Interview was at ISRO Guest House, Chennai.

Preparation Advice for written test :(most of you already know this) Do not prepare solely for ISRO written test, rather prepare for GATE only. I mean it seriously although it sounds like little arrogant!

Coming to the interview part, We were asked to report at 8:00 AM. There was some document verification which started at around 8:30 or so. After that candidates done with their verification were called for interview parallely.. My turn was second/third..

I entered the Interview room, it was quiet big with around 10 people sitting on 1 side of table with 1 chair in opposite side and a whiteboard at some distance behind the chair. Now, I don't know the name of the Prof/Scientist in the middle, but he was very polite, he greeted me and asked me to sit, then asked to tell a little bit about myself.

 

Following are the questions(not all, but to the best I remember), and the responses I gave there:

Q: What is the project that you have mentioned ?

me: Handwritten Digit Recognition.

Q: How does it work ?

me: told the whole process.

Q: How are the weights of Neural Network adjusted ?

me: told the Gradient descent algorithm. Then they asked Backpropagation algorithm. I told them what I knew but it seemed they wanted to listen something else. They again asked it and I again said the same thing. (Later I came to know that what I was saying was right but I could have been more precise with my terminology).

Tip: Try to be precise with words and terminologies.

Q: Does Gradient Descent always converge ?

me: told them no with the reason.

Q:In what cases it does not converge ?

me: told.

Q: Can you draw sigmoid function on board?

me: Drew. (For those wondering what it is ? It is a useful function in ML especially with Neural Networks)

Tip: Now I don't want you to get that you have to study Machine Learning and do some Machine learning project in order to get through (although It will be good) but the more important thing here is to mention a project which you have seriously studied, because they will dig deep into it. (And according to me, the project part was responsible for my selection! )

The main thing is that with this level of knowledge (which most of you are at) they don't expect you to solve some great real world problem or build a ISRO project , they just expect you to be thorough with your Project (as mentioned above) and with the GATE syllabus (as will be clear below).

The GATE syllabus part.

Q. What are your favourite subjects ?

me: Theory of Computation, Mathematics, Algorithms, Data Structures (I wanted to stop here and not go into system subjects but they kept saying and and...) so I had to say all i.e.,Network, OS, DBMS.

Q: Suppose a user wants to send Application data to another computer. How will the data go?

me: told the process of segmentation, then how the headers are applied etc.

Q:Do you know fields in TCP and IP header ?

me:told

Q:Do you know VPN?

me: I had never studied VPN, but I remembered something from somewhere and answered "It is used to group ports on different switches so that broadcasts can be done to only members of certain group rather than all the hosts on the switch...." I didn't realize that I was telling about VLAN,, so here came the next question :

Q: What is VLAN ? :O

me: Fortunately I remembered by now. I smiled and said that what I just told was VLAN.

Then came some Mathematics questions, but not much.

Q. What is rank of a matrix ?
me: told

Q. What are the applications of rank of a matrix ?

me: told them about its applications in Solving system of equations.

Pretty much that was all.

Final status : Selected!

posted Mar 14, 2018
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