Akshaj Gaur Email & Phone Number

College Park, Maryland, United States

College Park, Maryland, United States

• Led news coverage and editorial decisions by editing 5-7 news stories per week and managing 14 staff writers to strategize news coverage.
• Developed news desk roadmap by planning future coverage in collaboration with several other desks, such as data
• Reported on university administration, including biweekly interviews with university president, to investigate practices.
• Wrote investigate data story on ChatGPT academic integrity cases at UMD, using Python (e.g. pandas) to process data.

College Park, Maryland, United States

• Reported two stories per week about critical news across Prince George’s County, ranging from educaton to politics.
• Covered county council and school board, interviewing council members, school board members, and county executives.
• Contributed to local breaking news coverage, including on campus and in College Park.

• Worked in the Perception and Robotics group to develop a synthetic data generation tool in python to create synthetic oceanic environments in Blender to detect maritime objects, such as whales.
• Developed a synthetic data generation tool for oceanic environments to detect marine animals with Python and Blender.
• Trained convolutional neural networks with generated synthetic data to detect whales, outperforming real satellite images.
• First author of the publication: Whale Detection Enhancement through Synthetic Satellite Images

College Park, Maryland, United States

• CMSC132: Object Oriented Programming II (Data Structures) and CMSC216: Introduction to Computer Systems
• Lead a discussion section with 30 students, teaching fundamental data structures concepts and answering student questions.
• Hold office hours to answer student questions and clarify content taught in discussions.

Seattle, Washington, United States

Plano, Texas, United States

• Parallelized several components of crucial business-oriented machine learning models using Kubeflow and Python.
• Spearheaded effort to optimize downloads from AWS S3 to support machine learning models with thread-safe code.
• Implemented internal feature selection algorithms with scikit-learn and Dask, removing interal dependencies.
• Increased speed for data preparation and model prediction phases by 40% through parallelizaton and S3 downloads by 60%.

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

• Designed a New Relic Dashboard to display Jenkins and Aquasec data for company-wide software through a Flask server.
• Implemented a Flask server, deployed in Openshift, that interacted with Jenkins, Aquasec, and New Relic APIs to periodically push new data to dashboard, documented in a Swagger API.
• Automated process of adding and modifying widgets in New Relic using a GraphQL API.
• Helped with developer support regarding an internal CI/CD tool that centralizes numerous container development services.
• Decreased time to check project status by over 90% with New Relic Dashboard and created a blueprint for further expansion.

Mclean, Virginia, United States

• Developed an internal website using React.js to centralize machine learning metadata of numerous Machine Learning tools.
• Built a python command-line interface for NLP to pull metadata (e.g. packages and databases used) from a Github repository using abstract syntax trees and scraping techniques.
• Centralized details of over 30 machine learning tools in a website with automated updates using Python NLP program.

Covered the Washington Nationals and Washington Commanders in the MLB and NFL Departments.

Silver Spring, Maryland, United States

• Taught students, ranging from ages 5 to 16, fundamental mathematics concepts with unique and engaging methods.
• Assisted more than 25 students per day using a personalized learning plan that is catered to their strengths and weaknesses.

Sharon, Massachusetts, United States

• Developed a Java API to efficiently and automatically deploy and manage GCP, AWS EC2, and Azure virtual machines.
• Provided built-in VM customization for users, such as network security groups, availability zones, and spin-up options.
• Implemented a REST API with Flask to spin-up instances on each cloud provider given the results of a Machine Learning model, which reduces cloud costs for small businesses by finding the cheapest cloud instance.
• Saved users an average of 2 minutes and 40 seconds per VM instantiation on GCP, AWS, and Azure.

College Park, Maryland, United States

• Collaborated with Dr. Michael Hicks and the Lab for Programming Languages at the University of Maryland to further the viability of VOQC, a Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits.
• Integrated VOQC (a Verified Optimizer for Quantum Circuits) into the compilation stacks of python-based quantum frameworks to provide interoperability between the native OCaml quantum compiler and python.
• Defined OCaml to python bindings via a C wrapper class, the OCaml FFI and ctypes, and python ctypes.
• Devised and implemented compiler passes to Qiskit and Cirq using their respective quantum APIs in python.
• Performed regression testing and significantly improved runtime of the program after finding a bug in the OCaml ctypes library.
• Discovered further quantum gate reduction, ranging from 7.7% − 24.4%, across 3 sets of benchmarks in Cirq and Qiskit.

Master Of Science - Ms, Computer Science

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Computer Science, 3.98

Activities and Societies: Honors College: Advanced Cybersecurity for Experienced Students (ACES) Living-learning Program

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Applied Mathematics, 3.98

Science, Math, And Computer Science Magnet Program, 12

Activities and Societies: Science, Math, and Computer Science (SMCS) Magnet Program, Computer Team, Wrestling, Baseball, Science Olympiad.