Welcome to my website where you can get to know my work and me a bit better. I am pursuing a Master's in Statistics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am very passionate about Mathematics and want to build my career in the field of data science and machine learning. I believe the most pressing concerns today are finding a way to compute huge amounts of data very quickly and also finding methods to make sense of the data.
I am working as a Data Scientist for the University of Illinois System organisation, Administrative Information Technology Services (AITS). I assist the Advanced Analytics team in handling various projects concerning the university. Some of the key techniques I learned as NLP algorithms to process data, like TF/IDF, applying BERT LLM, and using Azure OpenAI.
In the past, I have worked as a Junior Research Fellow at DA-IICT. My project involved monitoring various parameters of plants using an IoT-based sensor system and applying techniques of Machine Learning to predict the chances of diseases in the plants. Based on the collected data, I built novel neural networks to predict fungal growth in plants and create an early warning system to secure livelihoods.
One of the key learnings I received while working on these projects is that the quality of data is the most important part of generating valuable and accurate insights. I realize that for any machine learning engineer, it is important to know how to deal with the inconsistencies in the raw data gathered from the real world before progressing towards the assessment part.
Have a brief look at my profile here:
Riya Saini Resume.pdfFor more details of my work, reach out to me at
Ever since I was a child, I loved reading fairy-tales and immersing myself in the world of fiction. While I still like to read made up stories, I enjoy reading Biographies as well and 'Wings of Fire', Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam's autobiography is at the top of my must read list.
I am a trained classical dancer with an experience of 12 years. I learned Odissi which comes from our eastern state of Odisha and was traditionally performed by dancers in temples of Lord Jagannatha.
I share my father's love for an occasional adventure, so trekking and hiking is one of my favourite activities. My first trek was when I was in class 6th and I went on a school camp to Alpine, Himachal Pradesh. Since then I have been to a few spots in Maharashtra and near Hyderabad, where I live currently.