Jun 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 11 mos · Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

• Smart Paper is a product of EdOptimize. Our solution is designed to digitize and analyze formative learning data on paper resources that students use every day. Our technology can convert existing workbooks and worksheets into smart-scannables that can give immediate feedback to students, and reduce the evaluation workload for teachers. Smart Paper has scanned more than 100 million OCR worksheets in India's Rajasthan state, showing how AI can transform large-scale assessment practice. Now with foundational models, our AI system can provide feedback on handwritten assignments. Check out Smart Paper at www.SmartPaperApp.com

Aug 2016 – Present · 9 yrs 9 mos · Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

• I lead the data science team at Playpower Labs. We are one of the most dynamic groups of educational data experts in the world, open to helping wonderful learning companies. We currently work with some of the biggest education organizations in the world.
• My team and I work with many different types of educational data. Examples include event data, assessment data, intelligent tutor data, user behavior data, web analytics data, license and entitlement data, roster data, eText data, item response data, time-series data, panel data, hierarchical data, skill and standard data, assignment data, knowledge structure data, school demographic data, reading passage data, student handwriting data (images), speech data, and more. We have developed expertise in analyzing and modeling these different types of data.
• For learning analytics, we primarily use data transformation and visualization to find useful insights from the data. Our focus is always on getting actionable pieces of information from the data. We also use various statistical models (regression, SEM, hierarchical models) and computational models to get more value out of the data. We know how to work with text data using NLP methods, we have computer vision capability to work with all types of image data, and our recent work also includes neural network speech models. Our special expertise is around Process Analysis of educational data, where we work to uncover hidden learning teaching processes in the data.
• Our work has won multiple awards.
• We won #2 place in the international NAEP data mining challenge co-sponsored by ETS against 89 global teams in 2020
• Our research in Curriculum Analytics field won us the best-short-paper award at the Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference in 2018
• We believe in doing research that directly impacts human problems, and we continue to do rigorous research that is practical and valuable.
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TIsCIPUAAAAJ&hl=en

May 2012 – Jun 2015 · 3 yrs 1 mo · Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

• I built the founding learning engineering and continuous improvement technology for our startup. Two main lines of work where I led technical innovations were:
• Infrastructure for large scale online RCTs in educational games
• An MVC framework to develop educational games
• My colleagues and I have conducted several large-scale RCTs in online math games. Our work has revolved around game design optimization using data. One of our experiments also used reinforcement learning to automatically improve an educational game design. Another one of the experiments led to a discovery that novelty and challenge also have an inverted-U relationship with motivation and engagement measures.
• My game development technology was at the core of most of our Flash-based games. I developed an MVC framework to build educational games. This framework was designed in AS3 and used PureMVC implementation. We ended up using this architecture in most of our games, and we continued to use the nomenclature in this framework for nearly 5 years.

May 2013 – Jul 2013 · 2 mos · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

• I worked with Dr. Ken Koedinger and my colleague Derek Lomas to design learning science experiments in our flagship fraction estimation game Battleship Numberline. We deployed these experiments in a Pittsburgh school and collected data from close to 200 students.

Dec 2010 – Apr 2012 · 1 yr 4 mos · Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

• At Playpower Foundation, I developed several award-winning edtech applications. The most notable one of them is Battleship Numberline, which has been played by children across the world millions of times and has been a subject of extensive scientific research.
• We won the National STEM Game Competition in 2011, where I led the game development.
• We also won a grant from Marvel where I developed an iPad version of the Battleship Numberline game.

Nov 2008 – Dec 2010 · 2 yrs 1 mo

• RedHat Certified Engineer. Engaged in problem-solving with other open-source enthusiasts and offered free help to people with Linux servers while in school.