Intern of the Week: Aayush Jannumahanti

Mon, 06 May 2024 23:30:27 -0400
computer-science, gsoc-developer, intern, intern-of-the-week, internship, iotw

Name: Aayush Jannumahanti

Pronouns: He/Him/His

Semester of Internship: Summer 2023

Major: Computer Science

Current Class Level: Master's Student

This semester I completed a(n)...: Internship

Internship, Co-op, or Research Site (Company/Organization Name): Google Summer Of Code

Location of the Organization (City, State): Cleveland, Ohio

Title of position: GSoC Developer

Tell us about your internship, co-op, or research opportunity, including your day-to-day responsibilities:
Google Summer of Code is a globally recognized platform for mature programmers to come and showcase their skills. Google Summer of Code is an opportunity for a coder to take responsibility for a project, design it, learn what needs to be done, and create a working, documented pipeline that delivers a useful product. My favorite part of participating in GSoC was the opportunity to work on a real-world project with a supportive community and mentors. It provided me with valuable hands-on experience. The most challenging part of participating in GSoC was managing time effectively to meet project deadlines while ensuring the quality of the work. Balancing the workload with other commitments was a learning experience.

I was involved in making an Audio Tagging system for Red Hen Lab Inc. I wrote scripts which took a video file from Gallina (Case Western Reserve University's High Performance Compute Facility). The Input had a VRT file, a video file. The Process: From VRT file create ""segments.txt"". This txt file has sentences with relevant information . I'd crop the audio-file (extracted from videofile) according to start and end of sentence and store them in ""audiofiles"" folder. Later on, created 'samples.json' where each line has values from three keys: audiofilepath, text, duration. The Output was a segments.txt Folder with audiofiles samples.json

Used these samples.json in an End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition (E2E ASR) by NVIDIA NeMo which is a conversational AI toolkit built for researchers working on automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP). The Audio Tagging software was used for Tagging/Transcribe events in Audio/Video segments.

Describe the process of obtaining your position. When did you hear of the position and submit your application?
It clicked to my mind while applying for internships, that there are several open-source high paying internships as well like GSoC, Google Season of Doc, MLH Fellowships, Microsoft Reinforcement Learning Open-Source fest and several others. I then started drafting a proposal and it took me about two weeks to write each proposal. I wrote about three proposals for different organizations that were OpenCV, Red Hen Labs and JDE Robot. All these proposals were well curated with a meticulous timeline and a high-level and low-level system design of my project for the summer. I submitted all the proposals on April 4th 2023 and received my acceptance email and offer letter on May 4th 2023. After submitting my proposal, I waited anxiously for the result. When I received the acceptance email, I felt a wave of excitement and a sense of responsibility. I was given the opportunity to work on a project that could make an impact in the community, and I was determined to make the most of it.

What resources did you use to find your current experience?
UMBC Career Center, LinkedIn or other social media

What have you enjoyed the most about your position and organization?
In summary, GSoC played a pivotal role in expanding my programming skills, particularly in the areas of NLP, conversation design, speech processing, research, and linguistics. This newfound knowledge and practical experience have equipped me with a diverse skill set that I can apply to a wide range of projects and domains in the future.

Red Hen is a house to several great products, resources and world-class mentors. Their Principal leaders excel at what they do! I am elated to have worked under their guidance and support. Mentors at Red Hen were versatile software architects, scientists and it was fun to learn from such great mentors. Their guidance and support is invaluable to me in my career. They had conducted several weekly sync-up meetings to advance the project, which was very helpful.

How do you believe you have made an impact through your work?
GSoC significantly enhanced my programming skills by providing me with the opportunity to delve deeper into the field of linguistics, which was a valuable addition to my existing knowledge in speech and text processing. Throughout the program, I gained extensive experience in various aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and linguistics, which included working with XML, conducting research, and applying linguistic knowledge in practical applications.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?
Communication, compassion, and diligence are the keys to success in any internship or job role. Individuals should be diligent, demonstrate an increase in their attention, energy, and productivity, and engage frequently on platforms like Slack/Gmail/Teams.

Please provide a short reflection or quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / working with the Career Center.

I was really lucky to be engaged and monitored by seasoned professionals from the industry and academia. Their supervision on hands-on problem solving is second to none. This type of mentorship was really necessary for me to become a seasoned professional.

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