Rahul Nandakumar Email & Phone Number

Redwood City, California, United States

• Conducted statistical research on growth metrics to identify perfomance levers that drive CPA for ad-campaigns. Provided A/B test recommendations for creative diversity, campaign funnel category and budget mode.
• Identified significant improvements to the bidding strategy for AMR Consumer Advertisers which led to improvements in ML model calibration.
• Collaborated with Growth Managers to monitor campaign health and provide recommendations to hit campaign goal for UA/RE campaigns run by advertisers such as Bumble, Fanatics, Activision.

Austin, Texas, United States

• Led the development of a robust LLM-based solution, leveraging LlaMA 2 to achieve a unified address structure, by processing 1.35 million records of lodging properties from diverse aggregators.
• Utilized a BERT-based model to generate contextual embeddings from categorical data in over 6 million shop requests to Sabre IntelliSell, improving accuracy and performance for cache rate prediction.
• Tested the hypothesis to utilize generated contextual embeddings for dynamic price prediction as a downstream task.

• Data Analysis:
• Installed and managed a holistic data pipeline (Algolia, Heap, Matomo, Segment) for tracking website user interactions to facilitate data-driven decisions.
• Leveraged A/B test insights and ad-hoc analysis to reduce product friction and boost daily user numbers by ∼ 5%. Machine Learning:
• Parsed raw HTML data from 700+ webpages on the product website using Beautiful Soup to train a Decision Tree model for automated classification of records into distinct categories (instabits, podcasts, articles, etc.).
• Proposed and implemented a unique metric correlating read time to page depth scrolled, improving page readability and user retention by 20%.
• Utilized text processing and topic modeling using gensim and spacy-transformers, leading to a 64% improvement in search querycresponse time and improved search recommendations.

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

• Selected and received funding from the Ministry of Heavy Industries – Govt. of India, to work on an autonomous robotic development project for the removal of plastic waste from beaches.
• Designed a vision system making use of a 3D camera for object detection, and a LiDAR for range determination.
• Collected and annotated over 1000 images using Roboflow, and implemented Transfer Learning using pre-trained models from Tensorflow 2 Model Zoo running on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano Processor. Also compared their relative.
• Collaborated with the Autonomous Guidance and Digital Twin teams, working in parallel to create a Digital Twin of the robot, and integrating an ESP32 WiFi Module to the Jetson Nano to enable real–time data analytics.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Information, Risk, And Operations Management

Area of Specialization - Decision Science

Master Of Science - Ms (Thesis), Operations Research And Industrial Engineering

Cumulative GPA: 3.5/4.0 Positions of Responsibility: • Social Events Chair, UT Austin INFORMS Student Chapter • Webmaster, UT Austin.

Bachelor'S Degree, Engineering

• Overall CGPA of 8.3/10, First Class with Distinction. • Thesis Title: Deep Learning integrated with modeling a medical waste.