Sample Essay

Growing up in Bangladesh, I’ve always been of the notion that ‘research’ is only for the big scientists out there working for NASA. The fact that universities carry out research and are funded billions for it was not even in my realm of imagination. So, 18-year-old me was awestruck at the idea that I could write a research proposal myself. At the start, I actually had no idea where to begin. 

I’d recently been reading up on a lot of threads on Reddit relating to Artificial Intelligence as well as experiencing the wonders of AI firsthand through applications such as ‘Google Now’, ‘Cortana’, and ‘Google photos’ to name a few, my favorite being Google photos for its scarily accurate identification. I’d began by trying to collect enough material and research papers on the topics of Machine learning, Deep learning, Mathematics behind AI, along with the philosophical and cognitive aspects of AI. See, Artificial Intelligence is possibly the most open-ended topic out there right now, it is like a vast field ready for seeds to be sown and the benefits to be reaped eventually, some will come early on, some later. Eventually, I had to find someone more experienced than me to work with, bounce ideas off and maybe even help guide me in this vast open space, that’s where Tahsinur Rahman came in. I’d come across him in Nurture A.I.—Dhaka Chapter, a platform initiated to keep the AI community to stay updated with latest research, create and implement breakthroughs. 

Working with Tahsin, I’d begun development of my paper on “Machine Learning, Unsupervised Learning”. Beginning this process, I’d begun learning of how little I knew of the world of Artificial Intelligence. Even slightly scratching the surface, I’d learned how much more there is to Artificial Intelligence than just the Computer science side of it, than just the Mathematics of it. I was slowly coming into contact with the philosophical and cognitive aspects of AI, delving into books such as Gödel, Escher, Bach, Global Politics and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Besides these, it was important to get to know more about what the leaders in the field of Artificial Intelligence were studying, and so came in the hundreds of research papers dealing with a range of things from the ethical issues of AI, the future of AI, Bayes’ Theorem, Boolean Algebra and even Ramanujan’s math, something critical to the future development of Machine Learning.