Statement of Purpose Caleb De La Cruz Paulino delacruzpaulino@gmail.com
April 24, 2015
That night a group of four men broke into my house, tied up my mom, beat up my dad, and stole everything they could from my home. That was the first time I was robbed. I was eleven years old. For many years I was angry and ashamed of my country, because it always appeared to be listed among the first places of delinquency and corruption. But then I realized that a small group of people should not define thousands of Dominicans, which aside from all their limitations go out everyday and excel in their respective fields. As software engineer I also want to contribute in changing my country’s reputation. I want my country to be recognized for offering intelligent software solutions, which improve our everyday lives. That is why I want to specialize myself in Machine Learning, and export from my beloved island intelligent applications which could help the whole world. In high school, I was involved with mathematics competitions. This meant going to my school library, every afternoon, to study math instead of going to play baseball. However, a life without challenges is a life without meaning. At the end it paid off, after lots of books, and math problems I won that year the first place in the national contest. Winning it opened the doors for more national and international competitions but more importantly it lit up inside of me the question: how far can I go? Representing my country internationally allowed me to study in one of the most updated computer science programs in the Dominican Republic. It was exciting to apply to programming the concepts I have learned in mathematics in order to create solutions, which solved actual problems. One of those solutions was my thesis: “Optimizing transportation through the use of clustering”, which was the first clustering research done at my university. I proposed a solution, which considers transportation routes as vectors that could be stored in geospatial databases. Using basics geospatial functions to measure distance between points I was able to cluster those vectors in sets of four or fewer elements, in order to minimize the cost of transport routes. This car-‐pooling proposal offered a faster and more secure alternative than the current public transportation in the Dominican Republic. I love challenges. That’s why I started working in a software development company while I was still a university student. I spent one year as a junior developer and after I had learned everything I could about Oracle Forms and Reports development, I wanted more. I asked to be transferred to another area and that is when they created a single person area for me, “New technologies coordinator”. I
Statement of Purpose - Caleb De La Cruz Paulino
was in charge of researching, proposing and implementing solutions to the requirements of the company, which were out of their usual scope. That position helped me to gain knowledge in: software integration using web services and automated testing. Now two years later that department has evolved into a 15-‐ person area, which I lead. The purpose of this department is to create from the ground up new web applications for our company. A specific example of the software we developed is Medical Core, a hospital administration software. We used a loosely coupled infrastructure, to stored medical records, which allows us to developed new types of medical cases depending on the doctors’ specialties without the need to alter the already existing solution. Right now we are already handling cases from gynecology, ophthalmology and pediatrics. Medical Core also features a unique web services network. This network allows doctors to communicate with insurance company in real time, optimizing their everyday claiming process, and allowing them to treat patience faster. Now, I want to go beyond creating systems that simply stored and retrieved information. Artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning composes the path that I want to follow to achieve that. I am particularly interested in applying optimization concepts to current industry problems. That is why I was intrigued by the work of computer scientist like Santosh Vempala in his paper “Algorithmic Prediction of Health-‐Care Costs”, who used clustering algorithms to predict health care cost. I have been working with health insurance software for four years already, and I have always wanted to look for ways to offer them not only an operational output but also an intelligent one. The insight offered by Mr. Vempala study using claims data is just one example of the information that could be retrieved. For me it would be an honor to learn from scientists just like him. Machine learning is the field that will be shaping the computer science industry in the upcoming years and I want to be part of that change. Moreover I want to see all over the world, industries using software solutions, which says “Made in the Dominican Republic”. Allow me to take on this challenge because as I said before a life without challenges is a life without meaning.
Page
2