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Kaustav Das Sharma

Computer & Software Engineer

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About Me

Conversation is my comfort zone, but saying where I’m from always makes me stutter. I was born in Kolkata, crawled through my early years in New Delhi, read my first books in Milan, found my love for science in Stavanger, and discovered its significance in London. However, regardless of where I am, I have found that nothing is more enriching than interacting and working with people. It has become an obsession of mine to pick their minds wherever I go, to learn about their backgrounds, gain insight on their perspectives, discuss their tastes and what changes they would like to see in the world. From repairing an earthquake-damaged roof with locals in the Kathmandu Valley to debating geopolitical crises at MUN conferences in The Hague and advertising technological challenges at Hackathons in Montreal, it is my ease in fitting into any setting that I believe truly sets me apart. I firmly believe in the values of collaboration and stand by the pertinence of diversity, because the ideas and viewpoints I cherish are a product of those very things. Innovation is triggered by cultural immersion, and I look forward to contributing mine and learning a lot more during my time at McGill University.

Brief History

Crawling About

Calcultta & New Delhi, India

Football and Pizza

Milan, Italy

Handling the Heat

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Becoming Myself

Stavanger, Norway

Scholarly Years

London, United Kingdom

Engineering Years

Montreal, Canada

Education

McGill University

Sept 2017 - May 2022

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering

  • McGill Artificial Intelligence Society, Canadian Federation of Engineering Students, Engineering Undergraduate Society, School of Computer Science, ECSESS, HackMcGill, Congress 2019, CodeJam, McGill Engineering Competition, McGill Formula Electric.

    • Projects

    McGillRTC

    Feeling bored during the lockdown days, my friend Rahul and I decided to build a chat roulette application for McGill students. We are using the WebRTC library with a Firebase backend and authentication. "Serverless" programming is really cool, and we used Vuex for our state management. Got to play around with some cool Bootstrap-Vue libraries and learn more about stun servers, RTCConnections and different protocols for internet communication.

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    Pentago Twist AI

    An extension to a class project based on building algorithms to play Pentago Twist. For this project, I added a Minimax search algorithm based on how many tiles were places adjacent to each other to form valid rows/columns/diagonals as the heuristic. Currently, working on adding a better heuristic, MCTS and reinforcement learning to find which performs best under certain time and memory constraints.

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    PrimeAID

    I am extremely priviledged to have lived in places like the UK, Norway and Canada which have universal healthcare. However, public healthcare, like other socialised systems, is rationed according to a worst-come-first-serve basis. PrimeAID addresses the inefficiency in this fundamental problem, it offers an interface for facilitated communication between patients and medical institutions to display information like wait times, hospital beds availability and allows patients to put in their symptoms in to refer them to the ER, walk-in clinic or regular GP according to a severity index.

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    Cryptocurrency Dashboard

    For my Summer 2019 internship, I worked for a start-up called Great North Data. I created a dashboard for members of the company to use to track financial indexes and metrics as well as deal with some tedious client requests. Lastly, I built a news tracker for cryptocurrency and business news. The dashboard is built using the EAN stack, and hosted on AWS Lightsail.

    block223

    Software engineering project for ECSE223 to build a fully functional BrickBreaker game. Designed and modelled using model-view-controller principles, Unified Modelling language and Umple, and programmed in Java using JavaApplet and Swing packages for the UI. Placed 3rd/30 teams in ECSE223W19.

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    Flappy Diamond Neural Network

    Built the front-end for a Flappy Diamond game which a user can play and so can a neural network!

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    clipRegister

    Ever copy-paste something, then realise its the wrong thing, copy something else... oh shoot, that first one was right! I can vouch for the fact that this is happened more to me than anyone else on planet earth. clipRegister is a Python application which aids in keeping track of your clipboard history, built using Tkinter.

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    upData

    Real-time event analytics application built for McHacks 2019 using NewsAPI, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This was my first hackathon!

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    Raptors Digest

    Site I made for my buddy's YouTube channel. This was one of my first experiences with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Good times!

    Articles

    I've always loved to research, learn, formulate opinions and convey my thoughts eloquently. More often than not it was verbal, wether it was having a discussion with friends or in a debating competition. I've found that writing can be quite therapeutic and allows me to fill a certain void I have of not being able to express myself fully. Below are examples of some early pieces I wrote which got me into writing, and my summer 2019 project to write an article a week. I must thank Aditya Sharma and Isabella Lyons out for their amazing contributions in editing my work, please check out their portfolios as well.

    How many miles can my computer drive?

    When I was a kid, I used to be comforted with Pinball and MS-Paint when I didn't have internet. Nowadays, it seems though any application on your computer or phone requires an internet connection to be useable. With the emergence of data centers and cloud computing services, I was curious to see what carbon footprint my IT usage leaves on a weekly basis.

    The Impact of COVID-19 on Tech

    Sample taken from my submission for CarmIka books' 'Young Engineers Essay Competition'.

    Reformation of Democracy: Issue I

    Exploring the flaws of democracy and the need for a competency test to determine voter eligibility.

    * Edit: Learning and understanding more about how governments in the world are actively engaged in the voter supression of minorities, I no longer stand by the claims made in this article. *

    Remnants of Roe v. Wade

    Exploring the progression and analysing the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, following Alabama's ban on all abortions.

    Cash rules everything around me?

    Following the huge backlash of Daryl Morey's tweet in support of Hong Kong, how should "businesses" operate when dealing with "authoritarian" regimes?

    Isabella

    Isabella Lyons

    My lovely editor

    McGill University

    Miscellaneous

    Let's grab a coffee!