Me in 10 seconds

I am a Machine Learning consultant with a focus on NLP (including search & speech) & Vision systems for 0 to 1 startups.

I’ve worked in Machine Learning for almost ~5 years, and have written a book on Natural Language Processing. Dr. Andrew Ng recommends my work to his CS230 students at Stanford. My blogs have been appreciated by Noble Laureate Dr. Paul Romer.

I live in Bengaluru, but grew up in Surat, Gujarat.

NLP in Python: Quickstart Guide

Github

This is a book for programmers to add NLP to their skillset. Written with code examples and programmer-first mindset. It has sold 1k+ copies mostly in US and UK.

Papers and Open Source Contributions

1. Hinglish: github, paper focussed on code-mixed languages was published in ACL 2019.

2. Awesome Project Ideas - Curated list of machine learning (mostly deep learning) project ideas with datasets. These ideas range from Vision, Text, Forecasting to Recommender Systems

3. Awesome NLP Curated list of Natural Language Processing Resources. I’ve been the Primary Maintainer for Awesome-NLP

   • Recommended by Dr. Andrew Ng’s (Stanford) CS 230
   • Featured in Github’s Official Machine Learning Collection since 2016 and

4. State of the Art Language Modeling in Hindi + new datasets, check the code here at hindi2vec

5. Comparative Study of Preprocessing and Classification Methods in Character Recognition of Natural Scene Images. In: Machine Intelligence and Signal Processing. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 390. Springer, New Delhi (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-2625-3_11

Talks

1. Fifth Elephant MLOps Conf 2021: Slides
2. PyCon India 2019: Slides and Youtube
3. inMobi Tech Talks: A Nightmare on the LM Street; Slides
4. Wingify DevFest: NLP for Indian Languages; Slides, Youtube
5. PyData Bengaluru Inaugral Talk: Quiz Generation with spaCy; Youtube

Web Mentions - My 5 minutes of Internet fame

Top 1% Podium finish at Microsoft AI Challenge 2018

• Search and Informational Retrieval Ranking Challenge hosted by Bing AI Team (2019)

• Won the Kaggle Kernel Prize (2019)

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to NLP in spaCy won the first ever NLP themed Kaggle Kernel award. I won a free licensed copy of Prodi.gy worth $390 with it, and $500 in cash.

• Exploratory Programming Notes found helpful by Nobel Laureate (2018)

  • Tips, Tricks, Best Practices for working with Jupyter Notebook’s was appreciated by Economics Nobel Laureate 2018 Dr. Paul Romer:

    Nirant, this looks very helpful.
    
    Re your recommendation to use f-strings, do you know a good place to learn about them for someone new to Python?
    
    Everything I’ve found seems to be for someone making the transition from older ways that a newbie doesn’t need to learn.

    — Paul Romer (@paulmromer) April 15, 2018

Hackathons and Press

1. FactorDaily’s piece on The great rush to data sciences in India ends with a direct quote from me.

   • FactorDaily is a new age news company which sits at the intersection of technology with life, culture and society in India.

2. First Runner’s Up at the Future Group Datathon (March 2019)

   • Two stage Machine Learning hackathon called Tathastu, working on recommendation systems and item information extraction problems

3. Opened AI Hackathon (2019)

   • Awesome NCERT won the Best use of IBM Watson API; blog
   • Idea: Find recent+relevant news articles against any NCERT chapter in sciences and social studies