Employee Spotlight: Anurag Mishra, Software Engineer — Machine Learning
Meet Anurag — The Bahubali of Indix. (Yep!!! He played the lead character of Bahubali in a fun skit). Anurag is a high energy individual who joined us after his graduation from Army Institute of Technology, Pune. We love having him on the team, and sat down to learn more about him and his work.
What is your role at Indix?
I am a Software Engineer — ML at Indix. My role varies from building ML models that solves prediction problems to analyzing the huge corpus of product data that Indix has gathered over the years and find out ways to improve the coverage and quality. Currently, I am working with the Attributes team that focuses on extracting and standardizing the attributes found anywhere on a product page. I focus specifically on the attribute standardization part to enrich our product catalog.
What did you do before Indix?
It’s my first full time job at Indix after graduating from Army Institute of Technology, Pune. During my graduation, I spent most of my time building interesting stuff (http://anuragmishracse.github.io) and was involved in research with CARES at the University of Auckland, NZ and at IIT, Varanasi. I also interned at Edelweiss, Mumbai in the data science team that gave me a balanced experience and opinion about academia and industry.
Why did you join Indix?
In 2015, after my second year at university, I did an internship at Indix. I was in Chennai for a month and half. The time spent here turned out to be a valuable part of my undergrad. I was exposed to the core product, working with the best engineers on important projects. This experience, along with the people I met here helped me make a decision to join Indix, scraping off other options.
What have you learned working for a startup?
In my limited experience, I have learnt that startups are fast-paced. Limited people, big objectives, dynamic goals/ targets help an individual work in multiple domains and learn things quickly. One has to own the work end to end with utmost responsibility. With all the ups and downs, as part of the job, it gives immense sense of satisfaction and happiness the moment we build something useful and impactful.
What technologies or trends get you most excited?
I am enthusiastic about Machine Learning and AI in general. There are various ideas in which one can make a program understand/ use historical information to deduce useful knowledge, be it simple algorithms or Deep Learning. All these require large datasets to build useful models. However, humans tend to learn things quickly with just one/ two examples. Making a machine understand/ learn concepts with one or two examples(also called Idea Learning) is something that excites me.
What do you do for fun?
I have a bunch of cool people as colleagues with whom I spend time, go for a movie or just a long drive. I get several avenues for having fun in our office, playing a game of TT everyday is one of them. On some days, I go out and explore the adventure sports that Chennai offers; surfing and paramotoring rate high on my list.
What is your favorite technology product?
For me ‘Google Maps’ is a product that I appreciate.
From the engineering point — it uses all major sorts of algorithm — data structures, search, sort, optimization techniques etc.
In the satellite view, creating a 3D map of the locations with varying elevation levels is a complex problem and I like the way Google is solving it.
From the users end — The impact that Maps is having on the lives of common people is worth documenting. It has helped me several times and so it does to other people.
As a platform — Apps that are built on top of these platforms are super useful too — Ola, Uber, Housing, Oyorooms and the likes.
How would your friends describe you?
My friends would describe me as a light hearted person who is serious enough to understand his responsibilities and work upon them; who is helpful and understands his limitations; who thinks about the pros and cons of any decision and takes a call; who tries to think of simple solutions to problems before getting into complex solutions; who is a doer.
Originally published at Indix.
