Amirhossein Esmaili Statement of Purpose

Academic Statement of Purpose
Amirhossein Esmaili Dastjerdi

An Applicant for Computer Engineering Ph.D. Program
I remember from middle school that I always had an inner tendency to learn more and more about my
surrounding environment and to contribute to it as well. I always pursued extracurricular activities alongside
my routine curriculum. Particularly, I went to an electronic workshop held under the supervision of Dr.
Tehrani, my math teacher in the middle school, where we built simple practical circuits for many daily
applications such as danger alarms. Since then, I have found engineering very appealing due to the fact that
it makes life more convenient. Therefore, I have been eager to be an engineer since I was a teenager. During
my high school studies, I was always one of the top students in almost all of the courses. During the senior
year at high school, I studied very hard for a year, day and night, for the university entrance exam, held in
Iran allowing universities to decide which students they can accept based on their results. I managed to be
ranked 15th among more than 280,000 participants in the exam nationwide. This great achievement allowed
me to be admitted to Sharif University of Technology, the best and most renowned engineering school at
Iran. I chose to pursue my studies in the major of Electrical Engineering, a major that applies to many
aspects of life and this fact did intrigue me.
During my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering, I took many courses in wide range of areas. At
Sharif, the students should specify their major field of interest at Electrical Engineering at their 3 rd year of
undergraduate studies. I personally preferred the field of “Digital Systems”, in which students learn about
design and development of digital systems including VLSI design and technologies, computer systems and
networks, computer architecture, intelligent systems, and real-time systems and their architectures.
Alongside with my courses, I started to do studies of my own, especially through many online courses
taught at many prominent universities around the world and began to understand existing design limitations
such as power wall, limited design area, limited bandwidth and so forth. To put my knowledge into practice,
I started my B.Sc. Project, which was building a digital hearing aid embedded system, under the direction
of Prof. Tabandeh. This was a challenging design due to many constraints. After about one year, I managed
to build the desired embedded system, based on audiogram matching filtering where the amount of hearing
loss at different frequencies is compensated separately. I took a course on “Embedded Systems” which
assisted me to progress through my project. This project was an invaluable experience which allowed me
to become familiar with challenges inherent in a research project and how patience and determination are
essential to prosper in spite of these challenges. To go further and achieve more valuable goals, I decided
to pursue M.Sc. studies in Electrical Engineering, in the field of “Digital Systems”, at Sharif University of
Technology as well. Considering my performance during my undergraduate studies, I won NOET’s1 award
for exceptional talents, which allowed me to pursue my Master’s program at Sharif without having to take
the national postgraduate entrance exam.
Sharif University offers a strong graduate program and I have been exposed to more specific aspects and
issues in hardware and software systems during my graduate studies. Particularly, at the 1st semester of my
Master’s program, I took the “Parallel Programming and Architectures” course where I got familiar with
programming models based on GPGPUs for data-intensive algorithms, where abundant computation can
be done in parallel using GPGPUs’ computational cores. Furthermore, the “Digital VLSI Systems Design”
course gave me a perspective on low-level hardware implementations of algorithms. During the project of
this course, we did an 802.11a WLAN PHY implementation and simulation using MATLAB & HDL for
both TX and RX sides, as well as ASIC syntheses. These two courses, alongside the “Advanced Computer
1
National Organization for Educational Testing
Architecture” course, made the 1st semester of my Master’s program the most informative semester of my
academic studies because I learned a lot about many different aspects of design and development of
hardware and software systems. Also, I am proud to say that, by far, I am ranked 1st among all the graduate
students in the class of 2015 at the Department of Electrical Engineering, with GPA of 19.59/20 (4/4),
which I owe it to a great extent to my inspiring and motivating professors who have enlightened the path
for me.
Regarding my Master’s thesis, I decided to work on the “Smart health” project under the supervision of
Prof. Shabany. In this project, various engineering techniques are exploited to help the people be more
aware of their health condition. I found this project appealing since I am of the conviction that the chief
mission of engineering is improving the life quality of people. My Master’s thesis is focused on developing
a novel and convenient approach for continuous cuff-less non-invasive blood pressure (BP) estimation, as
conventional approaches used for BP measurements are based on an inflating cuff, which can make
inconvenience for patients. In my thesis, vital signals are acquired from human subjects and being processed
to extract informative features for each individual. Based on these features, a novel BP estimator model is
derived for each individual using machine learning algorithms. The estimation performance of this model
is compared with conventional methods for BP measurement. I have submitted parts of my work to IEEE
Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and also, IEEE ISCAS 2017. One of the main goals of
this project is building a BP estimator wearable device that can be exploited in portable healthcare systems.
Moreover, since my 3rd year of undergraduate studies, I have been teaching assistant (TA) in many courses
such as “Logic Circuits and Digital Systems and Lab”, “Computer Architecture and Microprocessor and
Lab”, and “Microprocessor Systems Lab”, with a wide variety of TA duties. For instance, I was the head
TA of “Microprocessor Systems Lab” course, which is a senior undergraduate course, for last two semesters
and alongside with it, I devised a new version of lab manual for the course, during which students utilize
FPGA-based hardware acceleration for boosting up the performance of their implementations and in this
way, are able to learn an important aspect in designs during their undergraduate studies. Being the TA of
such courses not only allowed the students to gain a deeper knowledge of their field but also let me acquire
necessary skills which a good instructor should possess.
I recall that, after my undergraduate studies, I had a chance to start Ph.D. studies immediately. However, I
was not sure whether I am ready or even eager to embark on this important journey, since I was not sure
enough being a researcher is what I truly want. Consequently, I decided to pursue the Master’s program to
get a better view of research activities. Now, after about three semesters of my Master’s program, I find
research a vital way for developing critical reasoning skills, and a crucial requirement for shaping the
knowledge around a specific issue deeply, and thus I am certainly confident that pursuing Ph.D. studies is
what that personally satisfies me. Nonetheless, it is not going to be the point where I stop. My personal
perspective of my career, after Ph.D. studies, is becoming a distinguished researcher at a prominent
academic institution or a well-known corporation and I am resolute to achieve this purpose.
I am willing to pursue my Ph.D. studies at University of Southern California (USC). USC has proven to be
one of the most prosperous universities worldwide with a high-level faculty, thriving research centers, and
a vivid academic atmosphere. I am, to a great extent, of the opinion that USC can greatly pave the way for
me to reach my professional and academic goals. Having carefully reviewed the websites of faculties and
their recent publications and talking to a few graduate students, I find the research programs of Electrical
Engineering Department very intriguing. Particularly, research works of Prof. Prasanna on hardware
acceleration of data intensive problems in the FPGA/Parallel Computing Group are of great interest to me.
I also find research works of Prof. Pedram on power-awareness in the systems in the SPORT Lab appealing.
I believe my background and skills can contribute to a tangible progress in the growing accomplishment
rate of the university and I am really looking forward to being a part of your valuable community if I am
granted this precious opportunity.

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Academic Statement of Purpose

Amirhossein Esmaili Dastjerdi

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