Show Notes

• (2:27) Ankit studied Electrical Engineering with a focus on Communication and Signal Processing at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.
• (3:27) Ankit then worked for three years as a Senior Field Engineer at Schlumberger, an international oilfield services company.
• (4:23) Ankit then went to the US to pursue a Masters in Financial Engineering from the Walter Hass School of Business at UC Berkeley.
• (6:13) Ankit had an opportunity to intern as a data scientist at Facebook during his Masters and worked on detecting spam for Facebook pages.
• (8:27) Ankit worked full-time as a Quantitative Finance Analyst at Bank of America after finishing his degree, with projects such as building models to identify risk in bank portfolio and analyzing relevance opportunities for strategic investment.
• (9:46) Ankit discussed his transition to a Data Scientist role at ClearSlide, a B2B platform for Sales Enablement + Engagement.
• (11:32) Ankit discussed his work on sales forecasting algorithms at ClearSlide.
• (15:06) In 2015, Ankit moved to Bangalore to become the Head of Data Science and Analytics at Ruunr, a B2B platform that offers hyper-local logistics services that partners with merchants in India.
• (16:18) Ankit unpacked his thorough post “How Food Delivery Can Be a Sustainable Business” that reflects his experience at Ruunr.
• (18:35) Ankit talked about the similarities and differences of tech culture in Bangalore and San Francisco.
• (19:39) Ankit came back to the US and started working as a Data Scientist at Uber in early 2017.
• (20:34) Ankit discussed his work at Uber on user-level forecasting.
• (23:12) Ankit talked about the different types of problems that researchers at Uber AI Labs work on.
• (24:49) Ankit unpacked his in-depth technical post on Uber’s Engineering blog “Food Discovery with Uber Eats: Using Graph Learning to Power Recommendations” — including graph neural networks for food recommendations, the design of the data and training pipeline, and ways to incorporate more data for further improvement.
• (28:55) Ankit discussed the challenges with building the Uber Eats recommendation system in production.
• (32:15) Ankit has written a technical book called TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects — which teaches how to exploit the benefits (simplicity, efficiency, and flexibility) of using TensorFlow in various real-world projects.
• (34:43) Ankit gave his two cents on the battle of frameworks between TensorFlow and PyTorch.
• (36:26) Ankit shared his advice for academics looking to work in the industry: building end-to-end projects, learning how to build scalable pipelines, and keeping up with important research topics.
• (38:33) Ankit reflected on the benefits of his electrical engineering and financial analysis education towards his career in data science.
• (40:11) Closing segment.

His Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• GitHub
• Quora

His Recommended Resources

• GraphSAGE
• Meta-Graph: Few-Shot Link Prediction via Meta-Learning
• Ankit’s book "TensorFlow Machine Learning Projects” published with Packt
• Andrew Ng
• Geoffrey Hinton
• Jeff Dean
• "Elements of Statistical Learning" by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman

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