Maroof Akhtar - A-STAR - Summer Blogs

**My Summer Internship Experience at A*STAR Singapore**

Hi Everyone! I’m Maroof, a B.Tech Final year student in the MEMS department. I do full-time calisthenics and part-time engineering, just kidding! I also play badminton.

My Interest lies in Machine Learning.

I’ve always been amazed by God’s best creation – humans – and the fact that many ML models try to mimic the way we are designed. Just to make it clear, there are a few examples such as Visual Cortex → CNN, Pruning , which is literally happening in your brain as you are reading this blog and the list is endless.

I took up a minor in the IEOR department to explore ML courses and participated in some ML hackathons conducted within the institute. Just keep checking your webmail from time to time, and you’ll find one.

Finding the Internship and Interview experience

This summer, I had a chance to do a summer internship at the Institute of Infocomm Research, A*STAR Singapore, which comes under the Ministry of Trade and Commerce. If you search for SIPGA (Singapore International Pre-Graduate Award), you’ll land on the application form where you can find projects, supervisors, and the respective labs. In my case, I applied to 2 projects under the same supervisor.

Maybe 1-2 weeks later, I got an email regarding the interview. There was a paper I needed to present and suggest some improvements that weren’t mentioned in the paper, of course. There were also some very basic general ML questions like Math and the working of SGD and some questions on my resume and to explain the pseudo code of the paper repo, since this was my first interview after making my resume I screwed up my resume interview part and somehow the paper improvement and presentation part saved me 🙂

Preparation before the Internship

I had asked my supervisor during my interview what I should know before joining the work. He told me to familiarize myself with some famous RL algorithms, so I took a course during my 6th sem called Reinforcement Learning Algorithm which was offered from the IEOR dept. I had to go through some nightmare of proofs, but still, I managed to pass. I would also encourage you to just ask your supervisor about the prerequisites of the project. You can also find them in the project list in the application form.

**Work at I2R, A*Star**

At I2R, we had just 2 days of work from the office, so you could go for a marathon on some random Tuesday and then work again at night. I encourage you to do this 🙂. My work was to implement Brain Inspired learning in state-of-the-art RL algorithms and test them on some benchmark Gym and PyBullet environments. In state-of-the-art ML Models, the training process is based on backpropagation and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) optimization. However, studies in neuroscience strongly suggest that this kind of process does not occur in the biological brain. Rather, learning methods based on Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP) or the Hebbian learning rule seem to be more plausible.

Exploring Southeast Asia and Cultural Exchange

Let’s dive into the fun and exploration part. I went to Singapore with my batchmate Sanyam Jain. He was in A*STAR only but in a different lab. We explored Malaysia during weekends – it’s just an hour ride by bus from Singapore. We also visited Thailand during weekdays. If you like water adventures and beaches, you would love Thailand.

Coming to the places in Singapore, you can visit most of the famous places within a week. Then, to find some hidden gems, you need to message me personally 🙂

You will meet a lot of people from across the world. Name a country, and you’ll find someone from there in our program. I had the opportunity to talk about and exchange cultures.

Life in Singapore

As for Singapore as a country, you can get used to everything from the beginning itself since it is automated, and almost all of the population speaks English. People were very kind and welcoming. You can find some of the best shots at my instagram.

Future Opportunities

As part of future opportunities, they offer SINGA integrated PhD from A*STAR and any of the universities from NUS, NTU, SMU. Apart from this, there are various Research Engineer positions.

Unexpected Encounters

Some unexpected events happened there. I met one of my professors, Prof Gururajan, inside the office lift. He came there for a talk at NUS and was accompanied by one of my office mates. Another time, I randomly met one of my fellow Hostel 2 residents at a metro station. I had just seen him in the hostel and never talked. Surprisingly, he was working in the same lab. We had lunch together for a few days, and then he left early since his attachment ended.

Concluding Thoughts

If you’re on the lookout for an opportunity that offers both corporate and research experience, this internship at A*STAR could be one of the best options available. It truly provides a unique blend of professional and academic exposure.

As a final piece of advice, I’d encourage you to keep searching for opportunities and never lose hope. Remember, we plan and God plans and we know God is the best of the planners. So, focus on what you can control: keep studying, maintain a healthy lifestyle, enjoy your favorite sports, and leave the rest to the most high. I do not have pictures of initial days at my office But I do have one from my last day of internship with my office guys trying some Peruvian Cuisine.