I'm an academic guy, with lots of visions and ambitions about the future of man-kind. I want to be a pioneer in the robotic revolution, I want to discover lots of things about human brain, I want to know more... To know will be my job!
Academic Achievements
My name is Kourosh Meshgi, a graduate student from Amirkabir University of Technology, one of the Iran’s leading universities in technological research and innovation. I’m seeking an opportunity to further my education in a well-known university. I’m especially interested in labs and research fields which haveresearch interests same as mine, found the publication interesting, and think I could have perfect contribution there. I individually visited him and his lab and found it a comfortable place for team work and with talented researchers and I feel really excited.
My undergraduate school, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), is one of the premier learning institutions in Iran where out of 400000 applicants only 1000 are admitted in all of engineering and science fields, and only 50 of them make it to the Computer Engineering & Information Technology Department. This department enables students to find their interest between software engineering, hardware engineering, and information technology as their major and pick courses upon their interests. I always wanted to make robots and had lots of ideas about them, so I chose hardware engineering as my undergraduate major in order to pave in the way of my dreams. This period granted me a great insight about systematic analysis and hardware issue a robot designer faces.
I also participated in the RoboCup competitions as a member of several teams in different leagues. I was in the coach simulation league with Kasra team where I achieved world 3rd place in RoboCup 2005, and then joined Aria team, one of the most well-known Iranian robotic teams, who attended in RoboCup 2007 with the background of 2 consecutive championships in the 3D simulation league in 2005 and 2006. Lack of sufficient utilities and fund drifts me toward robotic simulation, where I could grasp good experiences about the challenges of robotic problems and on the same time I can remain in the torrent of information heading to future world, robotic era.
This opportunity showed me the importance of artificial intelligence and because I daydream about intelligent robots, I shift my attention toward this field. In this area I started to broaden my knowledge about AI and also served as a teacher assistant in the Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course which provided me an opportunity to enhance my communication and teaching skill while I earned a complement for my tuition. Further I have been a researcher in our department's Robotics Lab since 2005. The research focused on machine learning, robotics, and multi-agent systems and I was involved in several projects on simulated robotic soccer player agents. Working in collaboration with other students and professors on lengthy research projects, I grasped concepts of teamwork, leadership, teaching, and problem solving. During my teacher assistantship, I tried to renovate the curricula of the undergraduate artificial intelligent course, and make it more realistic to give student the touch of using AI and how to solve problems with it. I chose some famous games such as Reversi, Checkers and Risk (aka World Wars), implemented a game server for them and asked the student to design a game agent for and scored students in a competitive manner. I always have a unique way of teaching stuff to people, a fun way to walk on the edges of science and give them the courage to push these borders and brainstorm to give stunning results. I wish to be able to continue this method in my desired career, being a famous and well-rounded university professor.
As my father getting older when I spent days at university, I started to work during my under graduation to pay my expenses as well as gaining industrial experience. So in addition to the academic field, I have some industrial recruitment history. Since I was familiar with both hardware and software, I was assigned to the mediation team, where I designed an agent to collect data from several brands of telecommunication switches and deliver them into a repository, a bridge between software team and hardware team. I figured out some defects in current network protocols and started to improve them using my knowledge of AI, and in this regard, I defined my final project of my under graduation as “Random Early Congestion Detection of Packet Switched Networks Using Fuzzy Q-Learning”. I studied a lot about computer networks and machine learning for this project and my project was one of the best papers of the department, as my full score demonstrates it.
I continued my education in Amirkabir University of Technology in a Master’s program via another nationwide examination in which from 10000 applicants, only 20 students of best ranks are admitted for the area of Artificial Intelligence. During my studies, I took courses such as machine vision, digital image processing, statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, robotics, neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. Becoming expert enough in AI literature, I started to develop papers most of which are based on my B.Sc. thesis. I contributed in the literature review, implementation, and manuscript writing of them. In my other older papers, I contributed in brainstorming, literature review and manuscript writing. Massive review on the literature and good analysis of dynamics of system, along with my experience in programming and fine technical writing skills, helps me to not only solve the problems by new ideas, but also to deploy and present them properly. In these papers I paired with a computer networks expert AI student, who did the simulations and I respected him to put his name in the beginning of my papers because I’ve learnt lots of things from him.
My interests in Robotics became more powerful in this period. I was a member of Nemesis 2D team, a machine learning research-based team of our university, qualified for RoboCup 2010 held in Singapore but due to financial problems I couldn’t register to this competitions and this financial insecurity of my university is one of the main reasons of my will to leave it, despite the fact that I’m recognized as the exceptional talent in the university among my school and they offered me a PhD position. My supervisor, Dr. Shiry is graduated from Kobe University and he encourages me to further my studies in Japan, where I can pursue my ambitions and can be in the scale of my powers in the peaceful, well-cultured and high-tech community of Japan. As I passed my courses with the highest credit in my class and ranked 1st among my class, I continued my publishing in the field of robotics with two papers (one is currently under submission) and served as the TA of Robotics graduate course. Introduced to the world of computer vision, I developed my interests in this area. On the other hand I passed training in the psychology called Transactional Analysis and from that time, I admire human brain as the source of all our perceptions and actions. Combining these two, I started to work in an interdisciplinary field of Brain Derived Vision which interfaces between machine vision and neuroscience. I studied neuroscientific models of brain cognition, surveyed natural image understanding literature, broaden my knowledge in statistics, face detection/recognition literature and neural network architecture and finally proposed a Visual Cortex top-down model to reduce non-stationary covariance dependency in natural input images such as human faces and cluster objects based on their image distribution and used it in the application of frontal face detection in which the results appeared in my Master’s thesis title “Brain Inspired Face Detection”. I scored full in this project even when I had no publication ready at the thesis defense date that shows my fluency in literature and impressive work (Believe me getting full mark in our department is the mission impossible as you can see I’m the top student of this department with the GPA of 17.93 out of 20!). I’m busy developing two conference papers on my model and plan to write a journal paper about this topic. I’m also waiting to earn the PhD student title to publish my survey over this topic as a journal paper or book chapter, because it’s not common for a graduate student to be credited for surveys.
In order to cover my life expenses I started to work with the permission of my supervisor professor after the 2nd semester of my master program. I was assigned as a software testing engineer, did some R&D on functional test techniques, became a functional test tool guru, and worked on outsourced test projects. Faced with the financial crisis of the world, my last company declared bankruptcy but I used my experience as the test designer for my next employer. My thorough analysis and report about the main product of this employer, Ticket Vending Machines and Banking Kiosks, brings me a promotion to product quality manager of that company. By the way, to keep track of my research goals, I started to work as a software developer in the field of video processing and surveillance in another company after my graduation. In this project I’m assigned the video understanding tasks such as left object detection, passenger counting, face detection, intrusion detection and motion detection. The time management required by each project has taught me to plan well, work systematically, keep my reports up-to-date, gather information directly and indirectly, deal with heavy documentations, and effectively present in official meetings. I’m a tireless person which now works over 240 hours a month for my employers, conducts some private teaching classes like digital image processing, introduction to robotics, and English technical paper writing and at the same time I’m socially well-rounded and continue photography and mountain climbing with my friends as my hobbies.
My lifetime dream is giving a robot the ability to learn and act like humans and to see a future when robots surrounds us, making life easy and convenient for mankind, bringing peace and joy all around the world. I have lots of fantasies about the future world and I wish to be a pioneer to this era. As a child I innovated lots of creative structures and machinery for special purposes and my family encouraged me by providing more tools and spare parts. Knowing my abilities during the years in work and study, I found myself suitable at research and teaching, and whenever it comes to artificial intelligence, I feel great enthusiasm and motivation to be the best and achieve the most. I have tasted many types of environments in my life, from international conferences organizing committee (IKT 2003 and 2005) to ACM and RoboCup competitions, student council of out department, IEEE student branch and swimming team of the university and even psychological healing environments, and I outstand in many of them by my personal characteristics, playing cool, wise and modest. Among all, I love being in a challenging academic environment, where everybody play win-win in research and is dedicated to what they do. I planned my lifestyle so that my wishes come true as the goals of my life, and tailor them to be the most profitable for all. Joining your program will fulfill my desire for doing in-depth research and provide me with the opportunity to have a career in research and teaching. I hope to eventually apply for a faculty position at a leading university and investigate issues within my research interests. I trust the above has been helpful and that my application will be accepted. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me via email: kouroshmeshgi@gmail.com.
