Debarghya Das
Debarghya Das
Debarghya (Deedy) Das is a Software engineer at Google working on knowledge graph, query understanding and personalization for Search.
He maintains a list of the stuff he enjoys reading, watching, or learning from called where the knowledge is and occassionally writes on his blog, Writes.
Career
Since January 2016 he has been a Software engineer responsible for Core Search Quality at Google in New York, where he dealt with Machine learning and Infrastructure on Search Knowledge Engine Triggering and Quality.
Between January 2015 and January 2016 he was a Software engineer at Facebook in New York, where he dealt with Places Search ranking and Data and Machine learning.
From January 2014 to January 2015 he was a Researcher at Cornell University Robot Learning Laboratory in Ithaca, NY, where he was working with PHD student Ashesh Jain under Professor Ashutosh Saxena, and p ublished a paper "Planning Trajectories for Humans via Object Affordances".
From June 2014 to August 201 he was a Software engineering Intern at Coursera in Mountain View, California. There, he was a KPCB Engineering Fellow 2014 and a Full-stack developer.
Between June 2014 and August 2014 he was chosen as one of 52 (out of 2500 applying) Engineering Fellows at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Mountain View, California.
From March 2012 to March 2014 he was a Head Undergraduate Researcher at Cornell Phonetics Laboratory in Ithaca, New York, where he d eveloped the first ever breakthrough tongue-controlled game to aid in Linguistics research, and published "Real-Time Articulatory Biofeedback with Electromagnetic articulography".
Between May 2013 and August 2013 he was a Software engineering Intern at Google in Mountain View, California, where he was active in YouTube Captions team. There, he implemented new system to add and edit Automatic speech recognition captions.
From January 2013 to May 2013 he was an OpenSource Contributor at Phabricator in Ithaca, New York, where he l aunched Memegen.
Education
Between 2011 and 2014 he studied Computer science at the Cornell University and received a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) and a Master of Engineering (M.Eng). There, he was active at the Cornell Violet Nano-satellite Project Team, Association for Computer Science Undergraduates, Cornell Graphics Department Research, Cornell Phonetics Lab Research, Cornell Robot Learning Laboratory and Tau Beta Pi Honor Society.
From 2003 to 2011 he studied at La Martiniere for Boys, Kolkata.
Awards
Other achievements
Deedy's TED talk on "Hacking into the Indian education system"
In June 2013, he publishedHacking into the Indian Education Systemabout some code he wrote to expose glaring anomalies in one of India's premier education boards. It amassed a lot of media coverage.
He's been mining, analyzing and working with media organizations for 5 years now since 2013 to spread the word about these severe grading issues affecting over a million Indian high school students annually culminating in a Delhi High Court order to stop it in May 2017. It featured on headlines multiple times.
In August 2013, he wrote a Quora answer about the perks of interning at Google, following the release of the movie The Internship (2013) about the same, which featured on Business Insider.
Yet another Quora answer from July 2013 about college advice students are not likely to ever hear was featured on Business Insider.
In April 2014, he open-sourced a XeLaTeX resume template that went viral and has over 1200 stars and 350 forks on the GitHub repo after trending on Reddit and HackerNews. It features on many popular online TeXing platforms and archives. It is one of the top 10 most popular Latex templates on Overleaf, with over 85,000 views. It initially peaked at number 5 on HackerNews. The Open-Source community has made a Resume Generator based on it that peaked at number 2 on HN and a version in Jade.
In August 2014, he spoke at TEDx Bangalore to an audience of 1600 about some major issues plaguing Indian education and how online education can be and is being an effective solution.
He has several talks at some of India's best engineering colleges.
Nit Trichy in August 2014
NIT Durgapur for their fest, Mukti, in January 2015
BITS Pilani-Goa for their fest, Quark, in February 2015
A joint talk at BITS Pilani-Goa and BITS Pilani Hyderabad on January 2017 about software, technology, his projects and his past experiences.
He was on Al Jazeera live on February 2017 to talk about United States H-1B visa (temporary worker visa) policy along with Bruce Morrison, former Congressman and the primary drafter of the H-1B bill of 1990, and several others.
His blog posts onWrites, including
My Transformation: How I lost 66 pounds in 8 months. [26]
Why are Adults so busy? [27]
The Grad School Admissions Statistics We Never Had [28]
Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News [29]
have been featured on Reddit, Hacker News, and been widely retweeted.
Interesting facts
He enjoys critically reasoning and debating controversial topics.
Topics that particularly interest him are India, education, politics, technology, and economics.
His Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is INTP [Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving]. The favorite people he supposedly shares his personality type with are Albert Einstein, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
He writes on Quora whenever he feels like he have something new to add, usually about India, life, code and education. He also writes a blog.
He enjoys hiking, cricket, eating and reading about tech.
He's compiling a list of his favorite books, videos, articles and news sources on the internet in a list called "where the knowledge is".
He loves Hindi music and has a large Spotify playlist going, cleverly marketed as the Best Hindi Playlist on Spotify. He also likes Keane and Michael Jackson and has recently gotten into music from different countries. When working, he listens to ambient storm sounds on Noisli.
He once lived off coffee, beer, and 5-hour energy shots, often in that order.
Now it's mostly honey green tea and cheap wine.