About

Apoorva Sharma is a data science graduate student at the University of Southern California and a GHC'22 Scholar. With over 3 years of experience in data science disciplines and software development, she is motivated towards achieving the perfect solution by employing a data-driven approach. Currently, Apoorva works as a Course Assistant at USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. She has previously worked as a Data Science Intern at PwC, where she built a data pipeline using PySpark for collecting, processing, and analyzing 42M records extracted from tax documents using OCR to derive key data insights. She also implemented an anomaly detection model and a subsequent random forest model to predict the location of errors in the tax documents. Apoorva deployed these models on the Microsoft Azure pipeline and implemented corresponding UI features on the tax document upload page to alert the client about the potential location of the errors and suggested probable corrections for the error. She recorded 3K work hours saved and reduced the data processing time by 43% using PySpark dataframe. Apoorva has also worked as a Research Associate at USC Information Sciences Institute on a DARPA project. She designed a data pipeline to collect, clean, and transform Reddit data to produce a database of moderated and unmoderated comments/posts. She constructed a comprehensive dialogue dataset using a bottom-up approach to generate discussion threads from the comment database and filtered this dataset to create a toxic-dialogue dataset comprising toxic dialogue threads and the toxic author. Apoorva utilized this curated dataset to train and improve the accuracy of the moderator-bot by 7%. She also built a RESTful API to respond with a toxicity score for a moderated comment using the Google Perspective API and utilized this toxicity classifier API in the moderator-bot functionality to auto-moderate discussions based on comment toxicity. Apoorva has a Master of Science degree in Data Science from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women. She also has a Science degree from The Air Force School (TAFS), Subroto Park. Her tech stack includes Data Scientist, Random Forest, Software Engineer, Spark, Azure, UI, and Research Scientist. Apoorva has 2.36 years of relevant experience and is passionate about using data science to solve complex problems.