About Me

Summary

Hi there! My name is Pravin Paratey and I am a graduate from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay where I did my Bachelors in Computer Science. Following that, I worked in a number of startups building systems to extract information from structured as well as unstructured text. Some of the things I built are,

Natural Language Processing - Custom parsers, custom rules engines and grammars.
Parsers - Deterministic & Non-deterministic finite state automata based parsers for HTML & XML. Also built an elementary javascript parser for evaluating a very limited subset of javascript.
Search Engines - both vertical and organic.
Crawlers - both open and closed crawlers.

Currently

I am currently the CTO of Affectv, the next generation audience targeting business serving ads based on a person's interaction with content and with people.

Research & Teaching

My research interests are in the domain of Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction. Lately, I have started working in Graph Theory.

I enjoy teaching and I have taken guest lectures on Linux, Natural Language Processing and Probability theory. I have also taught elementary math to school children.

Contact

Feel free to email me at pravinp@gmail.com [PGP public key]
Fingerprint: C429 C386 6373 A951 73AC 5C90 0A4D 9C11 A817 15BC

Credits

Icons courtesy: Lazy Crazy Cat.

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Latest Articles

Building a url shortener in 10 mins: A 10 minute guide to building your own url shortener i.e. a service that lets you shorten a long url - http://pravin.insanitybegins.com to a url that takes up less number of characters - http://goo.gl/q3jEH

Going Text-mode: I spend a great deal of time working on the Terminal. Here, I list my must-have console applications for email, www browsing, and programming in Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

Setting up Replica sets in MongoDB: A 5-minute guide to setting up replica sets on MongoDB. Covers downloading, installation on various flavours of linux, editing the config file and initiating replica sets!

Super quick Find & Replace: This article explores a number of ways of performing a find/replace and compares the various implementations for different sizes of the find/replace list and input text.

Set data structures & Implementation: Sets are an important concept and extremely useful in various computer science applications. We take a look at some of the ways a set data structure can be implemented.

Manage your wireless with nmcli: This article shows you how to use the command line tool nmcli to manage your wireless networks. If you prefer cli over gui, go ahead and take a look.

Binary heaps & Priority Queues: Heaps and Queues can be a powerful data structure. This article goes into the implementation of a binary heap and extends the data structure to act as a priority queue.

Recursive functions, Stack overflows and Python: Here we look at recursive functions in Python, and explore some ways of avoiding the maximum stack depth limit by using alternate functions like reduce().

Facebook puzzle - Find Sophie: Today we solve the FB engineering puzzle - Find Sophie. We start with a naive solution and improve the algorithm until we can pass the Facebook Puzzlebot. In closing, I leave you with open-ended questions on improving the algorithm further.

Palindromic sub-sequences in python: This bit of python code returns all palindromic subsequences in the input string. Nothing to see here, I was just having a meh moment.