
Anand Ramanathan
Verified Expert in Engineering
Machine Learning Developer
Anand is an entrepreneurial software engineer and data scientist with over 20 years at Microsoft, Amazon, and startups in roles, including data scientist, AI engineer, and technical product manager. His expertise includes NLU, speech, conversational assistants, Microsoft Azure AutoML, deep learning in computer vision with 3D semantic segmentation. Anand has strong Python experience—both experimenting in Jupyter Notebooks and building robust, test-driven production quality software.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Python, Jupyter, Flask, React, Scikit-learn, PyTorch
The most amazing...
...web-based experience I've built end-to-end was Ganglion, a web app that empowers consumers to control what news they read without giving up their privacy.
Work Experience
Founder | Machine Learning Engineer
MLAI, LLC.
- Conceived, designed, and built an end-to-end web app.
- Automated the daily refresh of news content enabling the entire app to work on autopilot.
- Manually labeled data to train a model for clickbait detection in news articles with 83% accuracy.
- Optimized the performance to efficiently fetch around 5,000 distinct news articles every day from 400 news feeds.
- Fetched and parsed news articles daily, updated models and predictions and uploaded an optimized view to AWS S3.
AI/ML Engineer
Healthcare Provider Client (via Toptal)
- Conducted feasibility analysis of an ML model for the business problem.
- Created estimates of data collection and annotation needed.
- Provided candidate models to evaluate once data was available.
- Answered all client's questions to their total satisfaction.
Senior AI Engineer
RedRoute
- Owned AI for the company; defined the AI roadmap for the company, combining several ideas from business, product, and technology as well as from academia, research, and industry.
- Led the audio-related data science roadmap and work; mentored/technically managed an experienced audio data science researcher.
- Built a real time audio barge-in detection model that performed very well with low resource requirements, compared to several prior attempts.
- Improved the performance of an eCommerce intent detection model by 2-5%—analyzing and relabeling the data, manually prioritizing and labeling high impact utterances, retraining and redeploying the model, and creating and monitoring looker dashboards.
- Increased customer handle rates by adding richer responses for eCommerce customers; this was done by answering frequently asked questions based on information from the customer's website and knowledge base. Created dashboards to monitor these changes.
- Created a transcriber/speaker diary tool to transcribe conversations.
- Built several dashboards and looks (queries) in Looker to monitor the impact of different changes.
- Educated the team on Kanban and influenced the deployment of a variant of Kanban in the company.
- Contributed to other areas of the company, including preparing to scale and establishing and improving processes and the business/sales/marketing/product strategy.
Data Scientist
Microsoft
- Built models to evaluate over 100 datasets to discover methods to improve the AutoML library.
- Improved the product on the benchmark against the competition by investigating and explaining a competing AutoML product's scoring methodology for imbalanced multi-class classification. I did this by digging deep into how metrics were computed.
- Analyzed feature importances by training over 100 datasets with automatic feature engineering libraries to prioritize featurizers for our AutoML product.
- Developed an end-to-end AutoML framework as part of a Hackathon project to understand what approaches would work best for AutoML.
- Delivered a dataset analysis and onboarding tool, which enabled evaluating, filtering, cleaning, and onboarding of 20 datasets into our benchmarking corpus.
- Built better complete performance graphs to improve confidence in the performance of each competitor across a corpus of over 100 datasets.
- Identified gaps in our benchmarking dataset corpus distribution and added over 20 datasets to fill those gaps.
Founder
Meon
- Built a web platform that allows you to create apps in minutes, Meonapp.com.
- Developed 80 apps in two days across several application domains.
- Created apps for various clients on the platform, including a tailor management app, a music composition app.
- Added capabilities for both general users and developers to build apps.
- Enabled apps to be hosted as soon as built, reducing turnaround time greatly.
Senior Software Engineer
Divensi, Inc.
- Researched and developed a deep learning model for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation of imbalanced outdoor Lidar data, with near state-of-the-art results for outdoor Lidar.
- Developed a V1 cloud-hosted decision support system web application utilized by several enterprise users for a remote startup client. Hired a technical team and transitioned the product. Offered a CTO position by the client CEO.
- Built a data pipeline framework for machine learning experimentation with Lidar data.
Freelance Developer
Self Employment
- Built nine educational games that were released to the App Store; iOS and cross-platform using the Corona SDK.
- Performed App Store optimization to maximize adoption and saw over 30,000 downloads across games.
- Developed a broad range of games, from running quizzes to new mathematical puzzles. The samurai game was highly appreciated by middle school teachers in the US.
Founder
Thouwords, LLC.
- Built a web application to make a textual website more visual by performing topic modeling with Alchemy API. Obtained images for each topic from Wikipedia APIs.
- Created a Wikipedia visual navigator using topic modeling and Wikipedia API to get images.
- Developed a web application to create rich ebooks for kids using pictures, video, and text books. The application was used to create picture books for kids and shared with parents.
Senior Technical Program Manager
Microsoft
- Built BizTalk Server, an enterprise messaging and workflow platform from idea to product. Released three versions of BizTalk Server.
- Created the first .NET based Outlook API, and released two versions of it.
- Built a service delivery platform for mobile telecom providers using .NET and SOA, including several WS- standards like WS-reliability and WS-eventing.
- Defined and led the inclusion of the REST API in .NET WCF.
Technical Product and Program Manager
Amazon
- Captured the end-to-end Amazon retail messaging and workflow blueprint by collaborating with over 40 teams at Amazon that used the messaging and workflow framework.
- Defined and led the creation of an internal distributed configuration store modeled on DNS.
- Proposed a well-received vision for (the then new) Amazon cloud. It was based on true elasticity and automatic scalability.
- Acting upon the vice president's suggestion, I presented the proposal to a special future architecture group. They incorporated it into their plans.
- Drove the adoption of a distributed configuration store across teams in the company.
Senior Software Engineer
Microsoft (via Aditi)
- Built a code profiler for Visual Studio Internal tools in C++.
- Developed an XSD (XML Schema Definition) library in C++.
- Created a persistence layer for an XSLT based BizTalk schema mapper.
- Ported the FrontPage server extensions to a pre-release version of C#.
Experience
Ganglion
https://www.ganglion.meI conceived, designed, built, and deployed this project end-to-end and automated the daily refresh of news content, updating machine learning models and word cloud images of the most common news topics. This set up the entire app to work on autopilot.
I optimized the performance to efficiently fetch approximately 5,000 distinct news articles every day from 400 news feeds and manually labeled data to train a model for clickbait detection in news articles with 83% accuracy. I trained and updated models to detect sentiment, objectivity, infer which articles have clickbait headings, perform NER, and generate word clouds. I fetched and parsed news articles daily, updated and generated models and document embeddings, created word cloud images, and uploaded to AWS S3 runs within hours.
AutoML
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/machine-learning/automatedml/Meon - Web Platform That Creates Apps in Minutes
https://youtu.be/ZCM7V_QH1zkAn AI Web App
Sumurai
https://www.quora.com/Which-android-games-make-you-smarterSmart Run
Skills
Languages
Ruby, Python 3, Python, SQL, JavaScript, Snowflake, Objective-C, C#, Java, XML, XSD, XSLT, TypeScript, Lua, R, C++
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Flask, Corona SDK, ASP.NET, .NET, Windows Communication Framework (WCF), CODE, Bootstrap, Angular, AngularJS, Unity, Cocos3d, Django, Django REST Framework, Realtime
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Pandas, Matplotlib, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), SpaCy, NumPy, Scikit-learn, Fast.ai, PyTorch, TensorFlow, SciPy, ATL, LSTM, OpenCV, React, jQuery, Django ORM, Keras, Tidyverse, Ggplot2, Google Speech-to-Text API
Tools
AutoML, Azure Machine Learning, Gensim, Seaborn, Microsoft Power BI, Jupyter, Visual Studio, JSX, Named-entity Recognition (NER), Trello, H2O AutoML, Ansible, Looker
Paradigms
REST, Agile, RESTful Development, Data Science, ETL, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), App Store Optimization (ASO), Kanban
Other
Natural Language Processing (NLP), Algorithms, SaaS, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Exploratory Data Analysis, APIs, Technical Hiring, Source Code Review, Code Review, Task Analysis, Interviewing, GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Architecture, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Image Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, JSON REST APIs, SDKs, Deep Learning, Statistical Learning, Web Scraping, 3D Image Processing, Image Processing, Team Management, Laspy, PDAL, AlchemyAPI, BizTalk Server, Outlook, Systems, Engineering, Workflow, Profiling, Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Neural Networks, Neural Networks, Data Structures, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Sequence Models, Hyperparameters, Regularization, Semantic Analysis, Rankings, Tf-idf, RSS Feeds, Discrete Mathematics, Graph Theory, Games, 2D Games, Mathematics, Game Art, LiDAR, Full-stack, IVR, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Dialog Systems, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), Labeling, Time Series Analysis, Reinforcement Learning, Time Series, Fintech, Cryptocurrency, Medical Imaging
Platforms
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure IaaS, Linux, Windows, MacOS, Heroku, iOS, Docker, Azure, Jupyter Notebook
Storage
PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Industry Expertise
Healthcare
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology - Roorkee, India
Certifications
Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
University of Alberta | via Coursera
TensorFlow Developer Certificate
DeepLearning.AI
DeepLearning.AI TensorFlow Certification
Coursera
Cryptocurrency Forecasting Using Machine Learning in Power BI
Coursera
Discrete Mathematics and Analyzing Social Graphs
Higher School of Economics, National Research University | via Coursera
Natural Language Processing with Classification and Vector Spaces
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Natural Language Processing with Probabilistic Models
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Mathematics for Machine Learning: Linear Algebra
Imperial College London | via Coursera
Data Structures
UC San Diego | via Coursera
Data Structures
UC San Diego and HSE | via Coursera
Algorithmic Toolbox
UC San Diego | via Coursera
Algorithmic Toolbox
UC San Diego and HSE | via Coursera
Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Sequence Models
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Convolutional Neural Networks
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Structuring Machine Learning Projects
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Deep Learning Specialization (Six courses)
DeepLearning.AI | via Coursera
Statistical Learning
Stanford Online
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking
Stanford | via Coursera
Human Computer Interaction
UC San Diego | via Coursera