I am on the founding team at Glean, a $1B Series C startup founded in 2019, in Palo Alto, where we're building the most intelligent search for the workplace. I lead several engineering teams working on Search and Intelligence.
I worked between Google New York City, Tel Aviv and Bangalore on Search, first on query understanding and then leading the Sports team focussing on Cricket. Before that, I worked at Facebook New York.
I graduated with a Bachelors and a Masters in
Computer Science from Cornell University after finishing high school in Calcutta, India, prior to which I spent 7 years during elementary school in Bay Area, California.
Some may know me from "hacking" the Indian education system, my popular resume template, or my data-driven weight loss story. I write on my blog, Writes, and on Twitter.
Glean is a Series C startup witha $1B valuation and ~200 employees backed by Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, General Catalyst and Sequoia led by Arvind Jain, who co-founded Rubrik. Our goal is to build the most intelligent search for the workplace!
I'm a founding engineer in Palo Alto and I lead several teams on Search and Intelligence.
We are hiring!
I was in the New York, Tel Aviv and finally the Bangalore office where I led the Sports effort on Search team, specifically cricket. Google [cricket scores].
I also worked on ML and infra for knowledge graph, query understanding and personalization for Search.
I worked under Eyal Carmi and Tal Cohen.
I worked in New York office on the Places Search Ranking team, under Jan Kalis, doing applied machine learning on large scale data on locations, geo, and search.
I built UDF Finder.
I did research here, broadly in Robotics and Machine Learning, under Professor Ashutosh Saxena. I recently published a paper as well. Most of the team now works out of Stanford on Robobrain.
I went to college here, in Ithaca. I learnt, did research and helped teach. It's cold and beautiful. You walk a lot. I graduated in three and half years with a Bachelors and a Masters.
I interned in Mountain View on the Future Learning Exprience team as a full-stack engineer and a KPCB Fellow. I shipped Yoda, and had a tremendously fun summer being mentored by the incredible Jon Wong.
I interned at the YouTube Captions team in Mountain View under Loretta Guarino Reid. I shipped the Captions editor and creator to production and met some really smart people.
I contributed to this open-source project as a part of a Facebook initiative, met the legendary Evan Priestley and amongst harder things, created the meme generator.
I went to school here, in Kolkata, for 8 years. It was founded in 1836, so it's pretty old. It turned 175 when I graduated. I was taught Math by David Royan.
In June '13, I published Hacking into the Indian Education System about some code I wrote to expose glaring anomalies in one of India's premier education boards. It amassed a lot of media coverage.
I've been mining, analyzing and working with media organizations for 5 years now since 2013 to spread the word about these severe grading issues affecting over a million Indian high school students annually culminating in a
Delhi High Court order to stop it in May '17. It featured on headlines multiple times.
In August '13, I wrote a Quora answer about the perks of interning at Google, following the release of the movie The Internship (2013) about the same, which featured on Business Insider.
In April '14, another Quora answer about the impact of competitive programming on careers featured in Forbes.
Yet another Quora answer from July '13 about college advice students are not likely to ever hear was featured on Business Insider.
In April '14, I open-sourced a XeLaTeX resume template that went viral and has over 1200 stars and 350 forks on the Github repo after trending on Reddit and HackerNews. It features on many popular online TeXing platforms and archives.
It is one of the top 10 most popular Latex templates on Overleaf, with over 85,000 views.
It initially peaked at number 5 on HackerNews.
The Open-Source community has made a Resume Generator based on it that peaked at number 2 on HN and a version in Jade.
In August '14, I spoke at TEDx Bangalore to an audience of 1600 about some major issues plaguing Indian education and how online education can be and is being an effective solution. The video is available here.
I've given 9 talks across prominent colleges in India and USA
about career, software, technology, my projects and my past experiences.
I was on Al Jazeera live on February '17 to talk about United States H-1B visa (temporary worker visa) policy along with Bruce Morrison, former Congressman and the primary drafter of the H-1B bill of 1990, and several others. The telecast can be found here.
On February '17 and September '17, I wrote a two part blog series about my body transformation and the data-driven approach I took to lose 66lbs, or 30kgs, in the span of 8 months and gain a 6-pack, and keep it off for another 8 while gaining strength. This featured on the front page of Hacker News and in GQ India.
My blog posts on Writes have been featured on Reddit, been widely retweeted, and have front-paged Hacker News five times.
I've been fortunate to have been in involved with research with Prof Ashutosh Saxena in Robotics and Machine Learning, Sam Tilsen in Linguistics, and Kavita Bala in Graphics and got two research papers published.
Tech Report, Dec 2014
IntInternational Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015
Linguistics Vanguard, Dec 2014
Delhi University is one of India's biggest universities with offering over 50 subjects amongst more than 50 colleges. Admissions to DU are based off of complicated cut-off calculations, innumerable quotas, and one needs to look at multiple cut-off list pdfs being served through websites stuck in the 90s. I scraped and structured the data from DU admissions and provide a clean, user-friendly form so you can check which colleges and for what subjects you're eligible to be admitted in.
GradCafe has 372 thousand graduate school admissions results. I scraped 93% of that data, including 80 thousand GRE scores and 75 thousand undergraduate GPAs. I also extensively deduplicated the user provided university names to over 98% cleanliness, and compiled a hyperclean Computer Science specific set of 28 thousand results. Let's dive into these never-before-seen statistics on graduate school admissions! Retweeted and shared by many professors.
Hacker News, the Y Combinator tech forum, has exploded from its humble beginnings in 2006 to one of the primary sources of news in the tech community. Looking through the data, we can see how HN grew, the things people talked about, the most shared domains, the most influential contributors and more. Received over 100k hits.
Inspired by King James Programming, I decided to write my own generic Hidden Markov Model that generates funny one liners by doing a random walk between two (or more) works of text. Here is a sample from the mix between King James Bible and Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. And here's one with the latter and the English translation of Mahabharata. They're hilarious.
A computer is mostly limes with chords of the terrified, herd of deer.
Torrage is a super secure peer-to-peer cloud storage platform written in C, where your password never leaves your machine and your files never leave your machine in one piece or unencrypted. It's based on the BitTorrent protocol. Read the paper here. I'm going to open source the code soon.
Worked with tGELF to aggregate and analyze over one and a half million tweets related to the 2014 Indian General Elections. We visualized interesting trends with time, location, and sentiment.
I developed a player trading model for the Fantasy Indian Premier League, the world's biggest cricket league. It was the first such model to compete in the actual fantasy league. It used Binary Integer Programming, computationally outperforming previous research in the field by 33x and achieved 99.54%ile out of over 400,000 participants. Read the paper here.
Marauder allows players to create and join maps that continuously but efficiently log location data from your phone and displays live locations of all players on the map with very low latency, much like the Marauder's Map. We used Tornado, WebSocket, and Redis amongst other technologies, and built a web app and iOS app.
Finally ported my obsolete Word resume into Latex and open-sourced it! There aren't many half-decent resume templates out there. I also compiled a few of my favorite Latex templates as well. The template has over 700 stars and is the 4th most popular English resume creating system on Github.
I developed two trading models - a volatility sensitive Markowitz model for small investors, as well as a Support Vector Machine model limited to trading only on SPDR ETFs, managing to outperform baselines and in the first case, half the risk. Read the paper here. This paper was tweeted by Carl Carrie, former Global Head of Algorithmic Products at JP Morgan and Head of Commodity Technology at Barclays.
Worked with Ashesh Jain and Ashutosh Saxena to build PlanIt, a Machine Learning system that helps robots plan paths in human environments from crowd-sourced user preference data. Read the paper here.
Used Play! to make a Java-backed deterministic Minimax Tree based AI, with optimizations enabling a 13 move lookahead. Deployed on Heroku.
I worked in a team of 4 to create a compiler from scratch in Java for Cubex. We used ANTLR, and implemented some optimizations. Ross Tate taught us and he's awesome.
Wrote code which used the WAVE sensor system to eventually create the world's first accurate tongue controlled game. A paper is in progress.
A Chrome extension and mobile website that allows you to use any mobile device as a remote for YouTube.
Monitors your vital signs with HumanAPI. Performs sentiment analysis on your Facebook conversations to find who cheers you up and connects you with them when it detects stress.
Uses governmental data about farm land to use 7 different factors to algorithmically rank land in the USA by quality depending on what the farmer wants to rear or grow using ArcGis.
Minimalistic instant search tool that uses the RottenTomatoes to quickly find synopses, User ratings and Audience ratings.
Wrote a GUI, an orbit analysis tool, and did some code factoring on a simulation for a nanosatellite that will actually launch into space.
Captor is a demo of a YouTube tool which allows quick, intuitive video captioning. This was the prototype for the actual YouTube Captions Creator.
I've also created a fully rendered, realistic and interactive 3D Game with a random terrain generator, a Ray Tracer renderer, a multithreaded SMTP Server, my own malloc, a fully functional filesystem with a multithreaded garbage collector, a MapReduce in OCaml, a Pokémon playing bot, a MIPS Processor, and Breakout.
I've also created a simple algorithmic trading simulator, tools to scrape the Cornell University student database, a Typeracer hack, a Cornell instant course search tool called Instudy, classic games like Pong, Tetris and Minesweeper, and a 3D Graphing utility.
I enjoy critically reasoning and debating controversial topics. Topics that particularly interest me are India, education, politics, technology, and economics. I tweet about my thoughts at @debarghya_das.
My Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(MBTI) is INTP [Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving]. The favorite people I supposedly share my personality type with are Albert Einstein, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. You too should take the test here. As of late '17, I test as an ENTP.
I enjoy hiking, cricket, eating and reading about tech. I'm compiling a list of my favorite books, videos, articles and news sources on the internet in a list called where the knowledge is.
I love Hindi music and have a large Spotify playlist going, cleverly marketed as the Best Hindi Playlist on Spotify. I also like Michael Jackson, music from different countries, and my throwback high school Rock and Metal playlist.
I once lived off coffee, beer, and 5-hour energy shots, often in that order.
Now it's mostly chai, coffee and cheap wine.
