Saurin H. Shah

About me

Currently I am a graduate student pursuing my Master's degree in Computer Science at Northeastern University with interests in Web Development and Data.

I've been exploring technologies by stepping out of my comfort zone since childhood. Gadgets intrigued me and led me to pursue a BE degree in Electronics and Telecommunications. Soon on realizing the impact of efficient software to make the best use of the hardware, I was motivated to pursue an MS degree in Computer Science at Northeastern University, Boston.

I opted for courses that strengthened my foundations in the areas of Data and Web Development. I've completed various projects during my Co-Op and courses in the areas of Web development, Computer Systems, Parallel Data Processing, Machine Learning and Information Retrieval.

With a passion for developing software that can empower people, I aim to work Full-time as a Software Engineer / Full-stack Engineer for a company that aligns with my goal of building innovative products at a fast pace.

(Available: Jan 2019)

Education

Sep 2016 - Present

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, Boston, MA

(Expected Graduation: Dec 2018)

Master of Science in Computer Science, GPA: 3.52 / 4.00

Relevant courses: Algorithms, Computer Systems, Machine Learning, Web Development, Information Retrieval, Parallel Data Processing in MapReduce, Database Management Systems, Program Design Paradignms

May 2015

UNIVERSITY OF PUNE, Pune, India

Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications, First Class

Related courses: Data Structures, Computer Networks, System Programming and Operating Systems, Computer Organization and Architecture, Embedded Systems and RTOS, Digital Logic Design

Experience

May - Aug 2018

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Northeastern University (Boston, MA)

Assisted the professor by clarifying students’ doubts and grading assignments for the Web development course.

Aug - Dec 2017

Product Software Engineer Co-Op

eResearch Technology (Boston, MA)

Developed features for a single-page eCOA application for Web and handheld devices using Backbone.js, Node.js and Jasmine test framework in an Agile development environment.
Saved around 4 hours of the translation team’s weekly time by writing a Python script to automate the validation of language translation strings for the application.
Developed a performance testing tool to test the database capacity for the application on different platforms.
Assisted in dockerizing and hosting the web application on an AWS EC2 instance.

Mar - Jul 2016

Programmer Analyst Trainee

Cognizant Technology Solutions (Pune, India)

Collaborated with a team of 3 people to develop a PoC for a bank management system using Spring Boot and SQL.

June 2015 - May 2015

Project Intern

Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) (Pune, India)

Designed and developed a system that automated the process of capturing photos and recording videos eliminating the need of camera operators at various types of events. Worked in a team of 4 students and used Python and C.
Achieved a high camera positioning accuracy of 0.064 degrees by tuning the closed-loop PID controller that was implemented using a DSP and FPGA connected to a Raspberry Pi computer.

Projects

EMPOWER CLASSROOMS Jun - Aug 2018

Developed a crowdfunding application using React, Spring Boot and MySQL to fund classroom projects from public schools. It offers a messaging service between teachers, volunteers and donors

PREDICTING ERROR IN ZILLOW'S HOME VALUE ESTIMATION Mar - Apr 2018

Pre-processed the data and employed feature selection and cross-validation techniques to ensure an optimum fit.
Implemented the Random forest algorithm which gave the best mean absolute log error of 0.0645 amongst three algorithms and wrote an AAAI format paper for the project.

MULTI-GPU IMPLEMENTATION TO GENERATE PRIME NUMBERS Mar - Apr 2018

Developed an enhanced implementation of ‘Sieve of Eratosthenes’ algorithm on multiple Nvidia CUDA GPUs to generate prime numbers in the range of 10th power (or higher) of 10 and achieved speedup of 500x over CPU.
Handled the memory management for CPU and GPU and wrote the GPU kernel launcher.

THREAD-SAFE MALLOC LIBRARY Feb - Mar 2018

Wrote a multi-threaded malloc library in C to support memory management with malloc, free, calloc and realloc.

HAPPY JOURNEY Mar - Apr 2017

Developed a responsive, mobile-first single page application (SPA) that can enable users to search flights and hotels, enquire about specific journeys with registered travel agents to get the best deals and allow hotel owners to list their hotel. It was developed using MEAN for full stack JavaScript development and employed RESTful web services.

SEARCH ENGINE DESIGN Nov - Dec 2016

Implemented a focused web crawler for Wikipedia articles and ranked the pages using Google’s PageRank algorithm.
Designed and built Information Retrieval (IR) systems in Python using BM25, tf-idf and cosine similarity algorithms with feature of query expansion using pseudo relevance feedback.
Evaluated and compared performance of all systems on CACM test collections in terms of retrieval effectiveness.

TRIPLE STAGE SECURITY SYSTEM Jan - May 2014

Led a team of 3 students for our Junior-year project to implement a system which can be used to provide security in 3 stages at places like bank lockers, restricted areas, master control rooms, etc.
Implemented 8-bit serial communication at 9600 bps between the microcontroller and the GSM module in order to send the identified user an OTP to his mobile phone.
Designed a simple user interface (UI) using a 16x2 LCD display that displayed user inputs through a 4x4 input matrix keypad and gave system status and violations.

SMART CLASSROOM Oct - Nov 2013

Implemented a system that aides in managing classrooms by keeping a record of the number of students present and controlling the lights and fan speed depending on the temperature.
Minimized the number of IR sensors required by placing the sensors in a specific sequence at the classroom entry and enabling the system to maintain student count by using same set of IR sensors to detect entries and exits.

Skills

Languages:

Java, Python, C, Racket, HTML, CSS, Embedded C

Web Technologies:

Spring Boot, REST API, JavaScript, React, Redux, Angular, Node.js, Express, Bootstrap, jQuery

Frameworks:

Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, Apache Spark

Databases / Cloud:

SQL, MongoDB, HDFS, AWS (EMR, RDS, S3), Heroku

Tools / Platforms:

Git, Docker, Nvidia CUDA, Maven, Rally, AccuRev, Webstorm, Eclipse, Pycharm