Shray Khanna

Data Science Education and Experience

Curiosity and being an avid learner is what made me tap into Data Science. During my Bachelors (in Computer Science), I was exploring different options across various domains such as Graphic Design, web development etc. I stumbled across an article back in 2015 which said that in the coming few years, Data Science will be very hot! I wanted to learn what it was and apply this to real world so I completed 5 online certifications from UC San Diego and Stanford.

I was so fascinated with data that I wanted to apply what I learnt in real life use cases. I interned with National Informatics Center during Bachelors where I got the chance to work on Gigabytes of goverment's data. I analyzed and made reports using Pyspark and Hadoop to reduce decision making time from 6 months to 2 to 3 months. This was when I realized that analyzing data and finding patterns in it is what comes naturally to me. So I joined the Masters program in SFU to dive deep.

This is where I learnt how coding, statistics and business can be combined in one thing to achieve better profits and grow exponentially. I interned with the leading travel companies Expedia as a Data Scientist where I worked on a NLP project. I made ML models which predicted themes from comments of people. These themes helped various departments such as marketing, R&D and developers to analyze different areas and hotels inorder to best provide to customers.

In any use case I work in, I try to utilize my past experiences and be always curious to ensure that the company is profitting in whatever they invest in.