Saswati Das was born and brought up in the capital city
of Assam, Guwahati, in
India. She studied in the renowned
school of Guwahati named St. Stephen’s English School till class X and then did her higher secondary
levels (classes XI and XII) in the ‘Science’ stream from Cotton College, considered as the
centre of excellence in the north-east part of India. In 1999,
she joined the Assam Engineering College under
Gauhati University as a student of the
Department of
Instrumentation Engineering. Her major area of study was microprocessor
based instrumentation and optical instrumentation. Saswati received her
Bachelor’s of Engineering degree in October 2003 with First Class Honors and
University Rank 2.
After her undergraduate studies, Saswati wanted to gain
some industrial experience to learn how instrumentation is used for the benefit
of mankind. As such, in 2004, she joined Microcommindia Ltd., a
UK based electronics company
located in New Delhi, the capital of
India. She worked there for a few
months as a team leader in the R&D Hardware sector. Her responsibilities
included designing of circuit schematics and PCB Layout for data loggers used in
Environmental sensors and systems. After her exposure to Hardware electronics
design she wanted to gain knowledge and experience in firmware development and
joined HPL Socomec Pvt. Ltd., an
Indo-French company, as a Trainee Engineer in the R&D section of the
Embedded System Design Group. Her responsibilities there mainly included
development and testing of Firmware in Assembly Language for Electronic Energy
Meters. After working there for 3 months she got an offer to work in some
challenging Embedded Product Design and Development Projects in Dana India
Technical Centre (DITC), a 100% subsidiary of a famous Fortune 200 multinational
automobile company named Dana Corporation.
Saswati worked in DITC for two and a half years as a Project Engineer in
collaboration with JR Simma . Her
responsibilities included analysis, design, coding, testing and documentation of
Embedded firmware used in the Electronic Control Module of Tractors and
Trailers. Her most significant achievement in her professional life has been the
development of a customized bootloader for MC68HC908QT4 microcontroller from
Freescale which is controlled by a 32-bit DSP from Texas Instruments viz.
TMS320F2810, a project which was
considered for patent.
After gaining an experience of about 3 years in Embedded
Product Development, Saswati realized that she needed to gain more theoretical
knowledge and research experience in order to make significant contribution in
her field of work. As such, she took admission in the MS program in Fall 2007 in
the State University of New York at
Buffalo in the Department of Electrical Engineering with specialization in
signal processing and communications. Her focus area is Digital Signal
Processing and Embedded Systems. She is also carrying out research under Dr. Adly Fam in the field of DSP.
Her research topic deals with improvement of finite-length accuracy for
fixed-point FFT. Additionally she is also working on another research topic on
digital filters. This research involves development of a more complicated filter
which satisfies the desired design parameters with lesser area and power
utilization from a seed or kernel filter having simple computational properties,
via successive iterations.
Apart from her academic work, Saswati takes part sports
and social service. She composes poetry, writes articles and maintains a
webpage at www.geocities.com/meetsaswati.