Gobaan Raveendran

Master of Mathematics Student
Specialty in Information Retrieval
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Office: DC 3618
hi@gobaan.com

After working at A9.com, Bing, and Facebook, I acquired a passion for big data, to create tools that know users better than they understand themselves. I believe startups, through lack of collaboration, are wasting powerful opportunities. I hope to change that and, in doing so, change the world.

If you are in a startup with more data than you know how to handle, and you want to extract useful systems from your data, shoot me a message. As you start to open up this discussion with me, you will begin to ensure your products are user driven. I hope to create tools that help accelerate innovative startups to the Fortune 500, and hope that you will join me on that ride.

Current Interests

• Automatic Summarization writing a news summarizer for tracking and recommending news
• Reputation Systems predicting user trust, and interested in implementing manipulation resistant systems.
• Recommendation Engines written using click data. Making progress on more hybrid approaches.

Recent Work

Data Scientist
Facebook, Palo Alto, California, September 2010 – December 2010

• Designed and Implemented Reputation System for Facebook Questions to detect spammers
• Researched cutting edge algorithms for systems that harness large scale data
• Performed user and item clustering for content recommendation

Software Development Engineer
Microsoft Bing, Bellevue, Washington, January 2009 – April 2009

• Collaborated with Microsoft Research Asia developing tools to visualize user behaviour
• Created map-reduce jobs to sample from Petabytes of data based on specific trends
• Worked on rough prototypes for Bing mobile workflows

Software Design Engineer
A9.com, Palo Alto, California, May 2009 – August 2009

• Designed and implemented discrete event simulator for A9.com's query infrastructure
• Regularly read papers on algorithms in information retrieval, caching, and hardware optimization.
• Researched technologies supporting Amazon.com search, and became source of knowledge for less understood features

Compiler Software Developer
ON Semiconductor, Waterloo, Ontario, September 2008 – December 2008

• Prototyped port to a local architecture of the GNU Compiler Collection, implementing Embedded C extensions
• Studied various research papers that explain various new techniques in compiler design
• Coordinated open source work with developers working at IBM