Simola Nayak

University of Washington ‘21, Georgia Tech ’18. Fullstack and natural language processing skillset. 

ClassRanked, Salt Lake City/Remote – Fullstack and Natural Language Processing Engineer

JUNE 2021 - FEBRUARY 2023

Extracted syllabus keywords (as indicators of course topic and level) and review sentiment from legacy site data: syllabi, reviews, course equivalencies, and professor ratings with PyTorch, Selenium, and NLTK. Wrote frontend and APIs in React and Django to take initial product to pilot (of 500 users), including mission-critical login system. Worked on two tech stacks: S3-APIGateway-DynamoDB for large-scale and EC2 for small-scale. Communicated details of NLP applications, large scale data operations, and recommendation engines to nontechnical stakeholders, including issues of fairness, bias, and privacy.

Stanford University Code In Place – Section Leader

MARCH 2021 - JUNE 2021

Selective volunteer program (10%) during COVID-19 to teach introductory Python to adults from around the world. Ensured understanding of material and well-being in a group of students. Led special topic weekend sessions on language, computing, and ML.

University of Washington Linguistics Department, Seattle – Student Assistant, Programming

DECEMBER 2020 – DECEMBER 2020

Automated grade calculations and created concrete chat transcript metrics for a class moved online due to COVID- LING 566 (Syntax for Computational Linguists), using Python Pandas and NLTK, increasing grading efficiency and enabling more granular final grade calculations.

Pyxy, Atlanta/Remote - NLP Engineering, Contract

MARCH 2020 - AUGUST 2020

Built ELT pipeline for an aggregated corpus of scraped Yelp reviews to score locations on relevance to various sightseeing and tourism categories using Word2Vec embeddings using Python Gensim, with an emphasis on speed. Cached predictions to improve model performance on mobile devices.

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta – Research Assistant, EarSketch

FEBRUARY 2017 – MAY 2017

Project to rewrite EarSketch coding lessons to be more accessible to middle school students below target reading level. Wrote script in Python to calculate Flesch-Kincaid reading levels to facilitate faster rewrites, using bash, Python, regexes, and NumPy. Drove increase in enrollment and student retention.

University of Washington, Seattle - M.S. Computational Linguistics

SEPTEMBER 2019 – MARCH 2021

GPA: 3.82

Relevant Coursework: Syntax, Semantics, Phonetics, Phonology, Analyzing Neural Language Models, Deep/Shallow NLP, NLP Systems and Applications (Project)

Societies + Activities: Research Computing Club; Computation Language and Meaning Band of Researchers (CLMBR); Huskies for Suicide Prevention and Awareness (HSPA)

Relevant Project: Hate Speech Detection with BERT (Python, PyTorch, HTCondor, Jupyter Notebooks)

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta - B.S. Computer Science

JUNE 2016 – DECEMBER 2018

Relevant Coursework: Automata and Complexity, Machine Learning, Statistics, Linguistics Intro, Multivariable Calculus

Societies + Activities: Concert Band (Clarinet + Bass Clarinet); STEM outreach (Junior STEM)