An AI major, read in parallel — Divyakush Punjabi

Eighteen months of artificial intelligence begin at IIT Ropar, run with NSDC and Masai and read alongside the engineering core rather than after it.A Major Degree in Artificial Intelligence at IIT Ropar, delivered with the National Skill Development Corporation and Masai, running January 2025 to June 2026.The decision that mattered was to read it in parallel rather than after. A full B.Tech was already running at Vellore; taking eighteen months of AI alongside it meant the two informed each other while both were live — coursework in one turning up as an idea in the other the same term, rather than a year later.It is also the reason the projects on this site stop being web applications with a model bolted on somewhere around 2025 and start being systems where the model is the thing being engineered.

Selected work

Saturdays — Food Delivery Platform — A consumer food delivery platform — customer app, restaurant API, rider layer and operator console on one Django backend.
DineGuru — Restaurant POS and Billing System — A restaurant operating system — POS and GST billing, inventory, recipe costing, procurement and tiered analytics on one multi-tenant core.
GovernAI Research Atlas — Open-source platform unifying research papers, repositories and governance resources behind a single semantic vector index.
GovernAI Studio — Interactive training simulator for governance and compliance scenarios, backed by a RAG and LLM inference path.
Content Recommendation Engine — SASRec Sequential Recommender — Transformer-based sequential recommender with automated data pipelines, built as the IIT Ropar capstone project.
AI & IoT Rockfall Prediction — Geological Hazard Detection — Multi-sensor fusion pipeline for real-time geological hazard detection, running inference at the edge on live monitoring data.
Netra — AI Surveillance System — Autonomous person-tracking surveillance on constrained hardware, with real-time detection and an anomaly-scoring dashboard.
AlgoVerse — Data Structure and Algorithm Visualizer — Sorting, graph and tree operations rendered as animated 3D scenes, built to make data structures legible while they run.
IoT Smart Home Automation — Voice Controlled Home Assistant — Voice-activated home controller that interprets natural-language commands and drives devices directly, no fixed grammar.
Adaptive Traffic Light Controller — Verilog FPGA Design — Real-time traffic controller that adjusts signal timing to measured vehicle throughput, written in Verilog and synthesised to FPGA.

Record

National Entrepreneurship Challenge
Visionary Ventures
DevJams '24 — Vellore, Tamil Nadu
An AI major, read in parallel — Rupnagar, Punjab
Bharat’s leading startup summit — Surat, Gujarat
The calibre of the room — Surat, Gujarat
The first internship, signed off
Adaptive traffic control, in silicon
The day the submissions went in — Vellore, Tamil Nadu
Smart India Hackathon 2025
Convocation day at IIT Ropar — Rupnagar, Punjab
One with the grandmaster of computer science at IIT Ropar — Rupnagar, Punjab

Elsewhere

Divyakush Punjabi