About Me

I am a Research Scientist in the Core Data Science team at Meta Research. My research work spans data mining, applied machine learning, and computational social science domains, with a focus on recommender systems and graph mining.

Prior to joining Meta, I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During my PhD, I worked on robust user behavior modeling in large-scale social networking and online interaction platforms. My PhD thesis research includes designing robust graph neural networks and neural collaborative filtering models for graph representation learning, personalized recommendation, and social interaction modeling applications.

I was fortunate to have been advised by Prof. Hari Sundaram in the Crowd Dynamics Lab, and have actively collaborated with Prof. Jiawei Han. I have worked as a research intern in the Computational Social Science team at Snap Research (Summer 2020), Recommendations and Risk Modeling teams at Visa Research (Summers 2019, 2018), and Adobe Research (Summer 2014).

I received my Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2016. I worked with Prof. Sayan Ranu and Prof. Karthik Raman on developing a scalable graph mining algorithm for automated chemical reaction and pathway prediction. Our work has been featured in the Hindu newspaper.

I grew up almost entirely in Chennai except for the first few years of my childhood that I spent in the US. I'm a big sports buff, can spend hours watching any sport, be it Cricket, Tennis (a huge Federer fan!), Basketball, Football, F1 and more, while I play Tennis and Table Tennis. I also play the keyboard in the Carnatic genre and have given a couple of concerts in the past. This has given me a deep interest in Carnatic music that I hope to pursue more seriously in the future. I like reading books, some of my favorite authors being Dan Brown, John Grisham, Michael Connelly to name a few. I enjoy the adrenaline rush from hiking, biking, and outdoor sports.