Bharathi Athinarayanan, a tech enthusiast from Tamil Nadu (Rasipuram, Salem District) but settled in the Silicon Valley of India Bengaluru since 2005, has become quite famous amongst his alumni network. The reason is not only the fact that he has made his college proud with his achievements, but that he still cares and connects with the institute to date.
Passionate about technology, Bharathi is always willing to give back to society, especially to the student community.
When the pandemic hit, everyone was badly affected, including students. So, to boost the morale of the students and also to unravel their hidden talent, Bharathi collaborated with his alma mater – Coimbatore Institute of Technology, and another institute – SRM Institute of Tech, Vadapalani, Chennai, to organize special virtual projects.
“Just like any other segment, students have also been impacted by the pandemic. It started affecting their self-confidence and morale. So, to boost their morale and keep up their enthusiasm, I started this project called Project I’MPROBABLE. The key aspect of this is to learn a new domain (here it is Azure platform) within a short period and execute an awesome project,” shared Bharathi with Life Beyond Numbers.
The 38-year-old works as a Principal Engineer in Unisys on Emerging tech like AI / ML, 5G, Bots, etc. Since childhood, he was very attracted towards technology. He has built websites and trained professionals since the age of 17. During his college days, he was known for the large number of projects he had done (12 mini projects in the Final year alone). In his 16+ years of professional life, he pursued his passion for mentoring and mentored hundreds of students and novices. Throughout the process, he observed two things-greater exposure to data and technology makes students reach out for more, but at the same time, they miss out on the fundamentals.
And so, during the lockdown, while the institutes were running online, with the support of Professor Muthu from CIT, and Ms. Rama from SRM, he got a small army of students. They formed two WhatsApp groups – one for CIT, and one for SRM. Then Bharathi mentored them on AI / ML on Microsoft Azure platform. He taught them how to ideate and to implement the projects. And within 12 days, brilliant projects emerged from the students.
This includes:
- Mask Check
- Car Security System Using Face Recognition
- Credit Card Fraud Detection System
- Library CHATBOT
- Autonomous Traffic Sign Recognition
There were a total of six projects – two from SRM, and four from CIT. All the projects were AI-based and used the state of the art tech.
“I personally believe that a Mentor is someone who not only shares his vision and ideas; but also supports and encourages others’ ideas too. Bharathi Sir was such a Mentor, he not only shares his vision but also encourages us to think out of the box and supports us throughout the journey,” says Purushottam, a student of SRM.
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Likewise, another student Pranav shares, “Working on the project was a knowledge enhancing experience. This was the first time I used Python for a project apart from academic/competitive coding and I learned to use Flask, Flask WebSockets and leverage the Microsoft Azure customvision.ai service to generate image object detection models that could be exported as Python TensorFlow models with good performance, without having to code it by hand, OpenCV to capture video streams and pass it to the model, drawing bounding boxes based on result provided by the model, OpenCV built-in function for resolving overlapping predictions, multi-threaded architecture for simultaneous video capture and processing of multiple streams.”
Bharathi is married to Vasanthi, who is an entrepreneur in the F&B industry. The two have a bright 10-year-old kid – Yashvi BV who loves to keep herself busy building robots and improvising her singing skills.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are Bharathi Athinarayanan‘s own and do not represent the views of his employer. He is not speaking in the representation of his company.