Hemant Singh

Student, Computer Science

They still say of me, my mother's side and my father's side, 'He was the child that brings the house down. Hide everything. He'll break it!'

I knew Canada was very cold. Most of the people in India don't like cold weather, other than the Himalayan regions. Somehow, I really like cold. I really enjoy cold weather. Halifax is a very small city, but this is something I really like because this would be a great start. You don't want to go first to the big cities like Toronto, because they are so big, and people are too busy with their lives. I said, 'Ok if you want to start from somewhere, start from a small place, live there, take the feel of the place, take the feel of the people. Whatever happens, you can't predict the future.' So, Halifax it is.

If you take my family as a whole, it's massive. My mother's side, I would say 150 people. We used to get together in summer holidays. You don't get to see everyone in every summer. You only get to see everyone when we had a marriage. The cool thing was that every summer holiday, someone had a wedding. The family was so big people used to eat in batches. It was fun.

My brother knows I'm kind of antisocial and don't talk to many people — kind of a wild child in my family. My family doesn't know I've changed substantially. I mellowed my aggressiveness. I was very energetic. They still say of me, my mother's side and my father's side, 'He was the child that brings the house down. Hide everything. He'll break it!'

My father would bring home small toy cars to play with, and I would play with them, but after five minutes, I wanted to see how it worked. I used to open them to see that. My father thought I had a very engineering mind.

After working for six years, I know I can't work for anyone else. My dream job would be to code against the backdrop of Bahamas or Miami. I can't work stuck behind a desk. Energy doesn't flow if I keep sitting. Slowly I understand what makes me happy.

When you work over there in India in a huge company, the rate of growth and the rate of innovation is prolonged because you are confined in a very specific bubble. I was bored to my core, I would say. It's kind self-exploring, reinventing myself again. In my courses, it's very common after ten or 15 years, people come back to university and do degrees to change their career. It was a huge decision for me to leave everything there and come to Canada to start. I'm kind of an emotional guy. It was a tough decision. Should I leave?

In Canada, around 1700 people die due to lack of organ donation and approximately double that die due to fatal car accidents. I thought, 'Ok, this can be a starting point. Why not connect them, and using a machine learning algorithm, we can precisely match the organ recipient and donor so that the operation is successful.' They work right now based on a list. When you do a transplant surgery, you have to look at a plethora of data about my organ, my organ size, my age, my blood group, my medical history. This is not an optimized way of doing this. What if I can design an application that checks each and every one from the donor side to organ recipients’ side and give us a 100 per cent chance of being successful? I don't want to replace the search they do. I want to provide the doctors with a dashboard to make an informed decision.

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