kushal chakrabarti | cv

I'm young, but I'm reasonably intelligent and I work hard. I haven't had a chance to read this book yet, but I think I'd be a fan.

Life Motto

Create meaning or die trying.

Selected Awards, Patents, Talks and Publications

I've authored 20+ patents, talks and publications covering scalable systems, computational biology and personalization. In the past few years, my work as a social entrepreneur has been been recognized by some of the world's top organizations.

Seattle's Top 40 Under 40. Named one of the Top 40 People Under 40 in Seattle by the Puget Sound Business Journal. (July 2010)

10 Most Innovative Finance Companies. Named one of the "10 Most Innovative Finance Companies" by Fast Company. (February 2010)

#1 Game-Changer in Philanthropy. Voted the "#1 Game-Changer in Philanthropy" by 1.7M readers on Huffington Post. (November 2009)

The Biggest Waste on Earth? Kushal Chakrabarti. Pop!Tech (October 2008).

Evolution of Personalization Systems. Kushal Chakrabarti. Principals of Amazon (June 2006).

Diversity Filtering of Recommendation Candidates. Kushal Chakrabarti, Ronny Kohavi and Brent Smith. USPTO (2005).

Evolution of the Mammalian Genome: Sequence of the Genome of the Brown Norway Rat. Rat Genome Sequencing Consortium. Nature v. 428 pp. 493-521.

Visualization of Multiple Genome Annotations and Alignments with the K-BROWSER. Kushal Chakrabarti and Lior Pachter. Genome Research v. 14 pp. 716-720.

Academic and Industrial Experience

Vittana builds the world's first student loan programs in developing countries. Vittana works in 11 countries, has been featured in the Economist ("a hotbed of innovation"), Fast Company ("10 Most Innovative Finance Companies"), Clinton Global Initiative and many other national- and world-stage venues. Vittana graduates have a 99% repayment rate and earn three times their previous income — that is, $18 per day.

I specialize in extremely rapid, data-driven product development, building high-speed, large-scale data mining systems and the art of balancing academic rigor and creativity with the need to just get things done. I've worked both with startups, both pre- and post-funding, and the Fortune 500. References are available if needed. Ask.

I was responsible for technical strategy and development of the Amazon.com personalized recommendations engine. Over 3 years and 4 major initiatives, I drove double-digit percentage gains in bottom-line effectiveness.

I personally redesigned and rewrote the flagship recommendations engine, fixing second-system design failures and slashing hardware costs by 85+%. I presented several talks on effective architectural patterns and algorithmic innovation at division- and company-wide levels, and mentored nearly a dozen individual engineers throughout the company in building practical services. On my own time and initiative, I prototyped 25+ novel ideas over the 3 years, resulting in 20 patents, launches, and/or adoptions by other teams.

I worked for Professor Lior Pachter in the Department of Mathematics and, separately, with Professors Richard Karp and Eric Xing in the Department of Computer Science on comparative genomics and large-scale machine learning. I ultimately built a major application (400GB+ of data, 10K+ lines of C) to visualize genome data (which was in continuous use for 5 years), published 4 papers and talks in top-tier journals and conferences, and peer-reviewed 5 other papers and books for the Bioinformatics, ACM SIGACT and Stanford PSB conferences and journals.

Recommendations

Excerpted from LinkedIn:

In all my years working closely with software engineers, I've never seen such a young developer have so much responsibility and impact on systems running at the scale required for a site like Amazon. While he's incredibly talented, he lacks a primadona attitude that many superstar engineers can possess. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat.

Kushal was the driving force behind innovation on Amazon's recommender systems during his time here. His strength is identifying unique, simple, and impactful ideas and turning them into reality — quickly and single-handedly. He's a strong believer and experienced practitioner of iterative development, and his work has had a direct impact on Amazon's bottom line.

Education

B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley (2004).

B.A., Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley (2004).

I learned more by doing research, consulting and working on my own crazy projects with really smart people than I ever did in class. More often than not, I slept in class.

Associations and Other Interests

I am a member of AAAS — I love my subscription to Science — ACM SIGOPS, ACM SIGACT and ACM SIGKDD.

I run marathons and Ironman triathlons.

I train guide dogs for the blind.