##Instructions
- save a copy of this document as FirstLast.qmd in the about folder
- replace Your Name in yaml header with your first and last name
- save an image (jpeg, png) to use in the about/images folder
- replace image names in yaml header
- replace github user name
- fill in information below, as appropriate
- commit to github and submit pull request
Education/Work Background
I’m Sahasra, a second year graduate student, studying Computer Science. I come from India, a very prominent country from South Asia. I pursued my undergraduate in a city called Pune, from Cummins College of Engineering for Women, a female-only engineering school. I completed a degree in Information Technology in 2018, where I developed an interest in the different facets of data science.
Post my undergraduate degree, I started my professional experience as a Technology Analyst at Citi Corp Services, the technical vertical of Citigroup, where I got the opportunity to work with Big Data. This experience helped me understanding the data ingestion and transformation pipelines, which further deepened my understanding of the processes involved in data engineering. I worked with the Commodities Business Unit, within the Simpliciti team, the risk engine within Commodities. Here my primary responsibilities involved code migration to the Saprk framework, as well as understanding, fixing and devloping on-the-fly fixed for bugs. A very interesting project I worked on involved me improving reliability of transactions traded on the day, where I succeeded in bringing down the errors by approximately 97%.
R experience
I have some exposure to R as a programming language, which I used as a part of the STATS 501 course, which was a statistics requirement for the completion of the degree. While my exposure and understanding to R as a statistical language tool is limited, I’m very excited to be pursuing this course to gain a comprehensive understanding of the language, which I believe will better equip me with skills as a budding data scientist.
Research interests
My research interest lies in computational linguistics, text mining, data mining, and machine learning. My primary research interest lies in studying the social and pragmatic nature of textual data and build systems that can improve natural language understanding. At the same time, I also want to explore data-intensive computing. I believe data lies at the heart of every problem, and I hope to develop data-driven solutions for problems that organizations continually experience.
Hometown
I was born in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, a state in India. My teenage and adult years have involved me continuously flitting between Pune and Mumbai, as both are relatively close, geographically. Mumbai boasts of some of the best Indian street food, and is India’s answer to “the city that never sleeps”. While Mumbai is located along the Western coasts of India, Pune is situated at a higher altitude, and is one of the few cities with a perennially pleasant climate. Pune has a number of educational institutions, and is hence monikered as “the Oxford of the East”.
Hobbies
I am an avid reader, reading is something that I seek after a long day, or even at times of extreme stress. My mother had instilled this hobby in me from a very young age, and it has only become stronger now. I’m currently reading a fictionalized biography series of the Mughal dynasty by Alex Rutherford, where each book chronicles the life and times of one Mughal Emperor, starting from Babur, going all the way down to Aurangzeb. My favorite book so far has been “Tell me your dreams” by Sidney Sheldon, which is the account of an individual suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and the subsequent actions and consequences they face while battling this disorder.
Fun fact
I love to travel, but have next to none direction sense! I once “lost” my vehicle in my company’s parking, and it took a team of 4 guards and I to locate it an hour later.
