Name: Utkarsh Upadhyay
Company Role: Chief Technology Officer
Your favorite topics / Ask me anything about: Reinforcement Learning
What is something about the way we work that you want to fix?
We've been remote for too long! All my teammates are great people to hang out with, and I'd like to meet them in person again soon! I can use a good laugh or two. 😆
What do you do at Reasonal?
I coordinate the development of the product and the machine learning technology behind Reasonal.
Why are you good at doing what you do?
I have real-world experience both with scaling a startup from 0 to 100k+ users (while at Better AG) and deep technical expertise in machine learning, thanks to years of doctoral research at the Max-Planck Institute for Software Systems.
What do you like about working at Reasonal?
The problem we are trying to solve at Reasonal is a major pain point for many people and the solutions we propose will create immense value for our users. I cannot wait to bring the grand vision we have for Reasonal to reality.
What’s your background?
I am original from India, from a relatively moderately sized town of 3.5 million population (Lucknow). I did my Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IITK), my M.Sc. in Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), worked at a budding startup in Zurich (Better AG), and got my PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) from Kaiserslautern in Germany.
I also have spent time working at Microsoft Research (MSR) in Seattle, at Yahoo! Research (Oath) in New York, and at NEC in Japan.
What are the values that drive you?
Humans are multi-dimensional creatures and I believe that each lies on the Pareto-optimal front of those dimensions, with nobody being dominated by anyone else. Within that picture, I also believe that it is the moral responsibility of one to push on those dimensions as much as one can to keep improving.
Arete: the Greek virtue of achieving "excellence" and realizing one's full potential.
What do you enjoy doing when you are not working?
I enjoy reading, playing the occasional video games, and take part in recreational puzzle solving and programming competitions. Incidentally, my contributions to scipy and python recently made it to Mars!
Your top 3 reads?
I enjoy books which help expand my horizons. Being a student of science, I gravitated towards Sci-Fi early on, but have started looking at non-fiction and books in other disciplines of late.
Surely You are Joking, Mr. Feynman!
My learning: economic inequality in the last 200 years has only come down on 3 occasions on the world stage: during WW I, WW II, and then during our present Corona crisis.
Utkarsh is a brilliant problem solver on all programming challenges, and a walking encyclopedia.
