About

Raghavendran Balu is an accomplished Applied Scientist with over 11 years of experience in Information and Data Science. Currently working at Amazon as an Applied Scientist II, he has a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions to complex problems. Raghavendran has previously worked at Here as a Senior Research Engineer, where he was responsible for developing a data-driven solution for extracting point-of-interest information from web pages. He also worked on improving the search quality of location search by applying machine learning techniques, resulting in a 3% improvement over the baseline. He pioneered privacy-preserving technologies efforts at Here, leading to three successful patent grants and five more patent filings. His tech stack includes C++, Python, and Scala. Prior to Here, Raghavendran worked as a Doctorant at Inria, where he collaborated with Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent on privacy and scalability aspects of recommender systems. His work involved data sketching, differential privacy, similarity search, matrix factorization, Bayesian inference, and machine learning. His tech stack included Julia, C++, Matlab, and Scala. Raghavendran holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Computer Science from the Université de Rennes I, an MS by Research in Computer Science from the International Institute of Information Technology, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Anna University. His technical expertise includes research science, data science, machine learning, search, web, neural networks, Spark, Python, and Scala. Overall, Raghavendran is a highly skilled Applied Scientist with a passion for solving complex problems using innovative solutions. He is a valuable addition to any team looking to push the boundaries of information and data science.