Sravan
Parakala

I started this class thinking it was entirely pointless to me.

Then we watched a documentary about Helvetica and I ended up in a passionate debate with the professor. Long story short: if you try to imagine a world without design, you will quickly come to a logical contradiction.

Reading Don Norman's "Design for a Better World" reframed how I imagine my technical impact.

This work gave purpose to every matrix decomposition and graph theory proof I'd ever done. It felt as though I had spent years learning how to do things to numbers and finally learned what the numbers actually mean.

The idea that biological sequences are just another kind of structured data subject to probabilistic tools reframed my entire approach to data science.

The project started by crawling recommendation paths. I scraped data from artist profile pages to build a behavioral co-occurrence graph.

The dataset revealed dense communities and unexpected bridges between genres. I used node2vec for embeddings and projected them using T-SNE and UMAP into 3D space.

▶ Launch Interactive Visualization ▶ Motivation and Methodology

LEGUP: Most of my contributions focused on making the UI accessible for colorblind users—a feature I ended up needing myself 2 years later.

OED: Built testing infrastructure for an Open Energy Dashboard designed to interface with smart meters via MQTT protocols.