Archit Sakhadeo

University of Alberta

Title: Optimizing and automating a water treatment plant using RL (article)

Position: Graduate Research Assistant

Mentors:

Prof. Adam White

&

Prof. Martha White




Ongoing efforts to deploy an online RL agent to control the water treatment process by testing the solutions first on a physical model of the plant. Helped design and conduct experiments by implementing several RL agents and simulated environments that reflect the features of the water treatment process. Helped design a methodology for offline hyperparameter tuning for the deployment of online RL agents through the use of logs of historical data from real-world applications. Demonstrated the efficacy of this approach through empirical studies.

Title: Teaching Experience

Position: Graduate Teaching Assistant

Courses:
1) Empirical Reinforcement Learning (graduate course),
2) Machine Learning (undergraduate course),
3) Foundations of Computation (undergraduate course)

Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Title: A Common Sense Knowledge Base Framework

Position: Research Fellow

Mentors:

Dr. Simon Razniewski

&

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum




Contributed to the efforts in building a complete framework for constructing a commonsense knowledge base from several sources on the internet. Constructed a high-quality knowledge base, of 2.26 million salient properties for 80000 concepts, which is publicly available as a research resource. Improved recall by 83% and quality (measured through a human survey) over state-of-the-art knowledge bases.

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Title: Exploring Linguistic Semantic Interface with Syntactic Processing using Brain activity

Position: Research Intern

Collaborator:

Sophie Arana, PhD student




By conducting MEG experiments on participants reading a stimuli text corpus, the existence of a soft correlation between the P600 event related potential and the absolute difference of semantic associations was proven in order to study how the brain disambiguates prepositional phrase attachments. Corpus-derived co-occurrence frequencies of stimuli words were used as a measure of semantic associations.

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Title: Automatic Extractive Text Summarizer

Position: Research Intern

Mentor:

Prof. Nisheeth Srivastava




Developed an extractive text summarizer. Designed a hybrid approach of using keyword frequencies (statistical approach) with automatically generated entity relationships (semantic approach) to combine the strengths and ameliorate the weaknesses of both approaches, resulting in better summaries. Achieved 16.44% increase in recall and 2.17% increase in F-score than the next best tested technique. A survey on 94 participants also suggested that our method's summaries were more human-like than the tested methods' summaries.

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR)

Title: GMRT Archival Utility for Data Analysis

Position: Engineering Intern

Mentors:

Prof. Yogesh Wadadekar

&

Prof. C H Ishwara Chandra

Collaborators:

Rathin Desai

,

Shubhankar Deshpande

,

Shadab Shaikh




Along with a team, designed a data processing pipeline to run on a high performance compute cluster to synthesize images from radio interferometric data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT). It helped to reduce the synthesis time to under a week from 2+ years. It has enabled newer cosmological insights and the creation of one of the world's largest catalogues for radio astronomy images. Our work was presented at the 30th General Assembly of The International Astronomical Union in Vienna, the 36th Annual Meeting of The Astronomical Society of India, and is accepted at ADASS 2018.

TEDxPICT

Position: Co-Founder and Curator

Links:

Event page

,

Talks




TEDxPICT was founded with the intention of promoting social good, thoughtfulness, and discussion. Started as an informal college-level discussion group, it is now an annual city-level event that hosts talks by people who transformed extraordinary ideas into reality. A global platform is provided to the local community as these talks go online. As a curator, my job entailed ideating on the theme and working alongside credited speakers in developing the content of their talk.