2nd January, 2020

Our team Pseudo_Randomly (Tarun Khullar, Pratik Joshi and Shivank Bali from CSE Dept.) coached by Dr Akashdeep (CSE) secured a rank of 91 in the All-India Qualifying preliminaries. The preliminaries were held on 21 November 2019. We solved 4 out of 6 questions in the allotted 3 hrs. The problems were of Ad-hoc, Brute Force, Greedy, Dynamic Programming and Mathematics domains of Algorithms.

Our performance ensured that we were qualified for Kanpur Regionals that were to be held at UIET, CSMJU Kanpur on 31st December 2019. The onsite round was on an another level of competition all the brightest minds of the nation had gathered in Kanpur and were actively competing in a contest to determine the best of them all. Highly ranked competitive programmers from the likes of IIT, IIIT, NIT, BITS and other colleges were present there and it was pleasure to share our experiences with them as well as learn from them.

The onsite Regionals round was 5 hrs long and at the end of it our team ranked 33rd out of 92 teams present on site for the competition. We solved 5 problems out of 10 with 3 penalties. It was a great time thinking for solutions and reasons for mistakes. Most of the mistakes were caused because we missed some edge cases which we did not realize earlier. Again the problems were of Ad-hoc, Brute Force, Greedy, Dynamic Programming and Mathematics domains of Algorithms.

After the contest there was an event where the rank-list was announced and the solutions were discussed. Top 3 teams were selected for the World Finals. We were happy with our performance as we had managed to beat the all time best performance of UIET, Chandigarh at ICPC in both the Preliminaries and the Regionals while giving a tough competition to the other teams.

At the end we realized that competitive programming is a great way to improve your problem solving skills, software development skills and is a great team building exercise. We're grateful to the college for giving us the opportunity to participate in ICPC and wish the future teams all the best for the competition.

24 December, 2019

I was working on a Sudoku Solver project for the last few days and today it is almost completed and is now in working condition. This sudoku solver is unique in its own ways. It takes images of the unsolved sudoku grid on which we apply image processing to detect the grid and get each digit grid separately. Then these segmented digit images are resized to 28x28 and are recognised using the ocr. These recognised digits are used to solve the puzzle using backtracking, then the solution is presented.

This is the link to the project

Following are some screenshots of the project

http://techsetgo.mettl.com/

This is the link to apply for summer internship at Microsoft.

The selection process involved registering on this website first, which was initiated around November or December. Next was an online round conducted in January with 3 programming problems which were somewhat easy. After the online round students with 2-3 complete solutions were called for the interviews.

I was called for an interview at Chandigarh University in the February. The interview process involved 4 Technical elimination rounds. First was group fly round in which 2 problems were displayed and we were supposed to write a working code for those problems on plane sheets. Most of the applicants were rejected in this round. The rest of the rounds were one on one interviews in which they tested all the skills developed throughout the 3 years of college life including subjects as well as projects accomplished during that time. After all this we were sent back to home.

The results were declared after some days through an email.

After this various on-boarding processes were initiated to join them in the summers.