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Vishnu Thampuran (CS 4th Year) found opportunities to take what he learned about artificial intelligence and machine learning in the classroom and apply it to a wide variety of real-world projects in autonomous driving, neuroscience, astronomy, medical imaging, and more while at Illinois Tech.

“I found a technology-focused university in �鶹APP with a strong emphasis on applying what students learn rather than keeping everything inside the classroom,” Vishnu says. “T��� more I learned about Illinois Tech, the more I saw opportunities to get involved in research, industry-sponsored projects, student organizations, competitions, and interdisciplinary work. That combination was especially exciting to me because I knew I wanted college to be more than simply completing a set of courses and earning a degree.”

He worked with J.P. Morgan Chase as a software engineer during his first year at Illinois Tech, working with other engineers and project managers. He led a six-person team that developed a financial budgeting application, which gave him early exposure to Agile development, product decisions, and working in an interdisciplinary team.

“While I learned the fundamentals through courses in programming, algorithms, computer architecture, systems, machine learning, and other areas, I was also constantly finding opportunities to apply those ideas to solving all different kinds of problems I was passionate about,” Vishnu says.

As a senior engineer of Illinois Tech’s EcoCAR EV Innovation Challenge team, he worked to integrate software that interacts with cameras, radar, LiDAR, controls, communications, and real safety requirements. He specialized in connected and automated vehicle systems for the Cadillac LYRIQ that the Illinois Tech team rebuilt. The national competition was supported by the United States Department of Energy, General Motors, MathWorks, and Argonne National Laboratory.

“EcoCAR showed me that software can directly interact with a complex physical system where reliability and safety matter for robust autonomy,” he says.

Vishnu’s was also part of a student-led research team that competed in the university’s Grainger Computing Innovation Prize. The team built vArI, an ocean-plastic movement prediction application. It is computationally difficult to forecast ocean-plastic movement because currents, wind, geography, and time create an enormous number of possible trajectories. Rather than relying on centralized high-performance computing, the team built a distributed platform that could divide drift simulations into smaller tasks and send them to participating devices in the network contributing processing power and computational resources when idle. Thousands of individual physics-based trajectories could then be aggregated into probabilistic heat maps showing where plastic is most likely to move or accumulate.

“T��� Grainger Computing Innovation Prize is probably the experience that brought the largest number of things I had learned at Illinois Tech together at once,” Vishnu says. “What made the experience meaningful to me was that it combined ideas I had encountered throughout my education: distributed systems, dynamical simulations, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, product design, and, more importantly, teamwork.”

The team earned third place and a prize of $5,000 for its effort.

Vishnu says turning an idea shared between students into a scalable real-world system that took an unconventional approach to computing to help tackle problems in sustainability and ocean conservation was the most rewarding part of the Grainger Prize experience.

“Since the competition, I have continued doing grassroots research and outreach around how a platform like this could be useful to researchers and environmental organizations in adding meaningful value to ocean conservation efforts around North America and the rest of the world,” Vishnu says. “For me, the competition did not feel like the end of the project. It felt more like proof that the idea deserved to be explored further.”