Nikhil Dandekar Email & Phone Number

United States

Mountain View, Ca, Us

I lead the LLM efforts for Youtube covering large language and multimodal (e.g. video) models.I also lead the Community Intelligence team at Youtube, which owns ranking and quality for comments, community posts, live chat and other community-based products (e.g. Hashtags, Mentions etc.).

Mountain View, Ca, Us

So far, I've led 2 different engineering teams at Quora:- In my first 2 years, I led the team that owned the backend engineering for a major subset of the Quora product. This included the machine learning, product, and systems engineering aspects of the questions namespace, search, topics, SEO, and growth. - Since then, I have been leading the Machine Learning team that owns all of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, content quality (spam, abuse, bad actor detection etc.) and a few of the ranking systems (e.g. search ranking, related questions ranking etc.)Videos and slides from a few of the external talks I have given on different aspects of Machine Learning at Quora below.

New York, Ny, Us

I managed the search ranking and homepage recommendations team at Foursquare. My team owned the online search ranking and infrastructure stack as well as the corresponding offline data pipelines, models, metrics and tools.Here are slides from a tech-talk I gave in August 2013 as an intro to data-science at Foursquare: http://www.slideshare.net/nikhildandekar/data-features-at-foursquare-august-2013

Redmond, Washington, Us

I managed the team that did personalized ranking for web search at Bing. My team shipped the first set of machine learning models and features that personalized and contextualized the Bing search result ranking.

Redmond, Washington, Us

I worked as a developer in Bing Search, mostly focusing on shipping data/relevance features. Some highlights:* I iteratively shipped multiple techniques for identifying and improving the search result relevance for local-intent queries (both implicit local intent & explicit local intent queries).* Shipped a new URL discovery feature based on Twitter data, which is used in Bing Indexing team. * Developed a novel Twitter user authority ranking algorithm which powers this feature.* Shipped the Faceted Search experience of the original Bing.com.* Shipped multiple iterations of Bing features like deeplinks, related searches, indexing technologies etc.

Redmond, Washington, Us

I worked in the Assistance Platform group, which was an internal Microsoft group focusing on serving "Help" content across Microsoft products.Delivered novel data-mining approaches to identify assistance content that users found useful/did not find useful/had divergent reactions to. Worked through an entire Software Development Life Cycle on all the three tiers of a .NET based client-server architecture with a WinForms GUI (C#), API layer (C#) and a backend layer (SQL). Also developed and maintained the team's installation package.

Ms, Computer Science

Be, Information Technology