SOP Sample for MS in Computer Science in Canada

To, The Admission Committee Members

Subject: Statement of Purpose

I would like to submit my willingness to join the Fall 2022 Masters of Applied Computing Program at your esteemed university.

The rise of applied computing distinct from traditional, research-heavy cousin computer science is determined by very strong undercurrents of pragmatic software development. There is a huge demand for software engineers who understand the business statement well enough and are aware of appropriate computing tools that can help businesses create value quickly and effectively, such as using various cloud tools and APIs as leverage. This trend is exemplified in the data science domain where applied ML engineers are quickly overtaking much of traditional data science work, creating better-specialized roles for the research-oriented data scientists leading to a win-win situation. [UNIVERSITY_NAME] has one of the best-known applied computing programs in Canada and if admitted would be a great opportunity for me to strengthen my knowledge of applied computer science especially in the domain of artificial intelligence.

I began undergraduate studies at [UNIVERSITY_NAME] in Electrical Engineering Domain in the year 2015. Here, I learnt the fundamentals of electricity, electrical machinery, power systems, microprocessors and electronics and fell in love with a subject called control systems. These electronic systems are often computer controlled and are present inside every major appliance from refrigerators to cars and aeroplanes to large electric power plants. These control systems are responsible for maintaining a given set point or operating condition and are responsible for the recovery of the system from any disturbance that acts upon the system. I ended up researching these control systems for over a year, publishing 2 research papers on IEEE Xplore under the supervision of [PROFESSOR_NAME] my control systems instructor and Associate Dean R&D at [UNIVERSITY_NAME].

Towards the end of my Bachelor's Program, I discovered machine learning through some courses in Neural Networks and Deep Learning and Digital Image Processing and became really interested in the wide-ranging applications of this technology. After completing my Bachelor's Degree, I joined a postgraduate diploma course on big data analytics at the [INSTITUTION_NAME], [CITY_NAME] which is a premier government run research organization in India.

Here I took a lot of bridge computer science courses like object-oriented programming with Java, DBMS, Linux, Cloud technologies as well as specialized courses in big data Tools like Hadoop, Spark and Hive. I was most fascinated with the statistics and practical machine learning courses. Here my foundation in Linear Algebra, mathematical modelling and optimization from control systems helped me gain a fine understanding of how these algorithms worked and how I can utilize these tools to solve business problems.

For my final project at [INSTITUTION_NAME], Me along with my team members mined keywords from more than 100,000 research papers using a database from [URL] to analyse correlated research topics using association rules with FP Growth algorithm. I developed a small end to end UI using Python Flask to serve the recommendations and hosted it on AWS for the project duration.

After graduating from [INSTITUTION_NAME], I joined [COMPANY_NAME] a multinational heath-tech corporation as a data scientist. It was a fairly new team and I was immediately given end to end responsibility for developing a recommendation system. I worked closely with the senior data science management to refactor the entire code base, added new features and automation, containerized the application, developed and maintained dashboards, and created a new ML model based on the token usage frequency across a time series. This simple time-series based model beat the baseline accuracy of a complicated association rule mining and logistic regression based text classification model by a margin of as much as 20% for some accounts. I was awarded the [COMPANY_NAME] Value Master Award in learning category for my contributions to the team.

For my second project I developed a full-scale proof of concept Named Entity Recognition System for medical entities, using a pretrained med7 NER model in spacy library. I further tuned it on custom data for better performance using annotations developed using brat annotator. Delivered a python Flask API around the ML use case and integrated the API using Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions on GCP, also developed analytic dashboards using R shiny for the use case.

For my current project, I am developing a text based multiclass classifier for medical documents training the classifier on text generated using Tesseract Optical character recognition from Google. I have tried multiple algorithms and approaches, from Logistic regression, SVM, KNN, Naïve Bayes Models to tuning the TFIDF representation, SVD based dimensionality reduction, Tree Based models using LightGBM library, Bayesian hyperparameter tuning and even CNN and LSTM based Neural network models trained using custom word embeddings. However, in an ode to model simplicity and interpretability, we currently observe that a simple feature engineered logistic regression beats all tree based and neural network models and we are able to capture 80%+ accuracy using this approach.

I also work on various production support and automation tasks using Python. I was heavily involved in a recent migration from mongoDB to a MySQL Database. I was also a part of the Tech Exchange team, where we conduct basic sessions on ML, DevOps, Programming for company folk who are not aware of these technologies. I delivered 2 sessions on basics of python programming.

I believe by joining the applied computing program at your esteemed university, I will have an opportunity to develop my broad set of skills in computer science, drilling down on my fundamentals using the advanced software engineering courses as well as developing my niche as an applied machine learning engineer by utilizing the additional AI related courses.

I intend to actively participate in all technical seminars and colloquiums organized by the university. If admitted I will be really looking forward to the co-op/internship which can provide a good introduction to the Canadian workplace as well as a good masters project wherein I can apply my skills to a relevant applied computing problem.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to consider my application and hope that you will see me as a good fit for this program at your esteemed university.

Sincerely, [APPLICANT_NAME]