About

Battered legs and dried sweat. Lobuche, Nepal

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Personal

My girlfriend describes me as someone with black-cat energy with occasional golden retriever sprinkles xD. I believe all individuals have an interesting life story, and as a result I love to listen people talk.

I find it impossible to balance, especially in pursuits, so I’m either utterly obsessed or utterly disinterested. I love travelling to random towns, obscure places, and asking people there what they think of something. I HATE museums.

Man is condemned to be free, but he’s truly liberated on a motorcycle. Sorry, Sartre, you just never rode a bike. I devour riding motorcyles, for weeks, for thousands of kilometers, across hundreds of places.

I enjoy reading (absolutely anything, even political pamphlets), cooking, navy cross-fit, kickboxing, surfing, running, dog-walks, air-rifle shooting, playing devil’s advocate, seeing tree leaves flutter in the wind, working out, listening to music, memorising national anthems of different countries, and enjoy tons of other things I don’t remember.

My Story

1998, I was born in Akola, Maharashtra, India. It’s a small off-the-radar town known for BLISTERING summers, Varhadi and Saoji cuisine.

Growing up in Akola I grew up with lots of love, and fat, reading a lot, abhorring school, solving math problems for fun.

2014-16, JEE years in Akola Thought it’s the most -only- important thing in the world; I was very wrong. But as Roger Federer says, “Once you score a point, it’s great, but it’s behind you. Move forward”

2016-2020 Spent four wonderful years at IIT-Bombay. Travelled countries, was surrounded by some of the most amazing, talented, and smartest people. Felt inspired and depressed and motivated and humbled and intellectually stimulated. I could’ve used my years much better.

2020 COVID Opted out of college placements, wanted to join a Chinese AI start-up in Shenzhen, ended up joining Wadhwani-AI. During the first COVID wave’20 I was sanitizing mangoes, eggs, among others.

2020-2022 My time at Wadhwani-AI taught me that XGBoost is the GOAT; shiny new models(techniques) will get you a paper but, often, no real value; free investor money is poison; in ML, theory gives you deeper understanding but quality data gives you real performance. Understood Yogi-Berra. Procrastinated and eventually dropped on a Start-up idea.

Also 2020-2022 Went to Everest and Annapurna Basecamp, backpacked across SE Asia. Angkor-Wat deserves to be among 7 wonders, not Taj Mahal. Rode motorcyle across villages in Indian states, saw the raw and rural India, had conversations with real people; felt priviledged, and obligated towards them.

2023-2024 Had fermented rice beer in a jungle with Naga-people, met my girlfriend; traveled with her; she introduced me to surfing, made a 3500KM long motorcycle trip to eat a Horlicks Ice-Cream in Udupi in pouring monsoon rain, got into ELLIS PhD program and started my PhD.

2024-NowI was forced to Took some lot of courses because I had no masters, best things I learned: Quantum-Information-Processing; Quantum-ML; Formal Verification; Quantum Computing is a field with no solution (yet)desperately looking for a problem, started reading/understanding the whole Lifshitz-Landau series for the n-th time, passed my Qualification Exam, was in Saarbrucken, Germany, searched for reasons to like it– it’s kinder pingui!! Currently in Cambridge, UK.

Short Professional Summary

For a full professional summary please see my CV

WORK EXPERIENCE

  • Associate ML Scientist, Sept 2020- May 2023 (Full-time)
    • Wadhwani-AI, Mumbai
    • Applied ML for healthcare; Tabular data classification; Object detection; Computer Vision; NLP tasks; Data/evaluation-pipelines; Noisy datasets; Large Language Models; pre LLM-Chatbots; LLM fine-tunening; Gradio MVPs with LangChain
  • BlockChain Intern, May 2020-July 2020 (remote)
    • REDFOX LABS, Ho Chi Minh
    • BlockChain data analysis

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

  • Remote Research Fellow, Aug 2022— Oct 2022 (remote)
    • UIUC
    • Guide: Dr. Arindam Banerjee
    • Area: Adversarial Robustness
  • Remote Research Fellow, Aug 2021— June 2022 (remote)
    • UC-San Diego
    • Guide: Dr. Yonatan Aljadeff
    • Area: Theoretical Neuroscience
  • Research Assistant, June 2021— Dec 2021 (remote)
    • IIT-Bombay
    • Guide: Dr. Abir De
    • Area: Control theory and Optimization
  • Remote Research Fellow, May 2020— Nov 2020 (remote)
    • IISc, Bangalore
    • Guide: Dr. Arindam Khan
    • Area: Online Learning; Streaming Algorithms
  • Remote Research Fellow, May 2020—Aug 2020 (remote)
    • TIFR, Mumbai
    • Guide: Dr. Rahul Vaze
    • Area: Online unsupervised Learning
  • Visiting Research Student, May 2019—Jul 2019.
    • ETH-Zurich, Zurich
    • Guide: Dr. Suman Saha, Dr. Luc Van Gool
    • Area: Neural Network Compression
  • Visiting Research Student, May 2018—Jul 2018.
    • Oxford Brookes University, Oxford
    • Guide: Dr. Fabio Cuzzolin
    • Area: Action Classification and Detection

EDUCATION

  • ELLIS PhD Student, Jan 2024—Current
  • B.TECH, Electronics and Electrical Engineering, 2016-2020
    • Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Updated: July 2024