City lad Soumya joins Google I/O meet

| | BHUBANESWAR | in Bhubaneswar

Udacity, a global lifelong learning platform, made the dreams of a young Bhubaneswar resident and Udacity Nanodegree student come true by sending him to attend Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O 2018 in Mountain View early this month.

Soumya Ranjan Behera, enrolled for Udacity Front-End Web Developer courses under the Google-Udacity Scholarship for Front End Developers in India, was invited to attend the event through the scholarship programme.

For the 19-year old BTech student Soumya, being present amongst the world’s best developers for these platforms was an educational and inspirational experience. As a student of Computer Science at Silicon Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, travelling to be a part of  Google I/O was only possible due to his studies at Udacity.

The annual Google I/O conference showcases technical in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open source platforms such as Android, Chrome and Chrome OS, APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, and more.

This year, Google unveiled its AI-driven assistant’s ability to pass the test, making this a  historical moment for the development of AI. For this young Bhubaneswar resident, travelling all the way to California to witness this landmark moment was nothing short of a life-changing moment.

Behera said, “The Google-Udacity scholarship transformed me from a web-development enthusiast to someone with the experience and knowledge to win competitions and go places around the world. Learning from the best instructors – James and Julia of Udacity – and with real-time assistance from Udacity’s Live Help sessions provided in-depth explanations of critical topics while rectifying our mistakes.

I would urge the other young people of Bhubaneshwar to realise that hard work can make dreams come true. Winning the competition was the result of the incredible support accorded to me by Udacity, which helped me sharpen my developer skills and achieve excellence.”