Rachneet Kaur

PhD Student, Industrial Engineering Department

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

I am interested in Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Operations Research.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign PhD Industrial Engineering August 2016 - Present Adviser: `Prof. Richard Sowers`
	Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Masters in Mathematics 2013 - 2015 Adviser: `Prof. Aparna Mehra`
Ramjas College, University of Delhi Bachelors (Honors) in Mathematics 2010 - 2013

Past Internships

Research & Development Data Science Intern 3M, Minneapolis, MN May - August 2018 Mentors: David Redigner, Brian Stankiewicz
	Exploratory Quantitative Research Intern Quantlab Financial LLC, Boston, MA May - August 2017 Mentors: Areez Mody, Matteo Nicoli
Financial Consulting Research Intern World Quant LLC, Mumbai, India June - July 2016
	Research Intern Universite Paris - I, Paris, France May - August 2015 Mentor: Julien Randon Furling
Research Intern Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Center for Applicable Mathematics, Bangalore, India May - August 2014 Mentor: Mythily Ramaswamy
	Winter School National Institute of Technology, Calicut Dec 2013 Mentors: Satyananda Panda, T. Suman Kumar

Publications

Virtual Reality, Visual Cliffs, and Movement Disorders

Rachneet Kaur, Xun Lin, Alexander Layton, Manuel Hernandez and Richard Sowers

40^th Annual International Conference, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2018

Computing with words

Conference Presentations

Poster Presentation, Grace Hopper Celebration, 2018

Poster Presentation, 2nd Illinois Health Data Analytics Summit

Virtual Reality, Visual Cliffs, and Movement Disorders, by Rachneet Kaur, Xun Lin, Alexander Layton, Manuel Hernandez, and Richard Sowers, 40th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

IoT Project Demo for John Deere, April 2018

Poster Presentation, Coordinated Science Lab Student Conference, Feb 2018

Poster Presentation, Annual IEEE Power and Energy Conference, Feb 2018

Poster Presentation, INFORMS Annual Meeting

Poster Presentation, BMES Conference

Illinois Geometry Lab Open House

IIT Delhi Open House , Apr 2015
- Exhibited my M.Sc. Thesis project “Computing with words” through a poster presentation at Open House of IIT- Delhi on 18th Apr 2015.

Presented the solution on ‘Retrieving the playfair matrix from a given string of plain text and the corresponding cipher text’ developed as part of ‘The Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan Competition’ at the seminars on cryptography at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, U.K on June 2013.

The Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan International conference, Dec 2012
- Attended the International conference ‘The Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan’ held at University of Delhi on 22nd Dec 2012.

Selected Awards

Sept 2018	ACM Travel Grant and Conference Scholarship for Grace Hopper Celebration
2018 - 2019	Willian A. Chittenden Fellowship Award ($15,000 Research Scholarship)
April 2018	1^st Place, UIUC ISE Travel Poster Competition
Mar 2018	Illinois Geometry Lab Research Award
Dec 2017	Mottier Innovation Challenge in Systems Engineering
June 2016	World Quant Summer Challenge
Mar 2015	Charpak Research Intern Scholarship 2015
2015 - 2016	GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) Mathematics Scholarship
2015	II rank in M.Sc. Mathematics, IIT – Delhi, 2013 – 2015
2013	All India Rank - 40 in IIT- JAM (Joint Admission Test for Masters) Mathematics
2013	AIR 39 in IIT – JAM Statistics
2013	II position in B.Sc. (H) Mathematics, 2010 – 2013
Dec 2012	The Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan Competition
2010	Top 0.1% merit students in Mathematics and Computer Science
2009	Won Central level Science Quiz, Directorate of Education
2008	Top 0.1% merit students in Mathematics and Social Science
2008 - 2013	Oriental Insurance Trust award for performance in 10^th, 12^th standard and B.Sc.

Research Projects

Learning to Rank for text document prioritization, Aug - Dec 2017 [Code] [Report]

• Implementing Stochastic Pairwise Descent ranking function with SVM to extend the Python MeTA text retrieval toolkit.
• Comparing the mean average precision and training speed of our implementation of SPD with LTR ranking method.

Movie Review Sentiment Analysis, STAT542 Project, UIUC Jan 2017 - Apr 2017 [Code] [Report]

• Implemented logistic regression, Random forest and XGBoost for BOW, TF-IDF and LDA to predict IMDB sentiments.
• Visualized sentiment word tagging, word cloud and word frequency plots revealing the essence of the prediction model.

Visual Cliffs, Virtual Reality and Movement Disorders, Illinois Geometry Lab, UIUC Jan 2017 - Present [Report]

• Using a Virtual Reality headset (HTC Vive) to let people walk through a virtual world that is apparently dangerous.
• At the same time, using a brain-computer interface in the form of an EEG to record brain waves and estimate the person’s anxiety level.
• The tools we develop form the basis of a platform to study how anxiety influences people’s motion patterns.

Internet of Things, Industrial Engineering Department, UIUC Oct 2016 - Present

• Working on Python to develop predictive models for electricity prices.
• The predictions are to be used along with an IoT device to switch on appliances say washer and dryer optimally to benefit both the consumers as well as the producers of Illinois.

Maxit [Code]

Distributed K-means [Code]

Master’s Thesis, Computing with words, IIT Delhi Jul 2014 - May 2015
• Shortlisted to exhibit the project through a poster at IITD’s Open House
• Analyzed decision making techniques with linguistic evaluations in stock portfolio, image segmentation etc.

Modelling of Industrial problems in differential equations, NIT Calicut Dec 2013
• Simulated schemes of age structured nonlinear models in MATLAB to forecast the population of Indian cities

Winning project, The Legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan competition, Delhi University Oct - Dec 2012

Designed a cryptographic algorithm to unravel the playfair matrix, a digraph encryption scheme
• Presented the C++ code at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as part of a sponsored trip, during summer

Other Projects

Grow Safe, Apr 2015

Designed an android app ‘Grow Safe’ for the NASA International Space Apps Challenge Apr 2015

Color O Manic, Jan 2014

Collaborated in a team of 2 to create a Windows game ‘ColorOManiac’ for Microsoft Code. Fun. Do

University of Delhi - Milk content Analysis

HelpMeA(sa)pp, Aug 2013

Coordinated in a team of 3 to design an android application ‘HelpMeA(sa)pp’ for Yahoo Hack U Aug 2013

Positions of Responsibility

Sept 2018	Reviewer, 13^th Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Workshop ****Acted as a reviewer for the 13th WiML Workshop, co-located with NIPS, Dec 2018.
Mar - Apr 2016	Open House Coordinator, IIT Delhi ****Spearheaded a team of 50+ volunteers managing 500+ schools participating in the event Organized and regulated press coverages prior and during the event Strategized and guided execution of the inaugural ceremony and guest talks
*Feb - Mar 2016*	Event Management Volunteer, Rubic's Cube Indian Nationals Acted as a judge for various tournaments and managed attendees throughout the sessions
Jan - Mar 2016	Publicity Volunteer, Spic Macay, IIT Delhi Coordinated for offline and online journalistic activities during the 10 day cultural fest
Jan - Mar 2015	Event Management Volunteer, Tryst, IIT Delhi Managed the Math department events for one of the biggest technical fests of India
2009 - 2010	Prefect, Guru Nanak Public School, Delhi

Contact Me

21, Industrial Engineering Department

Urbana, IL, USA | +1(217)904-8392