Piyush Agrawal

As part of SuperProfs, a key challenge was digitizing the classroom content of our partner professors. We initially asked the professors to record their lectures at our state-of-the-art recording studios, but it became clear that this wouldn't work. It's an asset-heavy model, and it wouldn't scale as we grew.

We needed an extremely easy-to-use, fully automated lecture capturing solution that worked with the existing infrastructure of Indian classrooms. Indian classrooms are often plagued by poor internet connectivity, a lack of a consistent power supply, a lack of trained A/V technicians, and more. I came up with the idea of using off-the-shelf Android phones with high-resolution cameras for lecture recording.

With a team of four engineers and a designer, we built an Android app and a cloud-based admin system that could automatically start/stop the lecture recording on remote Android devices. We also implemented the capability to track the professor in the classroom as they moved around using computer vision and face recognition techniques.

This model enabled us to scale to hundreds of classrooms in an extremely cost-effective, yet robust manner—becoming a key selling point of SuperProfs platform for professors in India.

Millions of students in India prepare for various competitive exams every year. However, the availability of good and experienced teachers is limited to a few metro cities and hence the majority of the students in tier 2/3 cities and towns are not able to have access to good quality education.

As part of this project, I led the design and development of a mobile application which gave students the ability to do the following:
1. Subscribe to live as well as on-demand classes taught by India's best professors with a monthly subscription model
2. View the lectures offline (even without an active internet connection) while ensuring 100% protection against illegal downloads/piracy
3. Participate in live webinars by professors to clarify concepts and ask questions

The mobile app was downloaded by more than 1 million users and became one of the leading sources of exam preparation in India, attracting more than $3 million in institutional funding and extensive media coverage.

Tasks Accomplished
• Designed and implemented a real-time multicast-based system (inspired by the BitTorrent protocol) which reduced the download time of internet files by 44% and reduced the traffic load on internet links by 65%.
• Led a team of two undergraduate students who worked with me in the implementation phase of the system for about a year.
• Won the Cadence Gold Medal award from IIT Kanpur based on the impact of this project.

Tasks Accomplished
• Designed and implemented a video streaming protocol for wireless networks which reduced packet loss by 45% and improved received video quality by 2-10 decibels in PSNR.
• Presented this work at the ACM Multimedia conference in Germany and won the Best Student Paper Award.

I led the product design and implementation of SixthSense, an RFID-based enterprise intelligence system at Microsoft.

This system combined mobility information obtained from RFID-based sensing with information from enterprise systems such as calendar and presence to automatically draw inferences about the association and interaction amongst people, objects, and workspaces. For instance, SixthSense was able to automatically distinguish between people and objects, learn the identities of people, and infer the ownership of objects by people.

The client is a leading fast-fashion brand based in Singapore with multiple physical outlets in South East Asia and a thriving online eCommerce store. Given the distributed nature of the client's business, the client needed a cloud-based system to manage its inventory and route orders to specific fulfillment facilities. It also required a mobile app for its store associates to quickly check the inventory for particular items and enable instant purchases for walk-in customers from the mobile app.

I led the design and development of the mobile app and a cloud-based back-end system to launch the product within three months. The app enabled the client to reduce its cost of order fulfillment by three times while improving customer satisfaction due to the increased availability of catalog items across stores.