About Me
My name is Aswin Rajkumar and I'm a Computer Science graduate student at the University of Southern California. I'm really passionate about web application development and data science.
My passion for programming started way back in time during my childhood when my father gifted me a pop-up book called Inside the Personal Computer by Sharon Gallagher. I used to spend a lot of time typing on the paper keyboard and pretending to be a programmer. When I was in fifth grade, he bought me a Cyrix II dinosaur with Basic installed in it. I started hacking away with it and made my first program, a grocery expenses calculator for my mom. When she fed in list after list and the output kept coming out right, I felt a certain joy that I can't describe. In that moment, I told myself, "This is what I want to do". It was a real turning point in my life.
Internet came, floppy disks died and new interesting technologies kept raining all around me. I spent most of the time learning programming languages or reading tech magazines. After completing Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science at Cochin University of Science and Technology, I joined Tata Consultancy Services, where I learned how to apply my knowledge in a professional environment and engineer good quality software. I learned the value of team work while working as a part of the largest team in the portfolio. I also worked in small teams where I learned agile development techniques. Without a doubt, it was a great experience.
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
Confucius
Around the time when big data emerged and became the next big thing, my interests became more focussed and I decided to pursue advanced studies in Computer Science with a focus on Data Science, Big Data and Machine Learning. I'm glad that I made that decision and took the leap of faith because my knowledge and skills improved a lot and I had an amazing time in Los Angeles too. Now, I'm ready for the next step - choose a job that I love, one that wouldn't feel like work :)
My Work
Computational Social Science Laboratory, USC
Los Angeles, California
Since June 2014
What I did
- Designed the software architecture and developed prototype.
- Implemented a plugin based architecture and API for extensibility and to encourage developer community participation.
- Evaluated design choices and set coding standards.
- Managed a team of five developers and refined and expanded the prototype through agile development.
- Improved the user experience by implementing smooth and responsive UI through multithreading and asynchronous UI updates.
- Developed a custom Trie or prefix tree to implement LIWC-style text analysis.
Technologies
Eclipse RCP, Java
Information Sciences Institute
Marina del Ray, California
March 2014 to June 2014
What I did
- Developed the back end application and database queries to manage the storage and retrieval of the study data.
- Wrote client-side scripts for DOM view manipulation and asynchronous data transfer.
- Designed and finetuned database schema and modeled it in RDBMS.
Technologies
Java EE, jQuery, AJAX, JSON, SQL
Tata Consultancy Services
Bangalore, Cochin
November 2008 to June 2012
What I did
- Expedited the server migration process and drastically reduced the turn around time by 95% by developing automation tools for modifying, building and deploying the applications
- Utilizing agile development techniques, delivered evolutionary revisions based on client requirements and feedback.
- Developed automated tools and scripts for data integration, server house-keeping and application monitoring.
- Worked on the server-side controllers and application logic.
Technologies
Java / Java EE, Shell Script