Hi, I’m Shashank!
I am a Computer Science Master’s (M.S.) candidate from Northwestern University, graduating March ‘21 and actively looking for full-time roles in either of the domains (or intersection) of Databases, Backend Development, Cloud, Network or Data Science.
I’m part of Prof. Jennie Rogers’ Database systems research group in the capacity of a Graduate Research Assistant. I’ve contributed to the NSF-funded private data federation project: VaultDB, which would help securely query distributed, multi-party hospital data under CAPriCORN, and is being deployed as a pilot project onto 2 major hospitals in Chicago.
I am also concurrently collaborating with the Department of Sociology’s N3 lab on an active policy research study, analyzing the social factors responsible for misconducts by Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers over the past 23 years using R’s social network analysis.
Prior to coming to the States, I completed my B.E. in Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) with an HONORS degree from Rajiv Gandhi Technological Institute, India in 2019.
My primary research domain comprises of Database Systems and Data Science.
Having previously worked with large codebases through my prior projects, I’ve developed a thorough understanding of fairly advanced concepts in programming, data structures, and algorithms, with JAVA being my core programming language. I was part of a team that developed a quantitative trading platform for a student-startup, through which I gained an in-depth knowledge of backend developement and financial market paradigms. Besides that, I’ve developed and deployed scalable Distributed Systems, and have an extensive project roster encompassing web development, systems design, data science, networks and people analytics.
I have an ardent desire to work at the intersection of Cloud and Databases to push the boundaries of their individual existing systems. I aim to contribute to developing massively distributed cloud database systems which can span the limitations of physical storage and proximity.
Experience
Quantitative Data Analyst
Institute for Policy Research (N3 Lab)
Evanston, Illinois
Dec 2020 - Present
I am working on an active social policy research study at the Northwestern Neighborhood and Network (N3) Initiative where I modelled the co-evolution of the Chicago Police Department’s official assignment & attendance network data with 22 years’ worth of police misconduct data (Invisible Institute’s CPDP) to analyze the formation, evolution and cross-network dependence of officer ties. My primary role was to define and calibrate network boundaries after extensive cleaning and detailed exploratory analysis in GCP’s BigQuery engine. I also managed to identify the individual, organizational, and neighborhood factors responsible for burgeoning misconduct through police networks using the Goldfish library in R. I’m currently working on adding additional network dynamic effects, ones which aren’t included out-of-the-box but are critical to our further analysis, and contributing them to this open-source library in C++.
Mentor/PI: Prof. Andy Papachristos
Graduate Research Assistant
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois
Jan 2020 - Present
I am part of the Database systems research group at Northwestern, working towards creating operators for securely querying federated databases (provided by HealthLNK) for hospitals in Chicagoland, as part of a pilot project. My key responsibilities included:
1. Developing and Testing aggregate functionality in secure and plaintext settings.
2. Generating and deploying build pipleine for the ubuntu VMs in Docker with all necessary dependencies to run secure multi-party computation.
3. Query plan enumeration to incorporate operator reordering for the query optemizer using Apache Calcite’s algebra, among others.
Advisors: Prof. Jennie Rogers, Prof. Xiao Wang (Co-Advisor)
Backend Engineering Intern/Quantitative Developer
Practicum LLC
St. Louis, Missouri (Remote)
Jun 2020 - Aug 2020
I spent summer of 2020 working as a backend developer. I conceptualized a solid schema design with future scalability in mind, and engineered it through endpoints in Flask, using JSON and MySQL to work seemlessly with the Figma-designed front end.
The latter half comprised of realizing financial trading methodologies to Python code, where I led the translation of trading strategies like Statistical Arbitrage and Mean Reversion as a part-time quant developer. These were back-tested on 5 years of daily trade data from YahooFinance API resulting in gains of up to 5.76% over the naive approach.
By the end of this internship, my team and I were able to successfully create a quant trading platform for first-time investors to learn market strategies and apply them using pre-coded algorithms on S&P 500 stocks (paper trade) in real-time.
Education
Master’s of Science (M.S.)
Computer Science
Northwestern University, Evanston (IL)
Sep 2019 - Mar 2021 (expected)
GPA: 3.827/4.0
Relevant Coursework: Distributed Systems, Database Systems, Operating Systems, Intensive Program Design, Data Science, Social Network Analysis, Machine Learning Foundations, Statistical Language Modelling, Intelligent Information Systems
Labs: Database Systems and Security Research Lab, Northwestern Neighborhood and Network Initiative
Bachelor’s of Engineering (B.E. HONS)
Computer Science & Engineering
Rajiv Gandhi Proudyogiki Vishwavidyalaya, Bhopal (India)
Aug 2015 - Jun 2019
CGPA: 8.63/10.0
Relevant Coursework: Algorithms, Data Structures, Cloud Computing, Object Oriented Design, Software Development Life Cycle
Accolades:
* Finalist - Smart India Hackathon, 2019 (Software Edition)
* Winner - Wireless Robotics Competition, IIT - Kanpur (Zonal Round)