Vol. I  ·  Data Scientist  ·  Dallas, Texas

Ajaykumar Balakannan

Production ML, NLP and LLM-orchestrated systems.

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Data Scientist / ML Engineering Ajaykumar Balakannan Dallas, Texas

BUILDING WHAT
GETS USED.

A data scientist working where models, pipelines and the people who rely on them meet.

The practitioner

For the past four years I've built data systems that have to hold up in production, not just in a notebook. That work spans healthcare, job-market data and university operations.

At the University of Maryland Counseling Center I built a no-show prediction model on HIPAA-regulated clinical records, wrote the DuckDB pipelines underneath it, and built the dashboards the counseling staff open every morning. At Canaria I ran anomaly detection over 15M+ job-market records and a salary model across 40,000+ US zip codes.

The tools change. What hasn't is the approach: understand the problem properly, be suspicious of your own data, and make the result something a person can act on.

A model nobody uses isn't finished.

Fig. 001 · The author, printed.
k-means, settling
Fig. 002 · k-means finding its centroids, unsupervised.
Inside this portfolio
At a glance
Status
Open to data
& ML roles
Based in
Dallas, TXrelocate / remote
MS · UMD 2026
3.74
GPA
In production
15M+
records
Work

Where I've shipped

Sep 2024 - Present
University of Maryland
College Park, MD

Data Scientist

  • Built a no-show prediction model (Random Forest + LightGBM, SHAP for the "why") on counseling appointment records. It triggers automated outreach and lifted resource utilization by 25%.
  • Classified 4,000+ pieces of student feedback (e-forms and audio transcripts) with SetFit and BERTopic, surfacing sentiment and service themes the counseling staff now act on.
  • Wrote the Python / DuckDB / SQL pipelines that fold 12+ years of operational records into version-controlled data models, the backbone for the models and KPI reporting.
  • Automated the refreshes behind the Tableau and Power BI dashboards (utilization, cancellations, peak demand), cutting manual reporting turnaround by 60%.
PythonDuckDBSQLLightGBMSHAPSetFitBERTopicTableauPower BI
May 2025 - Aug 2025
Canaria Inc.
New York, NY

Data Science Intern

  • Trained a LightGBM salary model across 40K+ US zip codes, using SOC codes, seniority, and company features, wired into an MLflow-tracked, auto-recalibrating ClickHouse pipeline for real-time forecasts.
  • Built PyOD (Isolation Forest, KNN) and Cleanlab validation over 15M+ distributed records, cutting false-positive anomaly flags by 35% in production.
  • Designed Polars / PySpark ingestion across ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, and AWS S3 to keep the job-market data clean for everything downstream.
LightGBMMLflowClickHousePyODCleanlabPolarsPySparkAWS S3
Mar 2023 - Jul 2024
AastraZen Technologies
Chennai, India

Data & Analytics Engineer

  • Fine-tuned DistilBERT to auto-categorize support tickets and added vector semantic search, dropping manual triage by 45%.
  • Migrated a legacy database to a hybrid MongoDB + PostgreSQL setup with dbt transformation layers; query throughput went up 40% and reporting went real-time.
  • Stood up a Kafka streaming pipeline into an AWS S3 data lake serving 5+ client accounts at 99.5% uptime.
DistilBERTMongoDBPostgreSQLdbtApache KafkaAWS S3
Toolkit

What I reach for

AI & Machine Learning

LLM Orchestration (Claude, MCP)Generative AILightGBMXGBoostSHAPIsolation ForestARIMASetFitBERTopicDistilBERTScikit-learn

Data Platforms & Warehousing

SnowflakeClickHousePostgreSQLDatabricksRedshiftMongoDBDuckDBAWS (S3, EC2)MLflowdbtKafka

Languages & Processing

PythonSQLRPandasNumPyPolarsPySparkPyODCleanlab

Visualization & Reporting

TableauPower BIQlik SenseSigmaQuarto & JupyterKPI TrackingRoot Cause Analysis
Projects

Things I built to find out if I could

01

TravelGenie

An agentic trip planner that orchestrates seven MCP servers through Claude, pulling live flights, hotels and events into a single request. I load-tested EC2 against ECS Fargate at 50 to 100 concurrent users; Fargate matched EC2's 460 RPS on half the compute.

Agentic AI · Dec 2025 · Claude / MCP / SerpAPI / AWS
02

Farmland Intrusion Detection

A YOLO vision pipeline that spots wildlife on farmland in real time and fires a non-lethal deterrent matched to the animal, so nobody has to watch a monitor. Hardware prototype built and tested alongside the model.

★ 2nd of 500+ teams · National Technocraft Hackathon · published in BIOGECKO (Vol 12, Iss 03, 2023)
Computer Vision · Mar 2023 · YOLOv3 / CNN / Arduino
03

Bitcoin Price Forecasting

End-to-end pipeline: live BTC collection, ARIMA and XGBoost models at around 85% accuracy, automated ETL, and Qlik Sense dashboards giving real-time visibility into volatility. Cut the manual reporting effort by 40%.

Time Series · 2025 · ARIMA / XGBoost / Qlik Sense
04

Multifamily Real Estate Analytics

A full analytics pipeline over a multifamily portfolio: SQLite to engineered features to five business reports, a seven-sheet Excel workbook and Power BI. Surfaced $2.14M of annual loss-to-lease and a 26-point occupancy gap. The data is synthetic, generated with Faker. This was built to demonstrate the pipeline, not to report on a real client.

Analytics · 2025 · Python / SQL / Power BI

Fig. 003 · Four projects, ordered by how much I learned rather than by date.

Education

Where I learned it

Master's in Data Science

University of Maryland
May 2026 · Maryland
GPA 3.74 / 4.0
Natural Language Processing · Machine Learning · Big Data Systems · Deep Learning

B.Tech, Electrical & Electronics Engineering

Sri Krishna College of Engineering & Technology
Aug 2020 - May 2024 · Coimbatore, India
CGPA 8.4 / 10.0
Microcontrollers · Power System Analysis · Python · ML in Energy Systems
Certifications

Verified credentials

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate badge

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

Amazon Web Services · SAA-C03
Verify on Credly

Microsoft Certified: Power BI Data Analyst Associate

Microsoft · PL-300
Verify on Microsoft Learn
Let's build
something useful.

Open to full-time data science, ML engineering, and analytics roles. The inbox is always on.