Now. Present. Alive. I guess...
Mostly staring into the abyss. Machine Learning + Human Learning + Existential Crises (pondering about knowledge, learning, life, universe and everything.)
(Last updated Feb 11, 2024)
You can call me whatever you like though. I am a paraodx!
I finished my MS CS from UAH in July 2023.
Currently I am working as a "Computer Scientist" at NASA-IMPACT.
I am at the intersection of Machine Learning research + engineering with NASA-funded projects. That means, I get to dive deep into the research problem, generate new ideas, apply existing ones too, come up with solutions (or perhaps more problems to solve) that help advance the field of Earth Science. My general tendency is to encourage more open science no matter what and this aligns with NASA-IMPACT.
Well, heard of ChatGPT? Bard? Gemini? Claude? LLama? <put all the Large Language Models (LLMs) out in the market here>. I am working with LLMs to leverage their capabilities to build hybrid search systmes for NASA projects. I lead a team called Augmented Search which focuses just on that. RAG, LLM agents, text-to-sql, you name it. I am working on these.
As a GRA, I workedd on a very applied research for my master's thesis: Feature Selection in High-Dimensional Space with Applications to Gene Expression Data. As a part of NASA’s Bio-physical Science (BPS) collaboration, I worked on machine learning-based gene ranking algorithms for gene expression data from space-flown rodents and presented my poster for AGU 22. I built an ensemble-based ranking framework that helps identify important genes that contribute to the different physical attributes (gender, age, condition, etc.) of the rodents. Final Slide Deck
Beyond that, everything is a past now which helped shape my mental models and capabilities as an empathetic human being.
I am Nish. I don't do much, except staring at the abyss as long as I can.
BTW, I mostly put my thoughts in my perosnal knowlege base using logseq which is open-source! It's kinda messy. Yet is able to make myself comfortable.
This newsletter feels like an ancient past I wish I could touch, but failed. Anyway, here it is: bits-and-paradoxes.
- wake up
- feel dreaded (and gratitude) about my existence
- try to ponder (and feel more dreaded) about ML research+engineering happening around
- less opinions, more exploration about the world
- minimizing my HN/Reddit/LessWrong consumption
- poetry, music, musings, et al
- staring into the abyss
Life is a suffering-optimization algorithm!