Sponsors & Supporters
Kiran is an UKESF Scholar and is sponsored by ITDev, a major supplier of software and electronic engineering services, delivering to the UK, Europe, USA and worldwide.
Before university, I was able to take GCSE and A-level Electronics. I thoroughly enjoyed the subject and I especially enjoyed the practical projects. The ability to take a problem and design creative solutions appealed to me greatly. One of my favourite examples of this was using the principle of heterodyning, which I learned from studying radio receivers, to make ultrasound produced by bats audible to humans. The fast-paced progress of electronics as well as its increasing use worldwide was also something that I wanted to be a part of.
During my placement at ITDev, I was initially working on a software application which could take a camera feed or a video recording of a person’s face and determine their vital signs, such as their heart rate. Although I had no familiarity with projects like this, I was able to make a number of contributions to the application. After a few weeks of working on the software, I was tasked with getting the program running on an all programmable SoC, a device which incorporates a processing system and an FPGA. The aim of this was to accelerate the application in hardware. Over the course of this placement, I gained valuable experience in both software and hardware. My programming skills vastly improved and I was able to undertake some FPGA work for the first time. On top of this, I developed my soft skills by working in a team.
In my own time, I have been programming my own computer game. It is a 2D action-platformer coded in C++ which uses the Simple DirectMedia Layer library for rendering. Although I have been working on it for quite a long time, I hope to eventually release it online.