IOT Internship at NUS - An Unforgettable Experience!

Connecting the Dots: How did it all begin?

Many times in life, you feel like good things aren’t coming your way and you wander around waiting for opportunities to come, and then there are times when you feel overwhelmed by the number of resources and opportunities in hand. In December 2019, I, Shaolin Kataria, a second-year student from VIT, Vellore, felt like the latter.

A 3-week stay in one of the top universities in the world, the National University of Singapore, Singapore awaited me for my winter internship program in IoT with Machine Learning.

My first encounter with IoT happened in one of the extra classes in my first year of college when the only thing I had in my mind was to learn as much as possible from available resources. After a few projects within a year and winning an award and patent on one such IoT based research project, I found myself wondering, where do I go from here? How do I upscale this further? How can I maximize the productivity of the skill set I possess to the highest level?

Corporate Gurukul - the gateway to my next big opportunity

The answer to my questions was in this mail where Corporate Gurukul had asked us to fill in applications for a program GAIP - The Global Academic Internship Programme. IoT with ML was one of the modules of GAIP. When there's a chance of interning at an institute like the National University of Singapore (NUS), which is considered as one of the top 20 universities in the world, you don't think twice, you apply.

I gave a prerequisite test which was one of the criteria for selection for the internship on a random Sunday and I soon got a call informing me that I had cleared my first round. I was informed of my selection for the Internship. I was happy and thrilled, the next step was to register and finalize my seat for the program.

Get Set before the Go

Management is very important for a big trip otherwise you may overspend. I made sure to keep a check on the expenses wherever feasible. I was even fortunate to gain a scholarship worth 500 SGD which eased my expenses towards the program.

Now what was left was to plan and move forward. Book flight tickets well in advance to seek a price advantage. It is best to have the right travel agency for ticketing and get your paperwork ready for the visa, currency exchange, etc.

Everything was set, this build-up of months for this one trip which is going to test the skills I possessed and my prowess to learn, was finally happening. Me and two other friends of mine from college planned to pool the taxi to the airport and off we went for our voyage to the Lion City.

Touchdown: Singapore

14th of December, 7:30 am, Saturday morning, we found ourselves in a completely different world, an exciting one, something new. We were welcomed by a pretty view before landing, with the beautiful blend of water and land along with the greenery and structured construction. The moment was capped off with the song “Home” being played on the airplane. I was getting more and more excited.

We were in awe of the Changi Airport and began to wonder “if the airport is this good, how will the country be?” The airport had a beautiful area with a jungle-themed waterfall at the center worth at least 2 Instagram uploads.

We were welcomed by Corporate Gurukul at the airport who were there to receive us and other fellow aspirants and thereon, we knew, we were in for quite some ride. But to start off with, we had a bus ride from the airport till our residence, the PGPR, which was a compilation of some beautiful scenes and interactions with every other person sitting around us.

On-Campus at NUS - What to expect

There’s a smooth blend of the outside world with the campus, yet one which is quite distinguishable. There are well-connected roads, scheduled shuttles, and various variety of food courts, some of which operate late at night, that come in handy when you’re having an all-nighter. Various academic buildings along with the ones where there are theatres, huge auditoriums, and playgrounds around, are what make up the campus at NUS. One such playground was where everyone gathered one fine day to witness a full Solar Eclipse on the 26th of December, 2020.

The image below captured the ring of beauty.

We were given electronic key cards for access to our building, floor, and room. My IOT internship was about to kick-off and I could already sense it all around from electronic access cards to sensor hand dryers or coin vending machines. Adding to the list, we soon found an EZ Card which could be used for transactions on buses and metros, and a few restaurants, making the entire process a lot quicker.

There was a complex nearby which had different varieties of food and drinks, ranging from veg to non-veg. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that it was a nightmare for vegetarians there.

The working environment at NUS is so good that once you’re free from classes, you go to your hostels, have food, but then either you’re in your discussion rooms, or your teammate’s room or you’re in some shop looking for a module or a sensor or you’re just sitting in your room searching online. The environment is competitive, productive, and fruitful.

Adding to that, the country in itself, with a strict set of rules makes the citizens feel safe. I remember one night we were working on our project, and we were lacking a simple battery for one of the modules. It was 2 or 3 in the night, and we simply went out, walked 3 km to the nearest 7-Eleven, got what we wanted, and came back. I had a female teammate and for her to be walking that late at night at a random place, without any fear, says a lot about how developed a country is, and we were glad to be in such an environment.

Apart from this, there are other co-curricular activities like clubs involving dance which you can see being practiced on campus premises.

Fantastic Four

Moving to the professional aspect of my experience, I will say two words, Mantis Shrimp, a sea animal that can strike with great power, and that is exactly what we were being trained to be like. And it would be impossible if it had not been for the amazing faculty that raised the bars of the Internship.

HPE Faculty - Satan Pandey

It was one of the best teacher-student interactions I’ve had in my entire life of 20 years.

NUS Faculty - Trinity Trio

Modules with interfacing involved, usage of sensors, implementing safety measures such as MQTT Object Encryption, using Python Co AP, GPIOs, USB Serials were taught to us patiently by the NUS faculties.

• Dr. Anand handled the security protocols.
• Dr. Chan handled the Microbit, Raspberry Pi, both of which we used in our projects, and he also covered the use of Python in publishing messages over an established network, the applications of which can be a simple messenger.
• Last but not least, Dr. Tan was the one who made us use wireless sensors, wearable sensors, and made us aware of how we could improve our energy consumption efficiency in the theory classes.

When I went there thinking IoT is something I knew about, ML is something I’m yet to learn, I was proven wrong with the exposure I got provided with, not just in terms of theory but practical applications as well. The amount of security measures, standards, real-world applications, new modules, sensors, and efficient microprocessors to work with, is something that changed my entire definition of IoT.

It felt like an entirely new side was being taught there. You’d think that the technical knowledge has been finessed but that’s just not it.

Ahoy! Onboard the classes

A planned time table was distributed for us to follow, and so our first day started, a small hall, 2 instructors, and a bright screen which followed up with information about the ongoing IoT projects at the industry level involving attendance systems, parking, and so on.

There was an app called Acadly which all of us were new to, it took our attendance only when the moderator was in the vicinity of the students which meant you have to be physically present in class before it starts for your attendance to register which was cool and stressful at the same time, more on that later. We had classes from 9-5, with a lunch break from 1-2.

During the afternoon sessions which comprised of practicals (mornings were for theory, tests were taken every day in the evening to assess what we had learned on the day, and they carried a weightage along with the final project marks to determine our grade at the end.),

And our breaks during sessions were knowledgeable, Mantis Shrimp was one of them.

We were strategically divided into groups and given a topic which we had to deliver to our best-researched knowledge while proving technically as to how it’s better than the available versions or providing one novel upgrade, using everything we learned during the theory session.

There were a lot of brainstorming sessions as a group, along with presentations that we became comfortable with. I liked the tactic applied while making our groups, they made sure that people from different colleges were grouped because that’s the industry environment you face. You work on products with a random set of people, brainstorm with them, agree with them, work with them.

Our Project

Deciding our topic was a tough nut to crack, and we couldn’t come up with any ideas in particular, even after consulting our TAs or professors who were always ready to help. They would tell us every small detail about the practical implementation of our hands-on, but we were struggling to finalize an idea.

Thankfully, we came up with an assistant smart chair system for a person suffering from Cerebral Palsy. Coming up with an idea might have taken time but thanks to the training earlier, we were quickly able to specify the constraints around which we were going to work on coming up with a solution.

We looked at the symptoms, muscular function is almost null, so we came up with a gesture-based wheelchair so that not even the effort of pressing a button would be required. The patient would have to only hover their hand over a sensor to register a gesture.

We provided obstacle avoidance as well. Such a person usually has a problem with excess saliva leaking, so we installed a camera that would detect the face image and accordingly suggest whether a fellow house member needs to be called to wipe it off his face. Future implementation involves a robotic arm.

We also monitored his health regularly using sensors and kept a real-time track of his readings. Machine Learning algorithms were used to report any irregularities in the health patterns. An alert was sent to medical personnel in case of any irregularities.

We also made an extra accessory in a special case scenario where everything else will still be valid but a person will be able to speak, so the commands would be understood by our voice recognition system. The same can be used by the person to make voice memos which will be saved and can be accessed anytime from the cloud because in some cases, Alzheimer’s is also a concern for patients. Since these weren’t base requirements, we kept them as accessories, extras.

Time- Off - Exploring Singapore

As much as I wanted to excel and score well in the Internship, on evaluations and project presentations. I was equally looking forward to exploring the country and culture of Singapore. I was determined and made sure I did both. Here is my pick of the must-see places in Singapore :

Marina Bay, Downtown Core: It was the right time for me interning in Singapore because if you’ve watched movies like Home Alone as a kid and you’ve fantasized about having a Christmas and New Year like that abroad, this is the place to be. The light shows, the music, the decorations, the food stalls, the small gaming parlors. It felt like one of those places which make you happy just for being there.

What’s for the future?

While preparing for the internship, I honestly didn’t have any expectations apart from the excitement about the unknown, I was mainly excited for ML because I had already done a bit of IoT but I had a lot of exposure, more than I expected for IoT because there were just so many things which need to be taken care about and what we as engineers should take into consideration while developing a solution, which I wasn’t even aware of at college level.

Before this internship experience at NUS Singapore, I was never confident about pursuing IoT as a career but post this internship, witnessing how things are implemented at an industrial level, I grew more confident about the field. Next was the possibility of doing an MS abroad, where the field of research and industrial opportunities are vast.

The certifications that the program offers in the form of LORs and LOEs help a lot in developing a profile for Higher Education. The short term that I spent with such a vast domain of personalities made me grow professionally and personally.

Talking about this product idea, after coming back to college, a group of people and I created a team together. We implemented this idea of mine at various hackathons and won cash prizes as big as 12,000 INR and subscriptions worth 1875$.

IoT had become much more than I already knew before joining this research internship. We entered those 21 days as research interns, but we came out as a family, and I’m thankful to the professors for the knowledge, to Corporate Gurukul for providing the platform, the components some of which I checked, aren’t available in India, and for always being of assistance whenever called upon, let it be technical or nontechnical.

And if this entire explanation of my trip in terms of my experiences outside and within the technical domain wasn’t enough, there were the last 2 days, when our project presentations were done.

In those two last days post our final presentation of the project and grading, there was a concluding ceremony where we all met together for one last time with each other and our faculties and TAs. The ceremony was capped off by good food, dancing faculties, fun games, and certificate distribution. And that’s It, an experience that was a knowledge-packed, fun-loving, and memorable Internship of mine before the world went into lockdown.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR