Gati Aher

Experience

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  Einstein's Workshop

  Feb 2018 - Jun 2019

  Mentor and Teaching Assistant

  Taught STEM concepts to students learning and playing at Einstein's Workshop.- Coached a FIRST Lego League (FLL) Robotics Team and assisted in classes for robotics, CAD, and programming.

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  Boston University Software & Application Innovation Lab

  Jul 2018 - Aug 2018

  Software Engineer

  Designed and implemented demo protocols and benchmark tests for Javascript Implementation of Federated Functionalities (JIFF), Boston University's framework for building web-based applications that employ secure multi-party computation (MPC) systems.- Implemented Goodrich's Randomized Shellsort algorithm and a general set-intersection algorithm.- Found optimization resulting in significant speed increase for JIFF's secret multiplication operation.

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  MITRE

  Jun 2019 - Aug 2019

  Machine Learning Engineer

  Worked on creating the initial pipeline for SAILS (Secure, Assured, Intelligent Learning Systems), an IARPA program to establish and explore a science of security for privacy vulnerabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) systems.- Implemented pipeline to allow researchers to systematically evaluate the security vulnerabilities of their machine learning models on a customizable barrage of adversarial attacks.- Defined generalized gRPC interface and first prototype for evaluating Docker containerized attacks and defenses in benchmark comparison tests.- Successfully improved the flexibility and speed of sending batches of images over gRPC from 17 minutes to 17 seconds.- Researched and consolidated information about adversarial attacks and defenses to populate a public interest resource. Show less

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  Cumulus Digital Systems

  May 2020 - Aug 2020

  Software Engineer

  Developed externally facing REST API for Cumulus's clients that manage their business data using generic ERP solutions and have a need to interface with Cumulus's system directly. - Created Webhooks system for clients to subscribe into real-time events within the system by utilizing DynamoDB to store callback urls, and AWS Lambda to receive and react to event messages from AWS SNS.- Implemented secure API endpoints using a combination of Serverless Framework, AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFront, and NodeJS to fulfill standard batch ETL requirements for the clients.- Designed and implemented processes to improve REST API maintainability and usability, including strongly typed schema definitions for request and response validation, automated documentation generation, and an interactive and visual Swagger UI documentation display console that clients can use to learn and experiment with the API.- Implemented React-Native designs that decreased number of clicks required to perform common actions in the app. Show less

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  MITRE

  Sept 2020 - Jan 2021

  Machine Learning Engineer

  Researching new methods to exploit vulnerabilities in machine learning-based natural language processing systems such as information retrieval, machine translation, and unknown author characterization. - Revived and adapted an academic lab’s research code for generating a paraphrase database using the bilingual pivoting technique, debugged it in a new environment, incorporated newer software packages, ran timing experiments to determine hardware needs and Hadoop configuration for running resource-intensive computation with 4x more data, modified code to run faster for our specific use-case.- Augmented dataset with 900 million segments of parallel text, performed word-alignment, implemented methods for scrubbing poorly aligned segments- Used Logistic Regression for classification on an imbalanced dataset, improved performance with feature engineering Show less

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  Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering

  Sept 2020 - Dec 2023

  Microbial community datasets are compositional and hierarchical datasets. Identifying real and consistent trends across samples and removing spurious effects due to compositional and hierarchical properties is an area of on-going research. - Leveraged R and Python packages to visualize trends in time-series data with hierarchical properties- Performed literature review and empirical evaluation of methods for compositional data analysis- Implemented and analyzed algorithms for inferring network interactions in microbial communities - Cleaned and interpreted 2D Fourier analysis to measure periodic patterns in bacteria surface images Show less

  • Undergraduate Researcher, Microbial and Bioinformatics Research Lab

    Jan 2021 - Dec 2023

  • Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

    Sept 2020 - Jan 2021
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  Indico Data

  May 2021 - Aug 2021

  Machine Learning Engineer

  Worked on two related machine-learning research tasks: (1) adapting computer vision deep learning models to accurately handle handwriting and stamps on business documents, and (2) researching design for a flexible, intuitive extraction grouping interface.- Prototyped and user-tested novel React.js GUI for predicting and correcting grouped extractions- Adapted object detection Faster R-CNN model to classify handwriting on business documents- Incorporated methods for alternate pre-training, multi-label tasks, and small object detection Show less

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  Olin Satellite + Spectrum Technology & Policy Group (OSSTP)

  Sept 2021 - Jun 2023

  Undergraduate Researcher (ML, Automation, & Data Science Lead)

  The United States uses spectrum auctions to sell the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Understanding spectrum policy grows more important as more companies race to support 5G technology.- Applied causal statistics and game theory to analyze factors driving value in 5G spectrum auctions- Automated web-scraping, pdf-text extraction, and data mining with Python and R scripts- Researched and formulated economic implications of ongoing FCC satellite and spectrum policies Show less

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  Microsoft

  May 2022 - Aug 2022

  Undergraduate Computing Research Intern
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  Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science

  Sept 2023 - now

  Machine Learning Ph.D.