I’m Sai, and
I am a petroleum engineer and aspiring data scientist. I’m originally from Tirupati, India and now live in Houston, TX. I have a Master’s from The University of Texas at Austin in Petroleum Engineering and a Bachelor’s from The Ohio State University in Chemical Engineering. I worked as a Reservoir Engineer at Baker Hughes from 2017 to 2020. I’m currently working on a career transition to the data science and artificial intelligence fields of study and teaching myself various concepts and skills in statistical data analysis, machine learning and software engineering.
I’m very passionate about digital technology. I love that we live in an age where we have access to a whole world of information, entertainment and convenience at our fingertips. We have smart assistants built into our smartphones and connected to their counterparts in the various smart devices in our life, allowing us to have a customized and seamless experience on the daily. Moreover, I am grateful to companies like Google who have developed applications and algorithms to learn our interests and tastes to provide us instant access to the exact object of our search. This customization and convenience is made possible through clever machine learning algorithms and associated advanced applications. I bring up all these examples to say that we live in an exciting era of possibilities.
This brings me to my main point, which is the reason I started this blog. Despite the progress we’ve made as a society in our digital journey, we continue to dream and demand more from our digital companions and rightly so. I often find myself looking for ways to improve my own digital experience. For instance, I find reading PDFs on my smartphone inconvenient given the need to zoom into specific parts of the documents to actually be able to read. I found that there’s a solution, at least for a subset of academic articles published online. For those articles available through arXiv, an open-access archive of more than a million scholarly articles, a good samaritan has developed arXiv Vanity which renders arXiv articles into responsive webpages so that they are easy to view and read in a smartphone, tablet, computer etc. I happened to discover this service when I was trying to read a paper on latest machine learnings trends in academia and immediately felt grateful that someone had thought of a solution. In this spirit, I thought I’d do my part to help enhance our experience by sharing ideas and solutions that the reader hopefully finds useful or interesting.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out to me via my Twitter, LinkedIn or via email at therealsaientist@gmail.com.