PROFILE
- Hands-on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence leader and researcher with 50+ peer-reviewed publications and patents
- Proven track record of building industry-leading products, driving fundamental and applied research, and developing Intellectual Property (IP)
- Applications in finance, enterprise security, social media, aerospace, manufacturing, retail & other industries
EXPERIENCE
- Founder, Chief Scientist - Concentric AI, Austin, TX
- Nov 2018 - Present
- Set AI vision and led overall AI strategy, execution and Intellectual Property development
- Defined precision-focused and cost/compute efficient modeling philosophy, designed and built the foundational AI core of the product
- End-to-end ownership of AI features and modeling efforts including data collection/curation, model design, training, deployment, and overall model life-cycle management
- Director of Data Science and Machine Learning - Charles Schwab, Austin, TX
- Apr 2016 - Nov 2018
- Built out and led a new data science team of FTEs and contractors (onshore and offshore)
- Built and deployed solutions for a wide spectrum of use-cases leveraging state-of-the-art ML/AI and big data tools
- Created team vision and charter; actively evangelized data science opportunities and multiple project wins
- Drove requirements for and helped build internal technology stack; evaluated and onboarded multiple vendor products
- Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Member of Technical Staff - PetaSecure / Niara, Sunnyvale, CA
- Sep 2014 - Apr 2016
- Designed and implemented generic anomaly detection framework on arbitrary logs on Splunk
- Played a key role in demonstrations, investor pitches and in the eventual acquisition of PetaSecure by Niara
- Oversaw the design and implementation of several machine learning models that are now a core part of the Niara Platform; developed and owned all models underlying user behavior analytics modules
- Solution successfully deployed at several Fortune 50 clients including Microsoft, Aetna and VMWare
- Lead Data Scientist - Tagged.com, San Francisco, CA
- Mar 2014 - Sep 2014
- Developed models for match recommendations and spam behavior detection; proposed a novel personalized recommendation approach using SVD and matrix sketching
- Actively involved in recruitment and assessment of data scientists and engineers; mentored junior data scientists and supervised their work; represented Tagged at conferences and external events
- Staff Scientist, Principal Investigator - United Technologies Research Center, East Hartford, CT
- Mar 2010 - Mar 2014
- Assembled and led multi-disciplinary teams to build decision-support technologies on various projects
- Identified research areas; proposed and obtained funding from business units (Otis, Carrier, Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, UT Aerospace Systems) and government funding agencies (DoD and DoE)
- Presented to UTC CEO, CTO and business unit presidents, regularly presented to Engg. leadership
- Recruitment, assessment and mentoring of researchers; established relationships with academia
- Research Scientist - Mars Incorporated, Mount Olive, NJ
- Oct 2007 - Feb 2010
- Formulated and developed a data-mining solution to a European retail chain, a key customer of Mars
- Developed personalized ailment risk profiles for pets for Banfield - a chain of veterinary hospitals
- Identified cross-disciplinary opportunities, coordinated and worked within a diverse multidisciplinary team spread across the US, Europe and China; regularly presented to clients and senior management
- Research Intern - Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, MA
- Summer 2006 - August 2007, Summer 2005
- Developed machine learning algorithms for separating sources from audio recordings (PhD work)
- Developed algorithms for secure classification between two parties such that private data is not exchanged
- Graduate Research Assistant - Auditory Neuroscience Lab, Boston University, Boston, MA
- 2004 - August 2007
- Designed and conducted experiments to understand human auditory processing in natural reverberant environments, worked on psychoacoustics and developed computational/mathematical models of auditory perception.
- Research Fellow - Department of Informatics and Telecommunication, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
- Spring 2003
- Conducted research in the area of network algorithms. Developed efficient algorithms for optimally allocating data over multiple channels for broadcast such that average client waiting time is minimized.
- Summer Research Fellow - Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
- Summer 2002
- Worked on applying learning automata to the problem of channel assignment in wireless networks.
- Summer Intern - Electronics Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, India
- Summer 2001
- Developed a software module using Visual Basic for better visualization of scan data for an ultrasonic imaging system.
EDUCATION
- 2003 - 2007
- Boston University, Boston, MA - 3.96/4.00
- PhD, Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS)
- Thesis Title: Latent Variable Framework for Modeling and Separating Single Channel Acoustic Sources.
- Advisor: Prof. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham
- 1999 - 2003
- Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India - 9.39/10.00
- BE (Honors) in Computer Science
PUBLICATIONS
- Book Chapters / Journal Papers
- Advanced Building Energy Management System Demonstration for Department of Defense Buildings.
Z O'Neill, T Bailey, B Dong, M Shashanka, D Luo.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 204, pp 44-53, 2013.
- Model-based Real-time Whole Building Energy Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics.
Z O'Neill, X Pang, M Shashanka, P Haves, T Bailey.
Journal of Building Performance Simulation, 2013.
- Simplex Decompositions using Singular Values Decomposition.
M Shashanka, M Giering.
Pattern Recognition - Applications and Methods, Springer Series on Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, Vol. 204, 2013.
- Missing Data Imputation for Time-Frequency Representations of Audio Signals.
P Smaragdis, B Raj, M Shashanka.
Journal of Signal Processing Systems, Vol. 65, No. 3, 2011, p361-370.
- Probabilistic Latent Variable Models as Non-Negative Factorizations.
M Shashanka, B Raj, P Smaragdis.
Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, Special Issue on Advances in Non-Negative Matrix and Tensor Factorizations, May 2008.
- Latent Variable Framework for Modeling and Separating Single Channel Acoustic Sources.
M Shashanka.
PhD Thesis, Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University, August 2007.
- A Framework for Secure Speech Recognition.
P Smaragdis, M Shashanka.
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol 15, No. 4, May 2007, p1404-1413.
- Optimal Skewed Data Allocation on Multiple Channels with Flat Broadcast per Channel.*
E Ardizzoni, AA Bertossi, MC Pinotti, S Ramaprasad, R Rizzi, M Shashanka.
IEEE Transaction on Computers, Vol 54, No. 5, May 2005, p558-572.
*Authors listed in alphabetical order.
- A Characterisation of Optimal Channel Assignments for Wireless Networks Modelled as Cellular and Square Grids.
M Shashanka, A Pati, AM Shende.
Mobile Networks and Applications, Vol 10, Issue 1-2, Feb-Apr 2005, p89-98.
- Conference Proceedings
- Detection of Exfiltration and Tunneling over DNS.
A Das, M-Y Shen, M Shashanka, J Wang
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Machine Learning and Applications, Cancun, Mexico, Dec 2017.
- User and Entity Behavior Analytics for Enterprise Security.
M Shashanka, M-Y Shen, J Wang
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Big Data, Washington DC, USA, Dec 2016.
- Collective Spammer Detection in Evolving Multi-Relational Social Networks.
S Fakhraei, J Foulds, M Shashanka, L Getoor
21st ACM SIGKDD Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Sidney, Australia, Aug 2015.
- Maximally Bijective Discretization for Data-Driven Modeling of Complex Systems.
S Sarkar, A Srivastav, M Shashanka
2013 American Control Conference, Washington, DC, Jun 2013.
- An Integrated Infrastructure for Real-Time Building Energy Modeling and Fault Detection and Diagnostics.
B Dong, Z O'Neill, Z Li, D Luo, M Shashanka, S Ahuja, T Bailey
SimBuild 2012, Madison, WI, Aug 2012.
- Simplex Decompositions using SVD and PLSA.
M Shashanka, M Giering.
Intl Conf on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods, Vilamoura, Portugal, Feb 2012.
- Copula Functions for Learning Multimodal Densities with Non-linear Dependencies.
A Tewari, M Shashanka, MJ Giering.
NIPS Workshop on Copulas in Machine Learning, Sierra Nevada, Spain, Dec 2011.
- Real Time Model-Based Energy Diagnostics in Buildings.
Z O'Neill, M Shashanka, X Pang, P Bhattacharya, T Bailey, P Haves
12th Conf. on Intl. Building Perf. Sim. Assoc., Sydney, Australia, Nov 2011.
- A Fast Algorithm for Discrete HMM Training using Observed Transitions.
M Shashanka.
IEEE Intl Conf on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Prague, Czech Republic, May 2011.
- A Privacy Preserving Framework for Gaussian Mixture Models.
M Shashanka.
IEEE Intl Workshop on Privacy Aspects of Data Mining, Sydney, Australia, Dec 2010.
- Probabilistic Latent Component Analysis for Gearbox Vibration Source Separation.
J Isom, M Shashanka, A Tewari, A Lazarevic.
Annual Conference of the PHM Society, Portland, Oregon, Oct 2010.
- Topic Models for Audio Mixture Analysis.
P Smaragdis, M Shashanka, B Raj.
NIPS Workshop on Applications for Topic Models: Text and Beyond, Vancouver, Canada, Dec 2009.
- A Sparse Non-parametric Approach for Single Channel Separation of Known Sounds.
P Smaragdis, M Shashanka, B Raj.
Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), Vancouver, Canada, Dec 2009.
- Simplex Decompositions for Real-Valued Datasets.
M Shashanka.
IEEE Intl Workshop on Machine Learning and Signal Processing, Grenoble, France, Sep 2009.
- Missing Data Imputation for Spectral Audio Signals.
P Smaragdis, B Raj, M Shashanka.
IEEE Intl Workshop on Machine Learning and Signal Processing, Grenoble, France, Sep 2009.
- Mining Retail Transaction Data for Targeting Customers with Headroom - A Case Study.
M Shashanka, M Giering.
Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, Greece, April 2009.
- Probabilistic Factorization of Non-Negative Data with Entropic Co-occurrence Constraints.
P Smaragdis, M Shashanka, B Raj, GJ Mysore.
Intl Conf on Independent Component Analysis, Brazil, March 2009.
- Sparse and Shift-Invariant Feature Extraction from Non-Negative Data.
P Smaragdis, B Raj, M Shashanka.
IEEE Intl Conf on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Las Vegas, Nevada, Apr 2008.
- Sparse Overcomplete Latent Variable Decomposition of Counts Data.
M Shashanka, B Raj, P Smaragdis.
Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS), Vancouver, Canada, Dec 2007.
- Privacy-Preserving Musical Database Matching.
M Shashanka, P Smaragdis.
IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, New Paltz, New York, Oct 2007.
- Supervised and Semi-Supervised Separation of Sounds from Single-Channel Mixtures.
P Smaragdis, B Raj, M Shashanka.
Intl Conf on Independent Component Analysis, London, UK, Sep 2007.
- Sparse Overcomplete Decomposition for Single Channel Speaker Separation.
M Shashanka, B Raj, P Smaragdis.
IEEE Intl Conf on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 2007.
- A Framework for Secure Speech Recognition.
P Smaragdis, M Shashanka.
IEEE Intl Conf on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 2007.
- Bandwidth Expansion with a Polya Urn Model.
B Raj, R Singh, M Shashanka, P Smaragdis.
IEEE Intl Conf on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Honolulu, Hawaii, April 2007.
- Separating a Foreground Singer from Background Music.
B Raj, P Smaragdis, M Shashanka, R Singh.
Intl Symposium on Frontiers of Research on Speech and Music (FRSM), Mysore, India, Jan 2007.
- A Probabilistic Latent Variable Model for Acoustic Modeling.
P Smaragdis, B Raj, M Shashanka.
Workshop on Advances in Models for Acoustic Processing, NIPS 2006.
- Secure Sound Classification: Gaussian Mixture Models.*
M Shashanka, P Smaragdis.
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Toulouse, France, May 2006.
* Finalist in the Student Paper Contest.
- Latent Dirichlet Decomposition for Single Channel Speaker Separation.
B Raj, M Shashanka, P Smaragdis.
IEEE Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, Toulouse, France, May 2006.
- Optimal Multi-Channel Data Allocation with Flat Broadcast per Channel.*
AA Bertossi, MC Pinotti, S Ramaprasad, R Rizzi, M Shashanka.
Intl. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Santa Fe, USA, Apr 2004.
*Authors listed in alphabetical order.
- A Characterisation of Optimal Channel Assignments for Wireless Networks Modelled as Cellular and Square Grids.
M Shashanka, A Pati, AM Shende.
Intl. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, Nice, France, Apr 2003.
- Channel Assignment for Wireless Networks Modelled as d-Dimensional Square Grids.
A Dubhashi, M Shashanka, A Pati, S Ramaprasad, AM Shende.
Intl. Workshop on Distributed Computing, Kolkata, India, Dec 2002.
- Posters / Abstracts
- Mining Retail Data for Targeting Customers with Headroom.
Madhu Shashanka, Michael Giering.
NYAS Annual Machine Learning Symposium, New York, NY, Oct 2008.
- Separating and Understanding a Talker from a Mixture in Reverberant Spaces.
BG Shinn-Cunningham, S Bressler, M Shashanka.
152nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec 2006.
- The Role of Fundamental Frequency in Segregating and Understanding a Talker Competing with Another Talker in a Reverberant Setting.
M Shashanka, BG Shinn-Cunningham, S Nasser.
29th midwinter meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO), Baltimore, Feb 2006.
- Effects of Reverberant Energy on Statistics of Speech.
M Shashanka, BG Shinn-Cunningham, M Cooke.
Workshop on Speech Separation and Comprehension in Complex Acoustic Environments, Montreal, Canada, Nov 2004.
- Technical Reports / Manuscripts
- Scalable Deployment of Advanced Building Energy Management Systems.
V Adetola, S Ahuja, T Bailey, B Dong, T Khawaja, D Luo, Z O'Neill, M Shashanka.
ESTCP Final Report EW-1015, Oct 2012.
- Automated Continuous Commissioning of Commercial Buildings.
T Bailey, Z O'Neill, M Shashanka, P Haves, X Pang, P Bhattacharya.
ESTCP Final Report EW-0929, Sep 2011.
- Probabilistic Latent Variable Model for Sparse Decompositions of Non-negative Data.
M Shashanka, B Raj, P Smaragdis.
Unpublished Draft, March 2007.
- Optimal Multi-Channel Data Allocation with Flat Broadcast per Channel.*
AA Bertossi, MC Pinotti, S Ramaprasad, R Rizzi, M Shashanka.
Technical Report DIT-02-0079, University of Trento, 2003.
*Authors listed alphabetically.
PATENTS
- Method and Electronic Device for Generating Semantic Representation of Document to Determine Data Security Risk.
M Shashanka, B Varghese, S Sumbramaniam, K Krishnan, R Joseph.
- System and Method Directed to Behavioral Profiling Services.
J Wang, M Shashanka, C Yang, M-Y Shen.
- Sensor Data Fusion for Prognostics and Health Monitoring.
M Giering, M Shashanka, S Sarkar, V Venugopalan.
- Vibration Signatures for Prognostics and Health Monitoring of Machinery.
M Giering and M Shashanka.
- Gear Fault Detection.
J Isom, Z Chaudhry, G Zhang, F Sun, M Shashanka, Y Chen.
- Method and System for Matching Audio Recordings.
P Smaragdis and M Shashanka.
- System and Method for Recognizing Speech Securely.
P Smaragdis and M Shashanka.
- Secure Classification of Data with Gaussian Distributions.
M Shashanka and P Smaragdis.
TALKS / PRESENTATIONS / MISC
- Building AI Products.
Invited Talk - Computer Science Seminar Series, St. Edwards University, Austin, TX, 02 Feb 2024.
- AI @ Startups - Stories from the Field.
Concentric AI Tech Summit, Pune, India, 17 Dec 2022.
- Deep Learning for Data Security Professionals.
Concentric AI Publication, 2020.
- Panel Discussion, Productization of Machine Learning.
TX Analytics Summit, Austin, TX, 28 Sep 2018.
- Master of Science in Business Analytics Speaker Series.
McCombs School of Business, UT Austin, Austin, TX, 03 Aug 2018.
- Data Science and Relevance at Tagged.
Zipfian Academy, San Francisco, CA, 17 Jul 2014.
- Fast Algorithms for Approximate Online SVD.
Tagged, San Francisco, CA, Mar 2014.
- Privacy Preserving Speech Processing (tutorial with Dr. Bhiksha Raj).
ISCA Conference (InterSpeech), Portland, OR, 09 Sep 2012.
- Privacy Preserving Computations.
United Technologies Research Center, Hartford, CT, 06 Sep 2012.
- Implementing Bayesian Networks.
United Technologies Research Center, Hartford, CT, 18 Nov 2010.
- Topic Models: Applications.
United Technologies Research Center, Hartford, CT, 10 Jun 2010.
- Topic Models: Overview.
United Technologies Research Center, Hartford, CT, 27 May 2010.
- Probabilistic Latent Variable Models.
United Technologies Research Center, Hartford, CT, 04 Nov 2009.
- Simplex Decompositions - Techniques for Nonnegative Data Analysis and Extensions.
United Technologies Research Center, Hartford, CT, 03 Sep 2009.
- Simplex Decompositions.
Icosystem Corporation, Boston, MA, 14 Aug 2009.
- Latent Variable Framework for Modeling and Separating Single-Channel Acoustic Sources.
Cognitive and Neural Systems Dissertation Defense, Boston University, Boston, MA, 17 Aug 2007.
- Latent Variable Decomposition - Models and Applications (with Dr. Bhiksha Raj).
MIT Brains and Machines Seminar, Cambridge, MA, 16 May 2007.
- Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis.
Catalyst Group - Mars Inc., Brussels, Belgium, 02 May 2007.
- Probabilistic Models for Single-Channel Audio Processing.
East Bay Institute of Research and Education, Martinez, CA, 26 Apr 2007.
- Probabilistic Models for Single-Channel Audio Processing.
Boston University Hearing Research Center Seminar, Boston, MA, 19 Jan 2007.
- Probabilistic Models for Acoustic Processing.
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cambridge, MA, 21 Nov 2006.
RESEARCH / ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES & MEMBERSHIPS
- Workshop Chair, SIGKDD Workshop on Machine Learning for Prognostics and Health Management, 2016 and 2017
- Associate Editor (Jan 2015 - Dec 2016), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
- Senior Member, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) - only about ~8% of IEEE members are elevated to Senior Membership
- Voting Member, IEEE Multimedia Communications Technical Committee
- Member, New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS)
- Scientific Committee Member, Workshop on Statistical and Perceptual Audition (SAPA) 2008
- Technical Program Committee Member, Intl. Conf. on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) Multimedia Content Analysis Track 2007
- Invited Participant, Workshop on New Ideas in Hearing, Paris, 2006
- Invited Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing; IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing; Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NIPS); International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME); Workshop on Statistical and Perceptual Audition
ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS
- Finalist, Best Student Paper Award, Intl. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2006
- Invited Outstanding Young Scientist, Workshop on Speech Separation and Comprehension in Complex Acoustic Environments (2004)
- Arts and Science Dean's Fellowship, Boston University (2003 - 2004)
- Research Fellowship Awardee (top 3% in India), JN Center for Advanced Scientific Research and Govt. of India (2002)
- Merit Scholarship, Birla Institute of Technology and Science - awarded to top 10 students across majors in order of merit (1999 - 2002)
- National Talent Search Scholarship, Govt. of India (1997 - 2003)
- National top 1% among 17846 candidates, National Standard Exam in Physics, India (1999)
- Ranked 7th in Pre University Examinations (out of 319,028 students), State of Karnataka, India (1999)
- Ranked 1 in the State of Karnataka, National Talent Search Exam, India (1997)
- Ranked 16 in Secondary School Examinations (out of 471,307 students), State of Karnataka, India (1997)
- Ranked 6 in Regional Math Olympiad, State of Karnataka, India (1997)
- Ranked 13 in Regional Math Olympiad, State of Karnataka, India (1996)
- Ranked 12 in Inter-State Talent Tests in Math, India (1996)
MISCELLANEOUS
- Languages
- English, Kannada (fluent reading, writing, speaking)
- Hindi (functional)
- Citizenship: USA
- Erdos Number: 3