Siddhant and Vedant Kumar took a calculated approach to ensure they would be competitive applicants for Columbia University’s M.S. in Data Science program.

“Columbia was at the top of our list,” Vedant said. “We looked at many programs, and that quality of coursework and flexibility was not offered anywhere else.”

The Kumar twins have bachelor’s degrees from the University of Mumbai, where they studied electronics and telecommunications. To learn more about data science and artificial intelligence (AI) during their undergraduate studies, they took courses in machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, predictive models, clustering, and Python through Udemy, Coursera, and Udacity. 

The brothers also participated in nearly 20 national and international hackathons and won seven. Their approach to hackathons was strategic, according to Siddhant. “We found problem statements that were similar so that we could leverage approaches and techniques that we had tested earlier towards new solutions.”

For example, the challenge for the Smart India Hackathon was to develop an AI system to improve traffic flow for emergency vehicles. Siddhant and Vedant’s winning solution was an AI-powered, smart traffic control system—a set of sensors for traffic lights that could detect the approach of an emergency vehicle and would turn lights green for the lane to move quickly. Their chapter describing this work is part of the proceedings of the second International Conference on Data Science, Machine Learning and Applications, which will be available from Springer in October 2021.  

Another winning solution involved developing a customized optical character recognition tool to extract information from bills and invoices. The paper documenting their work was part of the proceedings from the 2020 International Conference on Smart Electronics and Communication published by IEEE. “This was a 36-hour hackathon that we went into already tired from staying up late for exams,” Siddhant recalled. “We didn’t have high expectations; we were just having fun, but our approach was the most accurate, and we ended up building something meaningful and useful.”

In addition to collaborating with University of Mumbai professors to publish their hackathon solutions, the Kumar brothers reached out to academics at leading institutions in the U.S. and Europe for networking and potential internships. “We sent hundreds of outreach messages, tailored to each person, and a few responded,” Vedant said.

The strategy helped the twins secure research assistantships at Carnegie Mellon University to work on deep learning classification models for molecular imagery, serve as data science and AI mentors for an online learning program, and complete internships with LTI and BitGenie.

Siddhant and Vedant appreciate that Columbia’s M.S. in Data Science program will help them be “market-ready” in 16 months. They initially thought it would be difficult to adjust to life in New York City, but Siddhant says the city feels like home, and the brothers have branched out in different directions. “We worked together to get here, now we’re ready to be independent, to pursue our own paths, meet different people.”

— Karina Alexanyan, Ph.D.