in order to identify the appropriate elements, and then feeds the information through the Mathematica API to give you the information you're looking for.

Teammates: Brian Wu, Robert Ying, Justin Zhao
Presentation [PDF, Web Slideshow] and HackerLeague description

CodeConscious

Sept 2013 - PennApps XIII

A chrome extension that adds a 'blame' button to GitHub, allowing you to penalize your colleagues by fining them through the Venmo API. Scraped together in the last few hours at PennApps after our original ideas fizzled out - in the end, this is just a fun way to increase code accountability among your friends. Finalist for Venmo API prize, and a personal favorite of Venmo's founder, Kortina!

Teammates: Xingzhou (Derek) He, Parthiban Loganathan, Kaiven Zhou
Code

LivingLanguage

Aug 2013 - NYC Facebook Summer of Hack

A chrome extension that dynamically translates random words on any webpage into whatever language you want to learn. Depending on your difficulty settings, it will change single words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. Hovering over and clicking the foreign words will produce definitions and will have the computer speak out the word's pronunciation in the correct accent. This hack won 1st place at Facebook's summer hackathon.

Teammates: Parthiban Loganathan, Bob Ren, Kaiven Zhou
Code