I am Karthik Thiagarajan, an educator at the undergraduate level in the fields of mathematics and data science. I work as a teaching fellow at the BS program in Data Science and Application at IIT Madras. I have been associated with the BS program since its inception in the year 2020. You can find a short interview on the IIT Madras BS Insider Channel.
I have a B.Tech degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Madras. I spent a couple of years working as a data scientist for two companies: [24]7.ai and HyperVerge. Subsequently, I was associated with the RISE lab and the Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and AI for about three years under the guidance of professor Balaraman Ravindran.
I have been a part of the following courses in the program with varying levels of involvement:
Computational Thinking
Programming in Python
Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms in Python
Mathematics for Data Science-II
Machine Learning Foundations
Machine Learning Techniques
Deep Learning
Mathematical Thinking
Algorithms for Data Science
Reinforcement Learning
Data Science and AI Lab
Typically, I am involved in the following activities for a given course:
Creating various types of assessments:
weekly assessments
question papers for exams
Creating notes, slides and recording tutorials
Synchronous support in the form of live lectures, doubt-clearing sessions and pre-exam revision sessions
Asynchronous support via discussion forums and chat spaces
Conducting workshops
I am particularly fond of creating my own notes and slides for my online classes and exploring various platforms that help in this process. I am quite active on Discourse. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.
I am against the exclusive use of AI for content creation. Most of my notes and slides were created before generative-AI powered tools become popular. I continue to create my own notes and slides and have no plans of offloading this activity to chat-bots. However, I do use AI, primarily Gemini, to:
review content that I have created
learn new things, especially programming languages
I write the GATE-DA paper every year. My scores in the last three editions:
Though the days of competitive exams are behind me, I believe this particular exam serves as a yearly reminder to continue to work on my foundations in mathematics and data science.
