Web Curriculum vitae

As an applied Scientist my primary work is two folded:

Firstly, I collaborate with other researchers on building machine learning models meant to improve Ripple’s solutions for facing digital asset markets. This requires me to apply my ML modeling and statistical analysis skills to translate business problems into machine learning problems in order to develop optimal solutions. Projects in this domain include — creating Anomaly Detection model as a service for real time payments/trade data, creating models for payment orchestration, and models analyzing market micro-structure.

Secondly, I contribute to tooling that allows for the above models to be built/experimented on at scale using our own Experimentation Bench. Once a good enough model is built, I also contribute to making sure the models are seamlessly deployed into production. This allows me to tackle real-world issues such as missing or inconsistent data, its latency, and data cleanness efforts. Continuous deployment and experimentation keeps me close to the source of truth, its speculations, and its results.

Apart from the above, I also lead and collaborate on the AI (read LLM) application efforts in the company on varied use cases. Our latest effort is on LLM fine tuning (or its need thereof) to help builders with improving code coverage across our proprietary codebase in our own style of codebase maintenance.

Working with the wonderful ML/AI Applied science team at Ripple for Automated Trading use case.

BRB asking my manager how much can I disclose 😄

For a long time, I have wanted to know if Innovation can be dealt with as if it were a process. Being at CMU, I thought I should be able to learn it somewhere right? Arguably one of the most innovative schools on the planet. Post some research, I found out Prof. Jason was teaching, one last time, his famous Grand Challenge Innovation class in the spring of 2022 at CMU. I had to take it. Unfortunately, I had already overbooked myself for the spring and could not have taken his class. Rather, I applied to help him with Technology setup throughout the semester! I got paid to attend his brilliant class. What more could I ask? What I learned:

• The formal process for innovation and ideation.
• User Research Methodologies
• Product Conceptualization Techniques (Importance/Difficulty, Decision Matrix, etc.)
• How to apply emerging technologies to solve grand challenges through a physical system
• How to set up dependable Zoom Sessions for large classrooms

As I grew up and gained exposure to the world of computing and the breakthrough research in the world, I found that I wanted to be closer to research and then its implementation as products and services.

I negotiated with my manager to help me transition to an Applied Research Team. Given my performance and my suggestions, agreed and soon I was only the second recruit at Eagle Labs — our company’s newly formed Applied Research Team. Here I was able to work on some of the coolest projects. Some of my achievements:

• Implemented phishing discriminant XGBoost model and productized its APIs on Palo Alto Network’s Cortex XSOAR platform to filter through approximately 17,000 emails a day.
• Delivered a Signature Extraction model for legal property documents using an ensemble of SOTA Convolutional Neural Networks (YOLO and ResNet), helping in 16 unique business process improvements.
• Developed a chatbot framework for multi-party service integration with endpoint integrations to Alexa and Google Home and streamlined information access for six customer-facing applications.
• Implemented an analytics dashboard for customer research and segmentation using Tableau and custom D3.js components to fine-tune customer retention and acquisition strategies.

I was in Kenya with my parents when I stumbled upon this EdTech SaaS startup working off one corner of the workspace my father was working at. I asked my father what the product was about and he asked me to talk to the core team itself. I learned they were working on making education more accessible to economically weak students of Kenya. I was so interested in their work that they offered me an internship to help them launch their product. I, obviously, agreed.

I helped them with the planning and presentation of their MVP to prospective investors. I went on to help them with the coordination of their off-shore software teams. Later, I did in-person school surveys where we pitched the product and took note of their grievances. This helped us understand the need better and plan our course forward. I even pitched the startup’s financial projections to investors and helped secure their first line of credit.