the sagacious fool 

Folks, did you feel the ground shaking, windows shattering, strong winds blowing and other tangible planetary signals. I am sure you'd skipped a heartbeat in April once. Yeah, that's when I came in, in onto this beautiful planet. You thought all of this was a coincidence? 

I spent 10 years (the first 10) of my life in the city of Gandhinagar in India. Gandhinagar was a quiet, well-planned, but not much to do kinda city. But then, there was city (Ahmedabad) nearby with all the hustle & bustle. I remember going to the city over the weekends, exploring book stores, restaurants & cafes, city's historical landmarks, and the riverfront. It was beautiful. In the first month of the second year of the 21st century, we had to move to a different city, and personally, I wasn't keen on that at all. I was in love with Gandhinagar and I was going to miss it!

Well, I was 17 and had to decide what major I'd like to choose for my bachelors, honestly, I had no clue. I felt that I hadn't explored much to know what I'd eventually like and the ones I'd explored, didn't seem exciting. I went with Computer Science mainly because I had done some bit of coding previously. I had no clear direction nor a clear vision. Though there was one thing, I used to enjoy studying or rather digging deep in any topic until I found out the 'why', But this time around, I couldn't find the 'what'

This was my second year at Barclays and though I was enjoying my work, in one of my projects I had come across some statistical models that the mortgage risk team was using. I would always get excited by the the work that team was doing and would want to learn and work on something similar. After a lot of engaging conversations with the machine learning lead of that team, thorough contemplation, and research of several months, I decided to pursue masters' in applied machine learning and data science

I am grateful to the entire community at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) . 2015 and 2016 were one of the most challenging, intense, fun, and ridiculously amazing years of my life. Masters' at CMU helped me push the boundary in every possible direction. I picked up books that I wouldn't have picked up, flow mode reached 'Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi' level, got interested in Squash, and data science problem solving seemed satiating; I got to expand the realm perpetually

I moved to Bay Area and started working at WalmartLabs. I was the youngest member of my team. The team was a terrific group of people, formerly a start-up that WalmartLabs had acquired a few years back. First of, I was excited to work in the Bay Area, and second and more importantly, I was working with some terrific data scientists and amazingly humble people. WalmartLabs and Bay Area gave me the opportunity to participate in several machine learning events, talks, conferences. I got to interact and network with so many wonderful people and learn about their time in the industry

A solo hiking trip to the mountains in Switzerland, while having fresh farm milk and cheese. Yeah, after a 2 month planning on the hikes, mountain towns, cheese huts, chocolate milks to have, trails, waterfalls, valleys etc. Bernese Oberland will always find a spot in my memory

Over years, I developed interest and passion in working on reducing bias in the society. I started working at TikTok, primarily on using machine learning to detect fake engagements on the platform. I was working on some extremely challenging problems with no defined space of solutions. I felt extremely satisfied not just with machine learning applications but just problem solving as such