I was born in 1989 at Patiala, a small but beautiful city in northern India, known for its greenery, royalty and emphasis on education - a very inspiring place for me. I spent early stages of my education in a convent, learning the importance of hard work and dreaming high. With optimism in my spirit, I left home in 2007, destined for a top school in Kerala (India) about 1800 miles away from home, where I spent 4 magnificent years learning all about engineering and cultural diversity, living with people from all around the Indian subcontinent. After graduating in 2011, I returned to New Delhi to begin my career as an engineer working on android applications and firmware for about 2 years.

Listening to my true calling, I packed my bags once again to leave for the US to pursue my Master’s (2013 - 2015) at University of Maryland College Park, USA in Communications Engineering. I worked on most interesting projects both in and out of class, which more or less shaped my career as of today. Joining AT&T Labs after my Master’s was a passionate choice. I have been solving difficult design problems to build new services in order to connect the world together. My experience here has taught me the value of time with a constant reminder that NOW!! is the time to enjoy life.

Purpose of this website is to serve as my professional profile and complete archive of my work as an engineer. This is also a space where I’ll write about things I like, events that inspire me and share my opinion on certain things.

Motivation


I have always loved exploring new things, even as a kid, you give me a toy, I’d explore all its features, so I can have the most out of it. Through the years, my dreams and ambitions have changed significantly from wanting to be a fighter-jet pilot for the Navy - for the sheer thrill of landing a fighter-jet on an Aircraft Carrier at sea, to wanting to be an astronaut inspired by the amazing story (and unfortunate tragedy) of Kalpana Chawla and her crew. When NASA sent Spirit and Opportunity rovers to Mars in 2004, I was 15 and I was convinced, I want to be on the first manned mission to Mars - I figured I have enough time to train before that becomes reality. Seeing my excitement, one day, my high school Physics teacher called me to her office and asked me:

Do you really want to be an Astronaut going forward? You know they have a lot of mission-critical systems they need to build before they can launch a manned mission to Mars. Did you think about that?

This question really got me spinning and I couldn’t stop thinking about the gigantic scale of a Space mission and how I could be solving enormous problems that could possibly impact such a mission to Mars. I loved Physics and was good at Math and couldn’t get enough of it. I realized that the best way to make an impact on the world was by solving hard engineering problems, which was natural with my Dad being an accomplished Engineer himself. That was the first time, when I said to myself - YES, this is who I am! An Engineer!! I had found my passion.

It intrigued me how long it took to receive images from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars at the time. That was the problem I wanted to solve - How to build a better communication system for such long distances?

Looking back, I now understand why subjects like Wireless Engineering, Information Theory and Network Engineering have interested me. Over the years, the question became - How to build better communication systems? How to build a better Internet? How to connect people in the world better?

And here I am today in 2017, working for AT&T, designing new Internet services for the people of the world. I feel accomplished.

What’s Next?


In about 15 years, Communications has come a long way - from Nokia brick phones and sloppy 56Kbps broadband connections, to modern smartphones and blazing fast 1Gbps Internet, with 40Gbps and 100Gbps technology on the horizon. More so, current record (as of 2017) for commercial grade Internet speed was set to 1.4Tbps in 2014 in London. This is crazy!

In 2004, Facebook emerged, Google launched Gmail and Ubuntu was first released. In 2007, first iPhone was launched. Today Facebook connects billions of people together, Artificial Intelligence is about to explode and we can send a 17857 times more data per second (1Gbps/56Kbps) than in 2004.

Back when Internet was invented, idea was to connect all users to centralized compute nodes since end-user computers were really slow. Over time, as end-user computers got better, compute responsibility started shifting towards the end-user, since it was cheaper to transport data over the network and save cost of maintaining data-centers. But now, with growing bandwidth needs and increasing network complexity, we have realized we can’t really do that anymore. So here we are with back with the original concept of centralized computing, now called The Cloud Computing.

But we must not forget, smart and resilient Computer Networks are the key to take communication technology to the next level. We need to design ultra-efficient and super-scalable networks which can run without any human interaction and automatically recover in event of any faults.

And that’s what I intend to design next!

—- Rohit —-
2022-02-08 00:00:00 -0500