Experience & Projects

professional experience

GRADUATE ASSISTANT, COMPUTER NETWORKING (SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, NY, USA)

I’m currently a Faculty Assistant for 2 computer networking courses (IST 233 and BPS 233). My responsibilities include preparing new labs and updating old ones to teach over 150 students basic networking tools such as Xirrus and NetSpot to survey networks, Wireshark to analyze the flow of packets in a network, MS Visio to design networks, and Packet Tracer to simulate the designed networks. The labs also teach students to setup and work with routers, access points, switches, and end devices. Additionally, I conduct the labs, prepare and grade quizzes and assignments.

Being a Faculty Assistant for these courses have helped me gain a lot of understanding of how organizations and individuals can use various tools and techniques to setup networking technologies and more importantly troubleshoot any problems that might occur in a network.

CO-FOUNDER, NEWS BY THE HOUR

News By The Hour is a news website that I developed with my brother to aggregate news from RSS feeds and display them on our website and then share them with over 190,000 social media followers. The website is fully automated and is developed using PHP, SQL, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

Scripts written in PHP run hourly to collect news articles published in the previous hour from chosen RSS feeds, clean the XML data to be compatible with the custom SQL database, display them on the site, shorten the link to the article using bit.ly’s API, and then finally tweet the articles with the shortened link.

The website currently displays and shares news about Microsoft, Apple, Cyber Security, and any news about the next World War.

BUSINESS ANALYST INTERN, ODESSA TECHNOLOGIES (BANGALORE, INDIA)

As a Business Analyst, my job was to completely understand the functionality and limits of Odessa’s product called LeaseWave. I started with a small module in the software called Purchase Orders for which I was required to design and wireframe the UI. I was quickly moved onto bigger modules that allowed users to manage Progress Loans, Lease Syndications, and Lease Buy Backs.

Working at Odessa helped me leverage my technical, design, and financial skills. I used to work with client requirements to identify gaps in the current software, then design the UI and functionality for updating old modules and creating new ones. By making use of my finance expertise, I was able to design how the software should handle and display various calculations. As part of my responsibilities, I also held meetings with the development team to explain what the client expected and how the software should function.

Once the development was completed, I participated in the testing phase by creating test scenarios and performing regression testing to make sure every requirement was met without breaking any other functionality of the software. I was also tasked with documenting the features of modules I helped build in functional documents for Odessa employees to use in future projects and in product handouts for users.

FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY INTERN, ALLCARGO LOGISTICS (MUMBAI, INDIA)

At AllCargo Logistics, I was hired as an Information Technology intern but after completing my first deliverable, I was transitioned into a Financial Technology role where I would work with the CFO and help him decide what technological investments would benefit the organization’s employees. My first deliverable was setting up an online support ticketing system for the employees, using open source software I was able to setup one fairly quickly and deliver it to the IT staff for thorough testing before being deployed on the intranet.

One of the objectives that the CFO had in mind was to setup Wi-Fi across the organization and I was tasked with figuring out a way to do that without any additional increase in costs to the company. I was successfully able to strategize a way to do so to provide the employees a much better experience while in office.

As part of upgrading to new technologies and with minimal costs, I performed a thorough cost-benefit and breakeven analysis to identify if moving from on-premises servers to cloud would be feasible as it provided much better data redundancy and contingency planning.

Having shown great results in my tasks, I was then assigned to evaluate fintech start-ups using various valuation techniques and software feasibility to identify investment opportunities.

TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANT, PRISM GAS DETECTION SYSTEMS (MUMBAI, INDIA)

As a technology consultant I was tasked with setting up the internal network and computers of the company. The internal network setup consisted of setting up a router, a switch, and multiple access points. I also configured Windows, Mac and Linux machines to easily share data in the office and also allow employees to connect to their workstations remotely using RDP.

research experience

BLOCKCHAIN RESEARCHER, NEXIS TECHNOLOGY LAB (SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, NY, USA)

An ongoing research project to learn and explore blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Ripple, Quorum, Hyperledger fabric, Corda, and Oracle’s Autonomous Cloud Service. My colleagues and I are trying to use Corda to develop a minimum viable product focused on reducing and then mitigating supply and payment risk that arises when multiple contractors are involved in the supply chain and multiple suppliers are in place to get the goods from source to destination.

IMPACT OF DEMONETIZATION ON MFIs IN INDIA (NMIMS UNIVERSITY, MUMBAI, INDIA)

Abstract - The demonetization directive of November 8, 2016 by the Modi government resulted in 86 percent of currency notes becoming an illegal tender overnight. Microfinance Institutions (MFI’s) are non-banking financial institutions involved in service of granting micro-loans which are repaid over short intervals of time. The 55,000 crore industry will be hugely impacted as almost all transactions are carried out in cash. 66.84% of India’s population lies in the rural areas and have an access to MFIs, hence this decision would impact a large portion of the population in terms of the liquid cash they possess and the circulation of these notes. Demonetization has had a major shift in the mind-set of the average Indian who has reprioritized his financial planning. The paper aims at studying the financial impact that demonetization has had on the customers of these MFI’s and reviewing how this would have an effect on loan recoveries. Our study has portrayed the change in the rural Indian’s life who borrows money on a regular basis from the MFIs, before and after the demonetization decision. We shall study the impact on customer savings, expenditure and loan repayment.

You can find the complete paper - here.

VOLunteer Experience

FINANCIAL ANALYST, iCONSULT (SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, NY, USA)

My colleagues and I are working with a non-profit organization called Collegiate Directions, Inc. that helps put students in the United States through high school and college. CDI currently uses multiple different applications and Excel to track donor and student data. This is quite cumbersome since different applications don’t talk to each other coherently. So, after meeting with the client, we understood they need a CRM system to easily execute all different tasks and integrate their different business units. Currently, we are comparing multiple CRM systems available in the market to find which would suit CDI’s needs the best. As a Financial Analyst my role is to help CDI find the perfect CRM in order to manage data of their donors and be able to efficiently understand the financial feature set offered by the chosen CRM.

DIGITAL WEB ANALYST, PROJECT NANDGHAR, VEDANTA RESOURCES (MUMBAI, INDIA)

In 2016, my friends and I decided to take part in the Google Online Marketing Challenge and found Vedanta Resources were starting a new NGO called Project Nandgar focused on improving the life of children and women in rural India. As part of the challenge we were supposed to use Google Adwords and SEO to market Project Nandghar to attract volunteers and create traction around it. Unfortunately, Google cancelled the competition that year but we still continued working with Vedanta Resources on the project. I was tasked with designing the website to achieve great SEO in order to increase the website’s search engine ranking. Apart from this, I learnt the Google Adwords platform in depth to correctly use keywords based on different parameters. The Project was later formally launched by the Prime Minister of India - Narendra Modi.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL CHALLENGE

MLB Challenge is an annual business strategy hackathon held at Syracuse University. My team and I took part in 2018 where the challenge was to develop the next innovative idea for MLB live broadcasting.

After the initial brainstorming we narrowed down on using AR to make the viewer experience extremely immersive and also decided to re-design the statistics section of the app using data visualization techniques to make it more appealing.

We developed the idea, the business strategy, and the prototype from scratch, overnight and were among the finalists of the challenge. Have a look at our - pitch and our - prototypes (one and two).