Adnan Shahpurwala

On 24th April, 2018, I conducted the LED workshop at my alma matter, the American University of Sharjah. It was in collaboration with IEEE Student Branch, a student run club which I was formerly a part of.
The whole idea behind this workshop was to introduce students to basic electronics in a fun way so they do not fear it and rather embrace it. I designed the workshop in such a way that even non-engineering students could attend it. Students took their circuits back home at the end.

The workshop taught the attendees two circuits -

1. Blinking LED with 555 IC
2. Music LED's with TIP31C transistor

In the first circuit, the attendees learnt how to connect the 555 IC in astable mode and connected a couple of LED's at the output to make them blink. In the second cricuit, the attendees learnt how to use a basic NPN transistor as an amplifier. An audio signal is fed in as the input (at the base), which then gets amplified and the LED's are connected at the output (at the collector). This was, the LED's glow according to the music.

Fun Fact: 1 business students and 1 professor (from civil engineering) also attended the workshop and succesfully made both circuits.

On 10th April, 2018, I conducted a basic Python coding workshop for the School of Business Administration (SBA) at my alma matter, the American University of Sharjah. It was in collaboration with Finance Executives, a student run club.
So why did I do this? Firstly, I love teaching. Secondly, coding is one thing which I believe has the ability to change a students' life, let him/her be from any major. It instills a strong sense of logic and gets us thinking about how any big task can be compartmentalized in to smaller "functions". Outcomes of the workshop included -

1. Basic Syntax
2. Variables
3. Lists
4. Logical Operators
5. Conditionals - if/esle
6. Loops - while/for
7. Functions

On 27th February, 2018, I conducted the Matlab workshop for the IEEE student branch at my alma matter, the American University of Sharjah. This was the 3rd time I've conducted it and it was an awesome experience. Teaching has always been close to my heart and workshops give me a platform to do exactly that while helping me sharpen my teaching skills. Outcomes of the workshop included -

1. Matrices
2. Variables
3. Conditionals - if/esle
4. Loops
5. Graphing

During my second internship at IIT Kharagpur, I learnt how to deploy neural networks on the Torch platform which uses Lua, a programming language similar to C++. A few years back Google released its own platform - TensorFlow. I asked myself, which one is better? To answer this, I have started learning TensorFlow after which I will test and compare performaces based on -

1. Training time
2. GPU usage
3. Final loss and number of iterations required
4. Classification accuracy on some basic databases (MNIST, etc)

Sharjah Innovation Week was a six day event where we displayed our senior year project. This was an excellent experience as we got to meet people from the field and academia who gave us valuable suggestions on our project. However, the real challenge was in breaking it down and explaining our complex project to high school kids which reinofrced one of Albert Einstein's quote - If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Post graduation I was getting bored out of my mind. Making things is my passion so I set up a mini-lab in my bedroom. Currently I'm making two dozen automatic night lamps (which will recycle old nutella bottles) which I will gift to all the people who have taught me something important during my undergrad life, let it be engineering or life lessons. A sample of this night lamp can be seen in the Projects section .

After four and a half years of hard work, 22 December, 2017, marked the day where I graduated with honors (magna cum laude). The best part about this day was receiving my degree from the Ruler of Sharjah himself, His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, member of the Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates, the Ruler of Sharjah, and President of American University of Sharjah.

After two semesters of rigorous research work, my partner and I succesfully completed our senior year project which is about designing, testing, and implementing an Autonomous Drone based Outdoor Insulator Inspection (as mentioned in the Publication sections).