About

Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan is a highly accomplished Computer Science Ph.D. student at EPFL, working at the Data Science Lab under the guidance of Prof. Robert West. With a passion for using deep learning, machine learning, and complex systems methods to approach problems in Sociology, History, and Philosophy of Science, Bhargav has already made significant contributions to the field of natural language processing and computational linguistics. Prior to his current position, Bhargav was a Research Fellow at Knowledge Lab, University of Chicago, where he worked with Prof. James Evans on Thinking with Deep Learning, a series of methods and philosophies of approaching social science, business, and research problems using deep learning-powered high-dimensional representations and embeddings. Together, they are co-authoring a book on the same topic. Bhargav has also written a book on text analysis with Python titled "Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics," published by PackT Publishing. He is an active contributor to the Open Source Scientific Computing community, and his work has been published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research and the proceedings of the International Conference in Computational Linguistics'20, among others. In addition to his research and academic pursuits, Bhargav has spoken at over 15 conferences across Europe, Asia, and North America, including PyCons and PyDatas. He is the co-maintainer and co-creator of the python machine learning package pycobra and comp-syn and was a Google Summer of Code student with NumFOCUS, where he implemented Dynamic Topic Models for Gensim. Bhargav has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani - Goa Campus, and a Master's degree in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago. He is currently pursuing his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Computer Science from EPFL, where he is working on deep learning approaches to study causal inference in social scientific settings and influence-based models. Overall, Bhargav has 4.20 years of relevant experience as a Research Scientist, with expertise in Deep Learning, NLP, ML, Python, and Data Science. He is a highly motivated and accomplished individual who has made significant contributions to the field of Computer Science and is poised to make even greater contributions in the future.