Hi everyone! I am Priyans Nishithkumar Desai, a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley. I am studying Computer Science with a minor in Data Science. I am passionate about software engineering and algorithms. Recently, having worked at Scanta Inc, I got a lot more interested at the intersection of Machine Learning and Computer Security. I am not just extremely keen to explore these fields as individual entities, but also deep dive into what their intersection has to offer.
June 2021 - Present
Working in the Fixed Income, Credit & Commodities Group under the Foreign Exchange (FX) team.
May 2020 - August 2021
Scanta is a company looking into building software to protect Machine Learning systems. I have been building an entity recognition engine for extracting relevant entities from text along with building a deviation engine which helps point out the changing nature of certain entities. In addition, I have been involved in building a text extraction tool out of scanned PDF files and images and integrate the entity extraction service with that. Moreover, my task also has been with the DevOps team for building an infrastructure for chatbot conversations based on the Kafka data streaming API. I will also be working on the Outlier Detection infrastructure.
May 2019 - August 2019
Doctor Insta is telemedicine company, providing online consultations to patients. I was involved with building and upgrading an existing business portal, optimizing its queries, upgrading the UI, rearranging the services, making queries faster and reducing server resources. At the end, I was able to reduce use of server resources by about 70% and optimize loading speed by about 30%. I was also part of completing other feature requests for the company's internal portals. Moreover, I also built an automated testing infrastructure for various portals, for mainly testing correct data and UI using Selenium webdrivers.
July 2020 - December 2020
I will be starting to work on a research project started by Rohan Bavishi and Professor Kaushik Sen (UC Berkeley EECS Department) in the field of Programming Systems, where the project is called AutoPandas, which is based on building AutoML tools.
January 2020 - Present
I am working to assist students in lab for an introductory EECS course, called 16B titled Designing Information Devices and Systems II, wherein building a voice-controlled Robotic car is the fundamental portion of the lab. I have also been involved in handling other logistics related to the lab such as providing technical support as the labs are moved online due to COVID-19. Currently, assisting students in completing these lab requirements virtually.
August 2019 - May 2020
I was responsible for building a website for the Human Contexts & Ethics team for the division of Data Science at UC Berkeley.
August 2019 - December 2019
I worked on building a sentiment analyzer for predicting employee sentiments in a particular company and allowing them to improve their work culture by this service.
Built a min-version of Git version control system in Java. Implemented almost all features like add, commit, push, fetch, pull, merge etc.
Source CodeDeveloped a working software prototype of the 20th century German Enigma Encryption Machine from scratch in Java, as an application of Object Oriented Programming concepts.
Source CodeDeveloped a Nordic game, similar to checkers in Java along with an advanced GUI. This game also involved building an automated player (AI) through the technique of Alpha-beta pruning.
Source CodeDeveloped an online-course finder for Computer Science upper division courses at Berkeley based on interests, previous classes taken and helping them arrange into a schedule.
Source CodeDeveloped a task scheduler, specifically designed for Berkeley students in React
Source CodeDeveloped a communication system using the Ruby on Rails framework for UC Berkeley clubs and student organizations.
Source CodeA Python script which obtains work experiences, skills etc about a Person using a profile link obtained from everyone who has commented on a particular post
Source CodePredicted increase in deaths per county and per state using COVID-19 data in addition to classifying various countries into different degrees of transmission level.
Source CodeBuilt an online lecture speed tracker for a Berkeley course using Flask and Firebase. Developed both a student facing and instructor facing tool.
Source CodeA service created using YouTube API which updates every 10 seconds with new updated videos for a certain topic.
Source CodeDeveloped programming samples of concepts of theoretical Computer Science concepts taught in Berkeley course CS 70 - Discrete Mathematics & Probability
Source CodeBuilt a voice controlled car from scratch using SVD and PCA for voice classification, eigenvalue placement for implementing control in the car as well as using System ID for estimating a linear model for the car.
Source CodePriyans
Hi everyone! I am always looking forward to talk to people about anything and everything. I am involved in many activities relating to Computer Science Education at Berkeley. In addition, I will be beginning research in Machine Learning and Programming Systems in Fall 2020 with EECS Prof. Koushik Sen and an EECS Department graduate student Rohan Bavishi. I have also co-founded certain initiatives such as Bear Advising for creating a seamless platform between upperclassmen and freshmen students to clear their doubts as well as introducing the popular US CS curriculum BJC (Beauty & Joy of Computing) to Indian High Schools, by partnering with Berkeley Professor Dan Garcia.
With these, I love building software that helps students and others in the community. My perspective on Computer Science has always been that it is an exercise of creativity to solve the most complex problems.
Feel free to reach out to me about anything! I am always happy to help.
Cheers !
Drop me line at priyansdesai@berkeley.edu or call me at +91 9999 333 582