ojas@portfolio:~/work$ cat overview.md
The professional side_
Data Scientist & AI Engineer. M.S. in Statistics — Data Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (May 2025). Currently modeling some of the largest behavioral gambling datasets in the United States.
$ who's reading? — i'll reorder this page for you
# hiring for something? paste the job description and get an instant, evidence-backed read on how Ojas fits it.
Data Scientist · New Brunswick, NJ
$ ./explain --like-im-not-technical
Millions gamble online, and a hidden cohort quietly spirals into dangerous overspending — yet no platform is required to catch them. Untreated, it cascades into bankruptcy, crime, and worse.
ML models that read behavioral fingerprints — bigger bets, rising frequency, a growing share of income spent — across 13.6 billion real betting events, to pinpoint the exact tipping point where someone crosses into high-risk.
At-risk players get flagged early for support — resources, mandatory cooling-off periods — and the models hand state regulators the evidence to shape policy and require platforms to adopt safeguards.
“Machine learning can trace these patterns to find a tipping point that places individuals into a risk category. This is virtually impossible to do with human calculations alone.”
$ cat pipeline.yaml — how 13.6B records become policy
$ ingest
4.5 TB · 13.6B events
PySpark + SQL across 7 operators
$ preprocess
clean · normalize · reduce
missing-value handling, Z-Score & IQR filtering, PCA (95% variance)
$ engineer
behavioral features
deposit, session & wagering signals per gambler
$ cluster
K-Means · GMM
1M+ gamblers segmented · silhouette 0.79
$ classify
SVM · LightGBM
multi-class risk · A/B-validated
$ deploy
interventions → policy
industry & state-level regulation
$ ./measure --impact
records analysed
0.00B
raw betting events
4.5 TB streaming out of seven operators
keep scrolling — this is what 13.6 billion records actually becomes
# this is the shape of my day job. move the sliders and watch a player get classified — the same behavioural signals I engineer at Rutgers.
change in average stake over 30 days — chasing losses is the strongest single signal
requesting a payout then reversing it to keep playing
how often money is added — rising cadence precedes escalation
how much of a deposit goes into a single wager
total weekly session load
share of play between midnight and 6am
▸ Behaviour looks recreational. No intervention — monitoring only.
what's driving it
where they land · cohort of 220
# an illustrative model on a synthetic cohort — transparent weights, running entirely in your browser. The production research at Rutgers runs on 13.6B real betting events with K-Means and GMM clustering (silhouette 0.79) and multi-class classifiers, and its outputs are not public. Same signals and the same shape of decision; this one you can poke at.
$ cat recommendation.txt
Ojas has been an invaluable asset as a data scientist with the Center for Gambling Studies team. He has guided the development of unsupervised machine learning algorithms to classify the risk level of gamblers based on behavioral data. Throughout this process, he has shown an eagerness to understand the base of literature to combine subject matter knowledge with his data science expertise.
Jackie Friedman Stanmyre
Assistant Director, Center for Gambling Studies — Rutgers University School of Social Work
December 2025 · managed Ojas directly
$ git log --experience
where I've worked and what I shipped.
April 2024 — Present
Data Scientist
Center for Gambling Studies, Rutgers University ↗ · New Brunswick, NJ
- ▸Engineered an in-depth analysis on a 4.5 TB dataset with 13.6 billion records from seven gambling operators, identifying high-risk gambler profiles to enable timely early interventions.
- ▸Built and deployed data-driven risk assessment models like K-Means and GMM clustering models to classify over 1 million gamblers based on behavioral indicators, achieving a Silhouette Score of 0.79, improving precision of regulatory policy insights.
- ▸Enhanced effectiveness of early gambling interventions by 33% through improved multi-class risk classification models (SVM, LightGBM), validated via A/B testing on intervention outcomes.
- ▸Monitored an outlier detection pipeline using Z-Score, IQR filtering, and PCA (95% variance retained) to detect irregular deposit patterns, enhancing the accuracy of fraud detection systems.
- ▸Accomplished high-risk gambler detection by 6% and boosted early-risk identification by 30%, influencing multi-billion-dollar policy decisions and state-level regulations.
August 2022 — July 2023
Data Analyst
Omalco Extrusion · New Delhi, India
- ▸Automated financial reporting and market analysis using Power BI and D3.js, improving business team efficiency by 80% and reducing ETL job runtime by 50% through optimized reporting table logic.
- ▸Developed real-time data pipelines and applied time-series forecasting (ARIMA, Prophet) to predict sales and demand, driving strategic planning and inventory management.
- ▸Architected and deployed hybrid data storage solutions combining PostgreSQL and Couchbase, powering real-time dashboards with D3.js for up-to-the-minute market visualization and faster decision-making.
- ▸Leveraged linear regression and hypothesis testing to pinpoint seasonal demand fluctuations, directly informing pricing and inventory strategies, impacting 100+ products from the company’s offerings.
$ cat education.md
the training — statistics, computer engineering, and a lot of ML.
Rutgers University
May 2025M.S. — Statistics & Data Science
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
# relevant coursework
Manipal University Jaipur
May 2023B.Tech — Computer Engineering
Jaipur, India
# relevant coursework
$ ls ~/projects/
things I've built end-to-end — including what I'm shipping right now.
Settl — Autonomous Invoice-Recovery Agent
building nowAn AI agent that gets small B2B businesses paid: it decides when, how, and on which channel to chase each overdue invoice — email, SMS, or a live two-way AI phone call — drafts the message in the business’s own voice with Gemini, and only sends after a deterministic compliance gate clears it.
- ▸A seven-stage agent pipeline with one safety authority: source adapters normalize invoices into a canonical schema (derived fields like days-overdue are always recomputed, never trusted), then ingest → strategy → LLM judgment → drafting → compliance gate → gated send → reconcile — every decision written to an append-only execution log that doubles as an explainable activity feed.
- ▸The LLM is deliberately not trusted: Gemini refines tone and timing inside a hard clamp (it can never flip a “hold” into a “send”), and 15 deterministic rules gate every message — legal-threat / consumer-debt / dispute detection, contact-frequency caps, and a non-custodial payment design where the real Stripe link is resolved only after the gate (any hallucinated URL escalates to a human).
- ▸The voice channel is a compliance system, not just TTS: live calls via Retell (ElevenLabs voices) open with a gate-enforced verbatim AI disclosure, with per-debtor consent records, an automatic do-not-call registry, local-clock call-hour windows, a never-double-dial ledger, and HMAC-verified webhooks that turn ended calls into audited transcript artifacts.
- ▸271 hermetic tests (zero network), including red-team suites that fire adversarial drafts, call scripts, and transcript injections at the gate — proving the core invariant: a mis-wired pipeline still cannot send a message or ring a phone.
ReferrAI — AI Referral Engine
building nowTurns cold job applications into vouched, warm intros. It verifies a candidate’s real competence from their GitHub, portfolio, and a short AI work-sample, generates a “safe-to-refer” brief, and routes it to the right insider at a target company — so an employee can vouch for a stranger without staking their reputation.
- ▸Next.js 16 / React 19 / TypeScript on Supabase (Postgres + row-level security). A verification engine pulls live evidence from the GitHub API and the candidate’s portfolio, and Gemini turns it into an evidence-backed competence score plus a per-role safe-to-refer brief.
- ▸The differentiator — a Tier-3 “AI work-sample” that auto-generates 2–3 questions anchored to the candidate’s own repositories, grades the typed answers 0–100, and folds that live signal into the score, so it can’t be faked by a stranger or a stock LLM prompt.
- ▸A fully automated two-sided loop: match the right insider via Hunter (role-scored) → email the underwritten brief via Gmail → accept or decline from a single-use, rate-limited public link with no login, feeding an outcome-ranked referrer-reputation model. Employers post a role, get an AI-verified shortlist, and pay a Stripe success fee on hire.
- ▸Production-hardened: an SSRF-hardened portfolio fetcher (rejects private / loopback / cloud-metadata ranges and re-validates every redirect), résumés generated by constraining the LLM to structured JSON inside a fixed LaTeX→PDF template, zod input validation, per-endpoint rate limiting, and graceful mock layers so the whole app runs end-to-end with zero API keys.
Production RAG System — LLaMA 3 + FAISS
A Retrieval-Augmented Generation system engineered for accuracy and speed — LLaMA 3 + LangChain + FAISS, served in production, not a notebook demo.
- ▸+70% response accuracy over a naive baseline by tightening retrieval and prompt construction.
- ▸Low-latency vector search with FAISS — query time cut 90ms → 30ms (~3× faster).
- ▸Served behind a FastAPI interface with CI/CD via GitHub Actions and automated performance tracking.
LLM Recommendation Engine — Fine-Tuned
A recommender that predicts your next purchase by fine-tuning open LLMs on real e-commerce behavior instead of classic collaborative filtering.
- ▸Fine-tuned Mistral-7B and TinyLlama on the Amazon Reviews dataset using LoRA / QLoRA for efficient training on modest hardware.
- ▸98%+ next-purchase prediction accuracy via novel prompting over product and review text.
- ▸Turns unstructured product language into precise, personalized recommendations.
RAG Techniques — Comparative Study
A rigorous head-to-head of RAG architectures across accuracy, coherence, and latency — with a verdict, not just vibes.
- ▸Benchmarked naive, hybrid, and re-ranked RAG end-to-end; hybrid retrieval won the accuracy/latency trade-off.
- ▸Built standardized evaluation metrics so retrieval strategies could be compared fairly.
- ▸Quantified how retrieval choices cut hallucinations while preserving contextual relevance.
Campus Watch — Crime Analytics
A real-time analytics dashboard that turns daily public-safety data into an interactive map of campus crime hotspots.
- ▸Automated Selenium pipeline scrapes fresh incident data from SpotCrime every day.
- ▸Interactive Plotly charts and geospatial maps surface where and when incidents cluster.
- ▸Blends data engineering, visualization, and automation into a live public-safety tool.
$ gh activity
live from github — what I've been building lately.
$ cat skills.yaml
the tools I reach for, by category.
# open to interesting problems in data science, ML, and AI systems. i love connecting with fellow builders, researchers, and curious minds — reach me anytime.
ojassharma16@gmail.com · +1 (929) 684-7733 · New Brunswick, NJ, USA