Non-profit virtual research lab
We help computer science undergraduates get a research footing early — with personal mentorship from working researchers and real projects that lead to publications.
About us
PQRS is a non-profit initiative to help computer science engineering students in India do real research. Having goals propels us — and to pursue something big, we have to dream something bigger.
We may not all be able to change the country at scale, but we can contribute in a small way by organising research. PQRS is our step towards directed research and education that benefits, first and foremost, the students.
We started PQRS to address three things about the common “state of research” in academics:
One-on-one guidance from researchers who have been through it — weekly check-ins, honest feedback and help choosing problems worth solving.
Real problems in NLP, machine learning, commonsense knowledge and accessibility, scoped so a motivated undergraduate can make genuine progress.
P2 and P3 projects are designed to be strong Bachelor thesis candidates, with a clear path from reading papers to publishing one.
Hands-on sessions on reading papers, evaluating hypotheses and the practical tooling of modern AI research.
How it works
The platform walks you through the same path our past mentees took.
Sign up and choose the research areas you care about.
Read a research paper in your area and answer a few short questions about it.
Apply to a mentored project. Your mentor and our team review every application.
Work with your mentor through milestones — and, over time, mentor others yourself.
Projects
A selection of past projects. Several led to awards and peer-reviewed publications.
Gyan Jyoti
Videos without audio description are unusable by visually impaired users. We defined accessibility in terms of the visual information a video carries, and built a model to estimate that information automatically.
Emoticon Buddy
Emotion mining goes beyond positive and negative sentiment. We derived emotional commonsense knowledge — that a roller-coaster is exciting, or that rejection is sad — from a very large n-gram dataset and used it to detect emotions in text.
Smart Scholar
We generate summaries of research papers from the opinions of the papers that cite them, organised into categories — giving readers a high-level view of a paper without reading all of it.
Graphicommonsense
We automatically extract commonsense knowledge from the web, using a graph-based algorithm to rank the extracted knowledge effectively.
Mentors are preparing the next round of projects. Create a profile and take the screening exam so you're ready to apply when they open.
PQRS levels
Projects are pitched at one of three levels, so you can start where you are and grow.
Little technical background needed.
Prepares you for P2 and P3.
Good background in the topic and fundamental applied knowledge.
Can lead to workshop publications; a good Bachelor thesis candidate.
Applied research experience.
Typically leads to publications in top conferences.
Team
Niket Tandon
Founder
Research Scientist, Allen Institute for AI (AI2)
Anjali Tandon
Co-founder
Stories
Past mentees on what working with PQRS was like.
I had a very challenging and a rich experience as a mentee in PQRS. I learnt a lot of research and programming skills and PQRS gave me the right platform to start research. Most importantly, I learnt the importance of evaluating the hypothesis.My mentee experience also taught me the most valuable lesson on how to have a "zoomed-out" perspective to problems. As an aspiring graduate student in the field of AI, I am proud to say that PQRS has shaped my career personally and professionally.
Dheeraj Rajagopal
Grad student at CMU
Research at PQRS was a perfect opportunity for me to learn advanced concepts in my area of research by building on to the basics I learnt in undergraduate studies. I dealt with different flavors of problems which include Data Mining, Machine Learning and Information Retrieval.It helped me build a strong research profile for my applications to graduate schools in US. I was able to publish a high quality research work in International conference due to very structured and focused guidance at PQRS. It eventually helped me in securing scholarship in graduate school and I got chance to work with some of the most outstanding researchers in the field of Information Retrieval.
Ashish Jain
SDE at Microsoft US
During undergrad, I caught fascination for CS research. I did not get many research opportunity in my university in my area of interest i.e. Machine Learning and Image processing.One of my seniors introduced me to PQRS-Research in 2nd year of graduation where I was introduced to Machine learning and related areas before diving into the problem in hand. Thanks to the wonderful and insightful mentoring at PQRS-Research, our project named Gyan Jyoti received the best thesis project award and a publication at AAAI, a flagship conference in AI.
Shekhar Sharma
Grad student at CMU
During my undergrad, apart from my focus on getting better grades every semester, I had a passion for research. In my second year, one of my friends introduced me to PQRS, that helps undergraduates in computer science to invest their knowledge and energy in good research projects.In a team of two, I started a project based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Right from the beginning, I could feel the energy and passion that was driving our project. It was through weekly scrum meetings that we all used to discuss our milestones, project aspects, upcoming goals, progress, and our shortcomings. The project involved various aspects like reviewing research papers, programming, testing and documentation. The project was the best learning experience which I had in my undergrad and it brought me accolades. Our project won the "Best Student Project Award" for the year 2013 among the 100 other entries of BTech and MTech students. Our team was passionate enough to continue the work after entering into the job. We could finally publish a paper in one of the top most conferences of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-2015 under the name of "Multimedia data for the visually impaired".
Tanima Makkad
Grad student at CMU
Contact
Questions about mentoring, projects or partnering with us? Send us a message.