Helped conduct a course on Decentralized Finance as a TA - COS473
Visited Melghat, Amaravati, Curacao, New Haven, Vienna, Innsbruck and Munich
Helped design a course on Decentralized Finance as a TA - COS473, also a TA for COS470
Started the year rubbing my eyes in the smoggy winter of Mumbai, while watching the Wire. Did a mandatory Goa trip with family. Came back to Princeton and devoured some new fiction authors that blew my mind: Bhalchandra Nemade and Shanta Gokhale. Then visited Champaign, Hawaii, LA, SF, Monterrey.
Made some oil and acrylic paintings. Started a snail's pace attempt at learning to play the keyboard. Became a bit too obsessed with the philosophy of mind. Changed my mind from physicalism to analytic idealism.
During the course of my stay at UIUC, I learnt ice-skating and pretended to learn salsa. Also went sky-diving once (I don't think I'll see the cornfields around UIUC the same way again, having had the experience of hurtling towards them while thinking about my death).
On most weekends though, I found myself on long walks through woods, while listening to podcasts or kathakathan or catching up and gossiping with friends.
I also got interested in Marathi poetry and started writing a few poems myself.
After my graduation, I joined Goldman-Sachs in Bengaluru as an analyst in its Model Risk Management division, which functions to validate financial models. These 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 worked on credit risk models.
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 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.
Was a TA for the Freshman course PH108 - Electromagnetism
My hobbies include reading, swimming, sketching, trekking and annoying my sister.
I also write poems (English for nature/life and Marathi for romance), but if anyone else reads them, there is a non trivial chance I would die of embarrassment. I sometimes get ideas to write a novel, but always fail to get past the first sentence, which happens to be ungrammatical.
Some of my non-fiction reading interests include evolutionary theory, linguistics, economics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, sociology and underworld logistics.
Most of my reading is fiction. I enjoy thrillers, fantasy, horror, those with historic backdrops, comedy, and romance (if it is done right).
I also enjoy Marathi theatre and Indian Classical music, Marathi bhavgeet and Marathi/English songs of virtually all genres. I enjoy movies and TV shows in the sci-fi, fantasy, black comedy and romance (again if it is done right) genres.
I loved playing MMORPGs and have played World of Warcraft and EVE Online on and off. But the one I spent the most number of hours on is LOTRO.
I also love trekking with my family or the awesome group of childhood friends that I have, all of whom are way cooler than I can ever hope to be.