About Ananya
I've spent a lot of my time thinking about my purpose in life. What to do, being here, in the universe, for a tiny dot of time. Though I may have settled on absurdism, Nelson Mandela said something that resonated with me: “What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.” I hope to impact billions of people for the better. I want to live a meaningful, exciting life. By learning, building, growing with exceptional people, I genuinely think I'm on the journey to do that. I will inevitably face challenges and perhaps be faced with life-changing obstacles out of my control. But I'll always give it my best -- try to spread joy, love, passion, and humor -- and that's all I can ask from myself.
My Journey
• Started off doing Genomics Research for 2 years, at the Cohn Lab at SickKids hospital. • I realized the problems in genetic data acquisition, and recruited experts and teammates to build G-nome, a platform famously putting genetic data on the blockchain. • The platform got moved into ConsenSys. • Then, I worked on the investment committee at Babel Ventures, a San Francisco biotech VC fund. • Then, I worked on the Artificial Intelligence team at IBM. • I interned at Neuralink, did invasive Neurotech research at Stanford • Now, I a Stanford engineering undergraduate and masters student, and building many projects in neurotech and AI. • I also love the random pursuit of curiosities, so I followed my instinct. • I built mind-controlled cars, brain-controlled prosthetics, talking robots, earned my pilot's license, became fascinated with philosophy(currently reading Nagel's article on Moral Luck), played too much poker, and advised companies along the way.
My Values
Here is a tweet from Shane Parrish that represents some things I value. "Eulogies are an interesting window into how to live. They talk about: The shots you take, not the ones you miss; Chasing dreams, not accepting the status quo; Epic love, not mediocre relationships; and What you do, not what you signal. "
A platform that famously "put genetic data on the blockchain", allowing users to anonymously share genetic data to researcher's datasets. Even though they were anonymous, they could also get paid for their contributions. The platform's technology later moved into ConsenSys.
Now, at IBM I started a team to automate the code QA process, a monotonous task that can take hours per day for developers when they write new code. Now, we're building the Analyzer. A tool to analyze call-graphs, C++, and LLVMIR to autonomously generate and run code tests. Now, we’re a team of five people, patent-pending, and hopeful to save millions of dollars per IBM team with our product. Catch us at THINK San Francisco for our demo!
Built a mind-controlled robot, brain-controlled MP3 Players, and prosthetics, controlled with EEGs and electrodes. I became sponsored by Microsoft for neurotech development. My brain controlled car won the International Grand Prize at the Impossible Science Challenge by engineering.com and was demoed on Discovery Channel and other media.
A lifesize conversational robot. I brainstormed, ordered PCBs and servos, and 3D printed. I met with Natural Language Processing(NLP) experts at Google and Microsoft. In the library, I consumed research papers about new NLP models like encoder-decoders and recurrent neural networks. I trained these ML models with my texts and emails.
