As the great poet William Ellery Channning rightly said," The home is the chief school of human virtues." My family used to live in a rented apartment for a long period of time. It is fine living in a rented space but nothing in the world beats the comfort of living in one's own home. After 38 years of working in a gruelling government commercial bank and being near the retirement age, my father decided to construct our own dream abode. We already owned a piece of land in the suburbs of Swarnjayantipuram, Ghaziabad. It was a beautiful piece of land facing the lush green City Park of Swarnjayantipuram, Ghaziabad. Our family decided to construct our own sweet abode there. We decided to get an architect on board for making a basic layout design of our home keeping in mind our needs. Then came the time to start the construction of our home. Cement is the most important building material as it holds the structure together. While deciding which cement to use I started to recollect the famous advertisement of UltraTech Cement- The Engineer's Choice with a tagline Bade Iraado Me Jaan Daal De and immediately connected with it. We also asked advice from an engineer about our choice of using UltraTech Cement and he whole heartedly recommended it and explained about the UltraTech binding particles which gives immense strength to the construction. Slowly and steadily as the construction started and went on in full swing, our dream home started taking shape and it was everything we could have imagined for. Two months back the construction of our dream abode was completed. We are eagerly waiting to shift into our new dream home and had our home inauguration few days back. All thanks to Aditya Birla Group.
During my graduation, our team has worked on our major project titled Interactive Robot For Asperger's Syndrome. This project was socially impactful driven by innovation and an amalgamation of Mechanical, Electronics and Computer Science engineering. Asperger is a disorder that basically affects the development of social and communication skills. Interacting with robots which provide simple emotional response and interaction has been shown to improve the communication skills of children diagnosed with Asperger. The repeatability of robotic movement combined with visual tracking may allow for more precise and repeatable tests to be used in the diagnosis of Asperger. While undertaking this project we were able to create a prototype of an interactive robot that is affordable, nonthreatening, durable, and capable of interacting with an Asperger’s child using Beaglebone, servo motors, webcam, image processing and wireless networking. The biggest challenge in this project was not making a prototype robot but actually using it to train a Asperger’s affected child named Shrey whom we met at an NGO centre at Bal Sahyog, Connaught Place. Initially there were inhibitions in his mind while interacting with our team and he used to get restless when we were around him. But as the time passed he got comfortable around us as we were able to win his confidence by being patient and sweet with him. Over a period of few weeks we were able to train him in simple colour recognition and arithmetic counting using image processing and our interactive prototype. It was the first time our team had a grass root experience of how technology can make an impact on the lives of underprivileged kids suffering from developmental disorders like Autism and Asperger’s and contribute for the betterment of the society. It was a challenging yet a very socially impactful, enriching and satisfying experience.