Hi! First of all, I’m honored that you feel this website is worth your time. I’ll go on and introduce myself, but feel free to (and I encourage you to!) introduce yourself over email at akashpalrecha@gmail.com.
TLDR: I really love tinkering with anything and everything to do with deep learning and computer vision, and like to spend the rest of my time composing mind bending and beautiful drum parts in my head, and play them on a kit whenever I get the chance. I’ve also recently started going for boxing classes and have been loving it so far.
Current interests / upcoming pursuits: high performance computing, reinforcement learning & compilers
July 2021 - Present: I’ve been building the entire machine learning framework for geospatial data (data, training, testing, deploying, etc. etc. the usual) at this really kick-ass space company called Pixxel that’s launching the world’s first constellation of hyperspectral satellites.
It was founded by my college seniors and I’ve been involved here on-and-off since my second year of college, so it’s really quite like home to me.
May 2021: I graduated with distinction from BITS Pilani with a Masters in Mathematics
Jan 2021 - Mar 2022: I worked as a helps-out-when-needed-Research-Assistant with my long time collaborator Siddhant Kharbanda (real life permanent RA) at Aalto University under Rohit Babbar. We worked on challenging extreme machine learning problems (classification with a million classes) where we smashed (by huge margins) previous state-of-the-art approaches by competing teams from Microsoft, Amazon and the like.
We’re even getting published in EMNLP this year (2022)
Kharbanda did most of the work, tbh
Aug 2020 - Mar 2021 | Nov 2021: I did my final year thesis at Harvard University’s Visual Computing Group under professor Hanspeter Pfister. In my time here, I’ve tried my hand on SoTA methods for image deblurring, super-resolution, and video instance segmentation.
Also, we got published in CVPR 2022!
Again, I contributed to what was majorly Kharbanda’s work
Mar 2020: I became a FastAI International Fellow! This was one of my best moments in the past few years.
Jan 2020 - May 2020: I spent a semester as a Teaching Assistant for BITS Pilani’s flagship AI course: Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic.
I’ve generally been quite happy with how my last few years have been, things have been working out, and I’ve been doing work that I love (for the most part) and on my own terms (for the most part).
Best decisions ever:
- I dropped a year after school to explore life outside academia with no constraints and external expectations. In that year, I worked in young and energetic organizations and upstarts like AIESEC and One4all in Surat and learned a lot of things that still help me every single day.
- I also dropped my EEE degree in my second year in college to better focus full-time on AI/DL.
- Painfully spending time in my second year and beyond to help Kharbanda understand ML/DL in his initial deep-learning years
You can expect me to take otherwise unconventional decisions quite frequently as long as they seem rational. I try and avoid the mental inertia, and like putting my big troubles first on my to-do list and not under the rug.