About

I am Pranav Jangir, currently working at PlusAI in the Runtime/Robotics team. This is my attempt at creating a nice looking website. This was my old website. The inspiration for this website came from a friend-of-friend's website.

What am I busy with nowadays?

Updating soon...

History

MS in Computer Science @ NYU Courant

I was a Computer Science MS student at NYU Courant. I focused on designing social welfare maximising algorithms for seminal problems in Game Theory; specifically in the burgeoning field of learning augmented algorithms, that attempt to move away from the pessimistic worst case guarentees for algorithms. I was also doing some research on theory ML and graph algorithms at NYU.

I am also fascinated by the use of machine learning in healthcare. I worked on a research paper that focuses on a specific technique called fast subset scan, which is used to identify affected regions in spatio-temporal datasets when prior information is available. The main objective is to efficiently scan through all the subsets of the data based on the given prior information. This prior information can take various forms. For example, let's consider a scenario where we already know that the regions affected by a disease are spatially connected and loosely resemble a circle.
In practice, this prior information is often not well-organized, and a straightforward search method would be prohibitively slow due to the exponential number of subsets. Additionally, storing the prior information in memory is not feasible.

I am also continuing my research on developing privacy preserving algorithms and we submitted a paper recently which should be out soon (hopefully)!

Software Engineer @ Google Ads Quality

Prior to joining NYU Courant, I worked at Google in the Ads Quality team where my team focused on improving the quality of ads for low resource languages like Hindi, Polish, Swedish etc. that constituted of non-trivial percentage of query traffic but having limited training data. I collaborated with the Google Research team to finetune query translation models designed specifically to increase ad revenue, and worked on the ad-serving infrastructure as well.

Cryptography @ IISc

I spent some amazing time as a Research intern at IISc, Bangalore under Prof. Arpita Patra in their Cryptography and Information Security Lab.
We worked on developing fast and secure privacy preserving algorithms for various problems of interest such as the Heavy Hitters problem. We also explored some oblivious RAM algorithms and some areas in theoretical cryptography like order preserving encryption.

Intern @ Tower Research Capital

I interned in the Post Trade Division. Our team's project was to validate financial data based on past transactions.

Brokers provided financial data in pdf format. Extracing information from the pdf files required writing a separate parser for every format that was done by contractors and took about a week.

I built a semi supervised machine learning pipeline that parsed any new pdf file with minimum human supervision. The effective time to parse a file reduced from a week to about a day.

Math Undergrad @ IIT Guwahati

My course involed more applied math than pure math. My courses included Probability (Basic and Advanced), Real Analysis (Basic and Advanced), Financial Engineering, Stocastic calculus, Combinatorics, Optimization and some other usual CS courses.

I spent most of my undergrad doing the thing I love the most, solving puzzles (more specifically algorithmic puzzles, but all types of puzzles are welcome). I took part in Topcoder, Codeforces and Atcoder contests.

I was inspired by the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity and in a bout of over-confidence decided that I should do my Bachelor's thesis at the interesection of Number Theory and Combinatorics. I finally wrote my thesis on Partition Functions.