Letter of Intent
of Swakkhar Shatabda
In my high school days I got a chance to compete for a programming contest which I mention for the reason that it changed the course of interest of mine. Later on I found programming and analysis of mathematical problems to be my own area. Soon I decided to continue my studies in the field of Computer Science and Engineering. After leaving the intermediate college, I sat for the admission test to get a chance in the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology which is undoubtedly the best engineering school in Bangladesh. Hitting the 19th place from all the pupils willing to start their graduation(only 4500 are allowed to sit for the exam from more than one hundred thousand) that year I started my classes in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in April,2002.
Sooner I discovered a lot of comfort at the laboratories and classrooms since for then, it had become almost a passion for me to be a Computer Engineer. For the first few semesters I was learning structural and object oriented languages, data-structures, algorithms and software engineering through the class assignments and project works. I remember developing a file-explorer in C, a chat machine in Java, a social network in ASP. Later also I became familiar with some advanced topics in CSE like Artificial Intelligence, VLSI design, Computer Graphics, Pattern Recognition, Graph Theory etc.
But it was not before the last two semesters, when I become aware of the industry experience as well the research works in this regard. The first one was of course the Interfacing project “PBX-Mobile Phone: Extensions to Cellular devices”. During the completion of this project as it involved immense amount of market-research for available devices, designing skills for hardware circuits, and last but not the least the software part, I got acquainted with the first real world problem. After the successful completion of the project I remember the interview that we had with a daily newspaper correspondence who later on published a one-page report on their weekly magazine.
In the last two semesters of our undergraduate course we had to prepare a thesis. With another classmate of mine, I finished my thesis in June,2007 entitled “Study of Algorithms in Bioinformatics”. Though it started with a survey work, after six months of work we were able to find out two new result in this field. The first one was “An approximation algorithm for sorting by reversals and transpositions” which was an improvement of the previous results in this regard. This paper work was eventually published in the Proceedings of Workshop on Algorithm and Computation, WALCOM2007, Dhaka, 2007, pp 97-108 and later on accepted for the Journal of Discrete Algorithms, Elsevier. Another research result was “An Approximation Algorithm for Closest Phylogenetic Second Root problem”which is accepted for the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists, IMECS 2008 to be held on March,2008.
While doing the thesis work, I felt that current increasing processing power of the fast computers and the high speedy communication networks are two blessings that in almost all fields of life the computers are ruling. Even in the case of biologists its not possible for them to deduce the synthesis results nowadays without the help of the computer programs. Huge Distributed Systems for acquiring high processing power are the only way to do the most cumbersome computations of the nature. We mainly addressed Genome rearrangement, Phylogeny construction, Clustering, Protein Folding, Gene Compression and some string problems widely used in Bioinformatics. It was the thesis work for which I decided that in stead of entering industry earlier, I may continue my higher studies and therefore applied for the M.Sc. course in Sweden.
In June 2007, I got employed in Vonair Software Services, a software company in affiliation with Broadsoft, USA. I was bearing the multiple roles of a Developer and Quality Assurance Engineer. That time I worked on a project on VOIP. I was part of different cycles of the Rapid Unified Process model applied. Besides designing and implementing researches were done on Session Initiation Protocol(SIP), Real-time Transfer Protocol (RTP), NAT traversal problem, STURN-TURN, Virtual Private Networks. Though for a short period but here also I found that researching was my first place interest and only way to lead me to that is the higher studies.
It was May,2007 that I graduated with the cgpa of 3.75 out of 4.00 securing the 18th place in the class. Now I am a student of the M.Sc. Engineering course in the same department. But I think I would have better opportunities to make research and as well as completing higher studies in Sweden.
Swakkhar Shatabda
Student, M. Sc. Engineering,
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology,
Dhaka-1000, Bnagladesh