Nilan is available for hire

Nilan Saha

Verified Expert in Engineering

NLP and Machine Learning Developer

Location

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Toptal Member Since

February 17, 2022

Nilan is a natural language processing and machine learning expert with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's degree in data science specializing in computational linguistics. Nilan has vast experience building large-scale recommendation systems, personalization technology, and NLP algorithms. A Kaggle expert, he has well-cited publications in this domain.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)Machine Learning Python Software Deep Learning Go Flask GraphQL Apache Kafka Databases MacOS Zoom Visual Studio Code (VS Code)PyTorch Elasticsearch Computational Linguistics SpaCy ELMo NLTK

Portfolio

AAQUA

Scikit-learn, Python, Go, Elasticsearch, Amazon DynamoDB, Neo4j...

Packt Publishing

Technical Writing, GPT, Natural Language Processing (NLP)...

Knowt

Python, SpaCy, PyTorch, Deep Learning

Experience

Software Development - 7 years Python - 7 years Natural Language Processing (NLP) - 5 years GPT - 5 years Machine Learning - 5 years Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) - 5 years SpaCy - 5 years Deep Learning - 5 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

MacOS, Slack, Zoom, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Jupyter Notebook

The most amazing...

...thing I've ever built is Convex, an NLP library for part-of-speech (POS) tagging using character and word-level embedding neural nets.

Work Experience

Machine Learning Engineer

2020 - PRESENT

AAQUA

Built and deployed multiple personalization ML pipelines to power the main user feed for the app. The pipelines were built using Python, Kafka, AWS S3, scikit-learn, and NLTK and deployed to AWS.
Designed, architected, and built an end-to-end search solution using Python and Elasticsearch. The analytics pipeline that drives data-driven decisions and better search results' relevance ranking was built using Kafka, Amazon Pinpoint, and AWS S3.
Designed, architected, and built an end-to-end autocomplete solution using Python and Elasticsearch. The analytics pipeline that drives data-driven decisions and relevance ranking of search results was built using Kafka, Amazon Pinpoint, and AWS S3.

Technologies: Scikit-learn, Python, Go, Elasticsearch, Amazon DynamoDB, Neo4j, GPT, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)

Technical Reviewer

2020 - 2020

Packt Publishing

Collaborated with the team to test out all code samples and make sure it was easy for users to replicate the projects from the book. The code consisted of neural networks built in PyTorch and various other pre-processing utilities in NLTK.
Worked with the editing team to review all the book chapters and make necessary corrections, technical and otherwise.
Suggested various improvements in terms of the book content.

Technologies: Technical Writing, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), GPT, Natural Language Processing (NLP), PyTorch

Machine Learning Engineer

2020 - 2020

Knowt

Developed a deep neural net with multiple heads using ELMo embeddings to identify phrases that could be used to generate quizzes and achieve other downstream tasks. The model was built using Python, PyTorch, and Flair and deployed to AWS.
Developed a pipeline using spaCy and Python to extract triplets from textual data, build relations using them, and represent it in the form of a knowledge graph.
Led initiatives to build a dataset to train models based on implicit user feedback.

Technologies: Python, SpaCy, PyTorch, Deep Learning

Data Scientist

2018 - 2018

Cookt

Developed a heuristic algorithm using named-entity recognition (NER), spaCy, and the natural language toolkit (NLTK) to identify cooking ingredients from recipe instruction data.
Created an algorithm to use identified ingredients to generate optimal cooking instructions to reduce friction for end-users.
Bundled the model into an API and worked with the in-house tech team to integrate it into the entire stack.

Technologies: Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), SpaCy, Python, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Experience

Convex

https://github.com/nilansaha/convex

Convex is a lightweight NLP library that supports POS tagging using deep learning models coded in PyTorch. It uses both custom character-level and word-level embeddings to power the neural net and provide superior performance.

Multi-label Classifier for Toxic Comments

I built this multi-label classification model using the BERT from the Hugging Face transformers library, PyTorch, and binary cross entropy loss classification for classifying toxic comments and achieved an F1-score of 90.5%.

Categorical Embedding Encoder

https://github.com/nilansaha/CategoricalEmbeddingEncoder

I developed a framework using Python and Keras. It can be used to train and represent categorical variables using vector embeddings for tabular datasets, which improves classical machine learning models.

Skills

Languages

Python, Go, GraphQL

Libraries/APIs

SpaCy, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), Keras

Other

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Software, Software Development, Computer Science, Deep Learning, Data Structures, Technical Writing, Computational Linguistics

Frameworks

Flask

Paradigms

Data Science

Platforms

Software Design Patterns, Apache Kafka, MacOS, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Jupyter Notebook, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Tools

Slack, Zoom

Storage

Databases, Elasticsearch, Amazon DynamoDB, Neo4j

Education

2019 - 2020

Master's Degree in Data Science and Computational Linguistics

University of British Columbia - Vancouver, Canada

2015 - 2019

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

Institute of Engineering and Management - Kolkata, India

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