Aanshul Sadaria, SWE III at Google, Institute Gold Medalist at IIIT-H, First Inventor at Adobe, Speaker at 50+ events and a Mentor to 1000+ students talks to Abbhinav (123 of AI) and co-host Debayan (Microsoft), in this first of 2 part series!

The conversation delves around Aanshul’s journey - his initial struggles to achieving the batch gold medal, from failing at interviews to his current position at Google, his data analytics projects around Twitter Sentiment Analysis for elections as well as Traffic Challan Portals, dealing with imposter syndrome, and his growth mindset for dealing with challenges.

CELEBRATION: We just hit an all-time high rank of the No. 7 in Technology on the Apple Podcasts Charts!

AANSHUL REVEALS:

• How he went from an over-achiever in schools to struggling when he landed in college
• Importance of prioritising research projects - which made his resume stand out and build interesting experiences
• The process of collecting and organizing Twitter data related to political figures, analyzing tweet activity and sentiment to infer potential alliances and competition between parties during elections.
• The existence of bots spreading misinformation on Twitter
• How they studied traffic violations and user behaviour change in relation to policing and big data aggregation, to understand the probability of repeat offences and extend the concept of criminal recidivism to traffic violations.
• The challenges faced in scraping data and collaborating with government agencies
• How they found loopholes in the traffic challan portal - revealing all your vehicle information with simple attacks.
• His project at Adobe involving image segmentation in vector images, deep learning, and patent publication.
• The unexpected opportunity to interview with Google
• The importance of a supportive team and environment in helping individuals overcome imposter syndrome

BEST MOMENTS:

"I was like - this doesn't make sense. I was happy for him, and, eventually, I was also happy for myself too (after some time)." - Anshul on his initial reaction to not getting the PPO at Adobe.

"The atmosphere of the office, the people in the team and the environment they create around you when you are joining a new team or a new company; that is important for how you can handle imposter syndrome." - Anshul on the importance of a supportive team environment.

"Some people call it arrogance, Some people call it attitude. Some people call it hard work as well. I don't know whatever it is, it has worked for me till now." - Anshul on his growth mindset and desire to continually learn and improve.

"I was tired so I went to sleep. I didn't wake up for my Uber interview and I was a teaching assistant as well." - Anshul on missing an interview due to exhaustion.

"It was kind of humbling experience for me and my family" - Anshul on the emotional reactions of his family when he received the Google offer.

ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Abbhinav Venkat, is the founder of 123 of AI, an ed-tech company enabling working professionals upskill in AI/ML. He is an entrepreneur, AI researcher, and podcaster. Prior to starting 123 of AI, he spent several years at multiple Silicon Valley startups as a Computer Vision Scientist. His academic career involved AI research at IIIT-H and Stanford University with several top-tier publications in BMVC, ICCV, ACPR. For his research, he was awarded Qualcomm’s Innovation Fellowship, felicitated by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), GOI, as well as invited for talks in 4 continents.

123 of AI’s official website: https://www.123ofai.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/abbhinavvenkat