I'm a graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, where I got my B.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Hons.) and a Minor degree in Computer Science. During the course of my stay at IIT-B, I was part of a great team of undergrads who manufactured Autonomous Underwater Vehicles every year for the annual Robosub competition representing India. I worked on the fifth iteration of the vehicle called Matsya 5.0. I did my Bachelor's thesis and research projects exploring the design of recommendations systems and opinion dynamics under the able guidance of Prof. D. Manjunath and Prof. Sharayu Moharir. I was also fortunate enough to do an internship at the Aalborg University in Denmark under Prof. Jimmy Jessen Nielsen, where I spent my summer working as a visiting researcher in 2019. During my internship there, I worked on managing burst errors and energy consumption while using multiple wireless interfaces (WiFi and LTE) at the same time, using Reinforcement Learning and Markov chains. After my graduation, I joined Goldman-Sachs in Bengaluru as an analyst in its Model Risk Management division, which functions to validate financial models, that are used to do everything from projecting revenues to assessing risk, by providing stochastic guarantees, doing rigorous testing and designing better benchmark models using statistical and ML techniques. In particular, I work on credit risk models.
If you want to know more about me (I can't imagine why), click around or whatever.
My research interests include stochastic optimization and RL, mechanism design, information theory and multi-agent learning. I also like to solve puzzling physics problems and learning more physics in general. I have vowed to myself to at least understand special and general relativity before I die, so help me god.
Some of my non-fiction reading interests include evolutionary theory, linguistics, economics, neuroscience, consciousness, sociology and underworld logistics. I may or may not put reviews and short synopses of the books I have read on the blog page, which primarily exists so that I can force myself to document things and to provide my future self with something to be embarrassed about.
Most of my reading is fiction. I enjoy thrillers, fantasy, horror, those with historic backdrops, comedy, and romance (if it is done right). There may or may not be blog posts about them.
My other hobbies include swimming, sketching and annoying my sister. I also enjoy Marathi theatre and Indian Classical music, Marathi bhavgeet and Marathi/English songs of virtually all genres. I sometimes get ideas to write a novel, but always fail to get past the first sentence, which happens to be ungrammatical. I enjoy movies and TV shows in the sci-fi, fantasy and black comedy genres. I love playing MMORPGs and have played World of Warcraft and EVE Online on and off. But the one I spend the most number of hours on is LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online), so you can contact me on discord if you want to form a fellowship or have an active kinship in the game. I am also up if you just want a travelling companion for a stroll through Middle-Earth. Again, there may or may not be blog posts about my LOTRO progress. I also love trekking with my family or the awesome group of childhood friends that I have.
In conclusion, I am a thoroughly boring person, so I marvel that you have reached this line (don't you have better things to do?). Bye! :-)