Hrishikesh Ganu

Curriculum Vitae

H (+91) 97406 39172

B hrishikeshvganu@gmail.com

Education (in order of relevance)

Indian Institute of Science 1 (IISc), Bangalore, 2003-2005.
Masters in Engineering (2 year full-time course)
Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Kozhikode, 2006-2008.
MBA, Operations and Marketing (Full time)
Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli, 1997-2001.
Bachelors in Engineering,

Work Experience: 10 years

Amazon.com, Bangalore, India
Manager-Machine learning , (2013-currently working).
{ Member of the Core Machine Learning Team at Amazon.com.
{ Deep learning based Review Summarization-Amazon has a rich source of customer generated reviews. It is
widely acknowledged that customers refer to the highly ranked reviews when taking decisions related to product
purchase. However, not all products have such highly ranked reviews. Our objective was to automatically
generate summaries of product reviews which customers could refer to when buying products. Our work falls
broadly in the realm of "Abstractive Summarization" and we utilized Deep learning in the form of an Attention
based encoder combined with a Language model.
{ Membership Propensity ML Models-built targeting models for Amazons key membership programs-Prime,
Mom and Student. Worked on AWS EMR to build ML models incorporating > 15K features and over 200
mn customers. Several approaches for modeling and feature selection were tried out and finally a linear binary
classifier was implemented in Vowpal Wabbit given its ability to utilize the hashing trick to incorporate more
than 15K features. Data preprocessing was performed using Pig to join datasets of size > 10TB on an AWS-EMR
Hadoop cluster. The ML models led to upto 10X lift in targeting Precision.
{ Identifying Substitute ASINs(Products) Identifying substitute products helps several teams like Pricing,
Recommendations etc. in improving their models. We wanted to identify substitutes based on customer browsing
history (glance views). The main challenge was that we could not compare a product with every other product in
the category since some categories have several million products. We leveraged minhashing followed by Locality
Sensitve Hashing to create buckets of similar products such that products within a bucket would be similar to
each other with a very high probability. This helped us identify similar products without doing an all-pairs kind
of comparison. We used Apache-Spark for data preparation and a custom MapReduce based Minhash algorithm
for similarity computation.

Mu Sigma Business Solutions, Bangalore

Principal Scientist , (2009-2013).
{ Client: Monetization team at Facebook, Project: Auction simulator: Implemented an agent based
simulation for the VCG ad-auction mechanism to optimize advertiser acquisition strategies. FB wanted to
understand the impact of variations in the advertiser mix on long term revenues.The simulation model had
several sub-models based on ML for advertisers reactions [bidding differently etc.] to changes in the win-rate.
The models were validated with ad-blocks (demand side shocks) and supply side-shocks. The simulation tool
allowed FB to plug in diverse scenarios and understand their long-term impact on revenue. In particular this
allowed FB to understand what kinds of accounts to acquire for advertising to specific user segments.
{ Client: Wal-Mart Merchandizing, Project: Assortment optimization for "reach": Customers visit WalMart to buy specific sets of items with a category. If none of the products that a customer wants is available
in the store the customer would return "empty-handed" Wal-Mart wanted to ensure that no customer returns
"empty-handed" (i.e all customers are "reached"). The problem was modeled as a set covering problem to yield
an assortment such that atleast one of the products in the consumption set of every customer would be carried
in the assortment. We experimented with greedy heuristics first and later implemented an Integer Programming
Formulation to ensure reach while minimizing the cardinality of the assortment

1 The

#1 ranked postgraduate research institute in India for Science/Engineering as per Times Higher Education Rankings

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{ Client: Zappos.com , Project: Marketing Mix Optimization : The marketing team at Zappos.com wanted
to optimize their budget advertising budget allocation across channels to maximize revenue. A non-linear sales
response model to incorporate diminishing returns to scale and interaction effects was developed with historical
channel level spends and external factors as control variables. The incumbent optimizer ignored the problem
structure of the optimization problem and hence could only find local optimal solutions. We used geometric
programming to solve the problem to complete optimality. R" was used for the sales response model while
Python was used to develop the optimization module.
{ Client: Enterprise Optimization group at United Airlines ( UAL). Developed a gate assignment algorithm
for UAL to optimally assign flights to gates at all hub and spoke airports. The primary contribution was a
re-timing based solution which allowed gating additional flights by re-timing the schedules of some flights.
An Integer Programming (IP) formulation was implemented which respected the flight connectivity and gate
availability constraints while re-timing. CPLEX was used as the IP solver which was called using Java as the
main program. The solution was able to gate 15% additional flights compared to the earlier solution without
re-timing.

IBM India Private Ltd., Bangalore

Analytics Consultant (Business Strategy), 2008-2009.
{ Client: Bell Canada. As a Business Analyst helped capture the business logic around customer self-service flow
on the Bell.ca website. I interfaced with the Bell.ca team at the customer end and the IBM India development
team at the other to translate business requirements into requirements for developers by generating mock-ups,
use cases etc.
{ Client: IBM Research Lab (IRL) India. Worked on a consulting assignment with IRL India to identify the
feature roadmap and create marketing plans for their social network analysis tool. The tool was targeted at
Telecom clients wanting to identify influencers by utilizing the call/texting graph among their subscribers.

Cummins Research and Technology, Pune

Analyst(Computational Fluid Mechanics) , 2005-2006.
{ Client: Newage AVG-SEK, UK. Developed an optimization module to generate designs for cooling fans by
optimizing fan geometry while minimizing the energy losses. The fan was to be used for cooling the electrical
windings of a 2MW alternator. The optimization module helped cut down the number of experiments/CFD
models developed and sped up product development.

HSI Industries Ltd., Miraj

Engineer , 2001-2003.
{ HSI industries was in the business of providing electrically heated furnaces and foundries for foundries/sintering
industries. I worked on thermal design of the furnaces to determine the right level of insulation and power
control tailored to clients process requirements.

Skills
Areas of Machine Learning, Linear and Integer Optimization, Marketing Analytics
Expertise
Analytical Pandas, Scikit-learn, R, Spark, IBM-CPLEX Optimization Suite
Tools
Programming Python, Java, Scala
languages

Achievements/Certifications
{ Stood among the top 1 percentile of over 1,00,000 candidates in CAT-2005: all-India entrance exam for
admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs)
{ Silver in Gedanken-2005", Inter IIT-IISc Puzzle Competition.
{ Stood among the top 1 percentile of over 30,000 aspirants in GATE-2003 for admission to postgraduate
courses at the Indian Institutes of Technology(IIT) /Indian Institute of Science.

Publications
{ Hrishikesh Ganu, Bharath Upadhya, CIP: An Integrated Problem Solving Approach, INFORMS Conference
on Business Analytics and Operations Research, California, USA (April 2012). Poster presentation at this
flagship conference for the Analytics/ O.R. community
{ Hrishikesh Ganu, B.N. Raghunandan, Morphological technique for Direct Drop Size Measurement of
Cryogenic Sprays,AIAA 42nd Joint Propulsion Conference, Sacramento, USA (2006)

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