Summer 2020 At Playstation!

Summer 2020 @ PlayStation as a Software Engineer Intern!

This summer I had the opportunity to intern at PlayStation or Sony Interactive Entertainment formally. When I was offered the position by Anthony, from the University Recruiting team, over the phone, I had no second thoughts where I wanted to spend the summer. The interview process was smooth and the discussions during the interview with my to-be team were so exciting, I just knew this was where I wanted to spend the summer.

Fast-forward to early June, I started working with the Video Codecs team where we worked towards building a POC for building a Deep Learning model to improve the perceived video quality by enhancing the regions of the frame containing text during the encoding process. I cannot go into details, but we worked through solving multiple challenges to get it working for our requirements under multiple constraints. We brainstormed on how we could build a more generic solution that would not only work for text but other salient objects in the video frame as well. The most important constraint was speed! We wanted to implement a solution such that we can run our deep learning model on non-NVIDIA GPUs, hence no CUDA Acceleration. Without this, our solution on a CPU was simply too slow to use on the console. Hence, we worked through multiple options to improve inference speed with said GPU acceleration and at the same time not compromise on precision and recall of our text detection as well. We also addressed other challenges in simple yet innovative to churn out maximum performance from our models.

Hats off to the University Recruiting team for pulling off one of the best remote internship experiences one could have imagined. With some amazing sessions by top folks across different domains of the company, interns got an insight into how PlayStation manages to be so successful. Then there was the swag and other after events for interns throughout the internship which kept everyone engaged even though everyone was working remotely. The hackathon around the “Spectating” theme was probably the highlights. It gave me the opportunity to collaborate with the wider team and work on a fun and exciting project. Some of the other projects in the hackathon were downright amazing and spoke volumes of the talent and technical prowess of the Engineer & Researchers at PlayStation.

If you are looking for a cool work environment where you can make significant impact and also enjoy some amazing perks of being at a company that values its employees: PlayStation might be the answer! As someone with a Software Engineering background professionally, looking to break into the fields of Deep Learning and Applied Data Science in general, this was probably the best opportunity I could have asked for!

If you want to know more about the life of a grad student in CS at SBU or just want to chat and know more about me or have opportunities for me in the Software Engineering, Computer Vision or Natural Language Processing space - hit me up on LinkedIn or any one of the social network options on the left here (or on top if you are on mobile).

Peace!