Adity (2014H103020H)
Overall experience at Tyco International was amazing. I chose the company over the typical IT companies because of the compelling research work done at the Tyco Innovation Garage in the field of Computer Vision. Being interested in the field right from the college days I consider myself fortunate to get the opportunity to work on the world class problems like Object Detection and Surveillance Event Detection. During my PS term I have gained great technical knowledge in the field of Computer Vision while working on two projects. Apart from gaining technical skills, I got a better idea of corporate life, team working, and developed better communication skills. Tyco international PLC is a fire and security solutions company incorporated in Republic of Ireland, with operational headquarters in Princeton, NJ. They are the market leader in the fire and security products industry. They build the products and provide different devices that surround us and are integral part of most of the constructions today. Some of these devices are smoke detectors, sprinklers, surveillance cameras etc. I worked here as a Computer Vision Intern in the Advanced Research and Development Team of the Tyco Innovation Garage at Bangalore. My responsibilities were to explore the application of Deep Learning for Object Detection and Event Detection. My first project dealt with developing a Detector using Deep Learning for smoke detector. I had prior experience in computer vision but I was new to Deep Learning. Being a challenging field it took me a month to complete my study on neural networks and Deep Learning. Apart from reading on topic I developed demo application for hand written digit detection that used all kinds of neural networks and convolution neural network along with the best optimizations available to date. After completing literature survey I successfully developed a detector for smoke detector with great results. (99% Accuracy)I did another project in my PS that dealt with Surveillance Event Detection. I used the spatio- temporal features to develop the application. The features were provided in the form of dense trajectories and then I created a signature for each event using Fisher Vectors and successfully designed the system that detects event for one person in the frame. The experience of PS was great and I learned more than I expected in the field of advanced computer vision and deep learning with the guidance of my mentor and manager. They shared the results of my projects with the global team at Tyco. They also offered me a job which I have accepted.
Jeevan Deshpande (2014H141030H)
The overall experience at Tyco International, Bangalore, India was great. I was not just well trained technically but was also exposed to the high working standards of the company, the very flexible and optimized working condition under highly qualified and experienced employees (including top level managers). The working hours were 9hrs from Monday to Friday. They are only looking for Master students in CAD or CAE background for internship and this was the first time they have considered BITS for 6 months internship. Interns are generally expected to do CAD, CAE or Product development work in
50 various teams like Special Hazards, Water Mechanical, etc. I worked in Special Hazards team Design of Fire Extinguisher Cartridge Guard and was technically trained in CREO 3.0, and gained in depth knowledge of the product development cycle, snap design, injection melding. You are not expected to know any software beforehand and sufficient training is provided before your project commences and sometimes the training continues along with the project. I had weekly review meeting with my manager, which were very important for the feedback and continuous improvement of my performance. All the employees were very friendly and were ever ready to help me all the possible ways. I even had access to the weekly meetings of the whole team where my suggestions were always welcomed. I was assigned a new problem which needed a solution. The solutions were thoroughly discussed with the team so that they can be practically implemented. I was also given training in GD&T level 1 and Level 2 and Tolerance stack up analysis and, was encouraged to implement my learning from the training in the project. The company even organized Mech Talks, Earth Day, Safety week etc. which added more to the experience. So I would say this was a very huge opportunity which will not just add to your resume but also to your life and nobody should miss this.
Shubhashri Bandyopadhyay (2014H141032H)
As a design engineer, the work that was assigned was to redesign a fire extinguisher nozzle. They had difficulties regarding the operation and the looks of the nozzle. It was a project involving a lot of creativity on our part. The most interesting part was the idea generation part, where I had to balance between nice ideas forming in the blank space of the mind and the fact that it had to be practical enough to be implemented into the real world. The second aspect that I learnt here was, just how “practical” the idea needed to be. Every assumption had to be backed up by not just normal tables or textbooks, but straight from established guidelines. Every piece of data had to be taken from right place. Every part was created with thought and its entire life planned, right from manufacturing, assembly to deployment and amidst all this was the constraint of “cost”. Cost was not just a constraint, it was creative force as it pushed an engineer to explore more and come up with ingenious solutions. And at the end of all this, whatever solution came up had to be strong enough to go through the list of tests recommended. Samples had to be sent outside of India for testing and there is always the necessity to get things right the first time. Third thing I learnt here was the fact that real life was a little more undetermined than a student’s project. True, we were trained for this to some extent in our Masters course where we often tried finding solutions to unexplored problems. But we often came up with ideal solutions, not practical ones, in one single field, under the guidance of a teacher, who knew, to some extent, how to solve the problem. In the industry, no one is too sure of how a problem will end especially with the constraints of cost. It is sometimes, up to us, to decide the next course of action, whom to consult and to decide whether what we know and have considered, is sufficient or needs more. We are taught, as a part of curriculum, a huge set of tools without knowing which one will be useful. On the field, every small line or concept could decide if we got just a solution or a successful product. Finally, was the necessity of team work and multi-tasking. Team members, on average handled about three projects at a time amidst tight deadlines. They were supported by their other members forming this mesh. The manager and the engineers were very understanding and did all they could to make the environment comfortable. They ensured that, at the end of PSII I was a more practical, proactive version of my earlier self. PS 2 has provided me the opportunity to explore the
51 life of an office employee from the safe precincts of our college. I may not have a paper to show, but the experience has been priceless.