Hi there!
I like doing math, writing and building useful things.
Once upon a time I co-founded a small venture capital firm called Alter Global, which invests in emerging tech and markets. Next, I worked on interesting data science and AI projects, while incubating new tech products with Rayn. One of those tech products spun into ekai.ai — an AI-driven data engineering automation tool — where I was cofounder and COO.
These days, I help companies analyze their sales and customer conversations using AI to extract product insight.
I also write essays and short stories.
Data Science and AI
I do classical statistics on text. Less flippantly, I’m interested in using machine learnings techniques and LLMs for classification, annotation and discovering relationships in text.
Project 1: Can auto-encoders be used to explore relationships between theme in text and outcome variables? I use auto-encoders to discover associations between aspects of sales conversations and outcomes such as whether the deal was won or lost.
Project 2: Can I teach a machine to infer the gender of nouns in a language? Languages, such as German, Hindi and Urdu (among others), often absorb nouns from other languages, such as English. How do they assign a gender to a “foreign” word? Can a machine replicate that human intuition? Web app here.
Project 3: Is there predictive power in token level log-probabilities that can be used to calibrate LLMs for classification? In other words, can model log-probabilities help human reviewers figure out which classifications to review? My research suggests that is the case. Paper in the works with Brown University.
Project 4: Can LLMs optimize their own prompts? I use an “actor-critic” algorithm — where one agent prepares and runs a prompt, and another provides feedback — to allow the machine to refine its own prompts to categorize blocks of text into one of three categories.
Essays and Stories
My essays on technology and society are contained in my Substack
My stories explore the intersection of technology, society, and power and privilege. They are set in the near future, and center around a young professional trying to navigate his own role at that intersection.
This is a space for me to share some of my creations, whether they be data-related or short fiction, or just random thoughts.
Links to Select Essays
AI and the reorganization of work within jobs
The case for investing in Pakistan — from my VC in emerging markets days
Take a look around, and feel free to get in touch.