Charangan's Homepage

Charangan Vasantharajan

Engineering Manager @ Iterate.ai, California

Email: (lastname[:6]firstname)[6:] [AT] company.ai

Contact Me: Request a Meeting | LinkedIn | Google Scholar

Recent Updates / Publications / Experience / Skills / Awards / Open Source / Talks / Services

About

Welcome to my personal space! Currently, I am driving next-gen AI solutions for business transformation at Iterate.ai, where we focus on building reproducible, automated, and scalable pipelines while optimizing performance, including enhancing edge computing efficiency. I completed my MASc in Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University, under the guidance of Prof. Thia Kirubarajan. My academic journey started with a bachelor's degree from the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka.

Before pursuing my graduate studies, I had the opportunity to work at the Speech and Language Lab at Nanyang Technological University with Prof. Chng Eng Siong. I also collaborated with Aaivu at the University of Moratuwa, working with Dr. Uthayasanker Thayasivam. My professional journey includes valuable experiences at Expert Intelligence, Inc., ExentAI, Ltd., and the University of Galway.

Successful Projects: Generate (Engineering Manager) · Extract (Previously Led) · Interplay (Contributing)

Recent Topics: Solution Architecture · System Development · Agents · LLMs · RAG

Recent Updates

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Our Generate is now featured in Intel Corporation's new AI PC Software Bundle!
Promoted as Engineering Manager at Iterate.ai.
Started working as a Graduate TA for COMPUTER ENG 4TL4: Digital Signal Processing at McMaster University.
Participated in Intel Vision 2024 in London, showcasing our project GenPilot on behalf of Iterate.ai.
Submitted my first patent through Iterate.ai, Language Independent Textual Extraction.
Started working as a Graduate TA for COMPUTER ENG 4TN4: Image Processing at McMaster University.
Joined Iterate.ai as a Data Scientist.
Started working as a Graduate TA for ELECENG 3FK4: Electromagnetics II at McMaster University.
Started my graduate studies at McMaster University.
Our paper got accepted at RANLP 2023 as a regular paper/long presentation.
Joined the University of Moratuwa as a Visiting Instructor for CS1033: Programming Fundamentals.
Presented our work on OCR for low-resource languages at Open Collab Research Jam #12.

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Presented a paper at APSIPA 2022 conference.
Presented a paper at IALP 2022 conference.
Joined the University of Moratuwa as a Teaching Assistant for CS3630: Deep Neural Networks.
Joined SimplyfAI, Inc as a Machine Learning Engineer.
Submitted an abstract on Medication Extraction from Clinical Notes for the N2C2 Challenge 2022.
Our team Medispeech@NTU was a finalist in the HPCIC Innovation Challenge 2022.
Released an open-source framework for fine-tuning transformer-based NER models (NERP).
Two papers got accepted at FIRE 2021.
Extended my internship by three months at NTU.
A paper got accepted in SN Computer Science journal.
Joined Nanyang Technological University as a Research Intern.
Joined ExentAI as a Junior Machine Learning Engineer.
Presented a work at TASME 2021 conference.
Worked as a student volunteer for the shared task on FIRE 2021.
First paper accepted at EACL 2021 as an oral presentation.
Joined NUI Galway as a Research Intern.

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Publications

Experience

Professional

Engineering Manager, Iterate.ai (California)
Sep 2024 – Present
Leading engineering teams and AI projects in enterprise solutions, including Project Generate. Responsible for technical direction, team management, and delivering high-quality AI solutions for enterprise clients.
Data Scientist, Iterate.ai (California)
Nov 2023 – Sep 2024
Developed advanced AI-driven business solutions for retail and finance sectors. Led Project Extract and contributed to Interplay, focusing on document processing and intelligent automation.
Machine Learning Research Engineer, ExentAI, Ltd (UK)
Feb 2023 – Aug 2023
Focused on research and deployment of computer vision models.
Machine Learning Engineer, Expert Intelligence, Inc (California)
Aug 2022 – Jan 2023
Designed predictive algorithms and improved ML pipelines.
Junior Machine Learning Engineer, ExentAI, Ltd (UK)
Jul 2021 – Dec 2021
Built prototypes for automated text analysis tools.

Research

Research Intern, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Oct 2021 – Aug 2022
Conducted NLP research for healthcare applications.
Research Intern, University of Galway (Ireland)
Jan 2021 – Jun 2021
Explored techniques for unsupervised machine learning.
Research Assistant, Aaivu (Sri Lanka)
Jan 2021 – Jun 2021
Worked on OCR tools for Tamil script.

Teaching

Graduate Teaching Assistant
Digital Signal Processing (COMP ENG 4TL4), Fall 2024, McMaster University
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Image Processing (COMP ENG 4TN4), Winter 2024, McMaster University
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Electromagnetics II (ELECENG 3FK4), Fall 2023, McMaster University
Visiting Instructor
Programming Fundamentals (CS1033), Summer 2023, University of Moratuwa
Teaching Assistant
Introduction to Data Science (CS3121), Winter 2023, University of Moratuwa
Teaching Assistant
Deep Neural Networks (CS3630), Fall 2022, University of Moratuwa

Honors & Awards

McMaster Graduate Research Scholarship
Grant awarded to support higher studies and research excellence at McMaster University.
Top 5 Finalist Award, HPCIC Innovation Challenge 2022
Team: Medispeech@NTU
Ranked among the top 5 products with the most potential for enabling a data-centric approach to environmental management and reducing carbon footprint.
SL Insurance Suba Pathum National Scholarship
Awarded for academic excellence in higher education.
Ceylinco Pranama Scholarship
Recognized for exceptional performance in higher education.
Mahapola Merit Scholarship
National merit-based scholarship for exceptional performance in higher education.
Dialog Merit Scholarship
Granted for top-tier academic results in higher education.

Open Source

Tools

NERP: A pip package for fine-tuning transformer models for Named Entity Recognition (NER).

Models

MedBERT: A pre-trained language model for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER).
Tamizhi-Net OCR: Enhanced LSTM-based Tesseract models for Tamil and Sinhala legacy fonts.

Datasets

Party Annotated Dataset for Legal Contracts: A dataset comprising 1,000 contracts annotated for parties, suitable for legal document analysis.
Tamizhi-Net Parallel Corpus: A document-aligned parallel corpus for Tamil, Sinhala, and English languages.
TamilEmo: A fine-grained emotion detection dataset for the Tamil language.

Talks & Presentations

Intel Vision 2024, Representing Iterate.ai, 2024 Presented on AI-driven enterprise solutions for next-gen laptops.
Research Week, University of Moratuwa, Dec 2022 Delivered a talk on advancements in Natural Language Processing.
Open Collab Research Jam #12, Dec 2022 Participated in collaborative research discussions and presented findings on machine learning applications.
APSIPA ASC Conference, Dec 2022 Presented a paper on signal processing and its applications in AI.
IALP Conference, Oct 2022 Presented research on multilingual language processing.
TASME Conference, Jul 2021 Presented findings on medical text analysis using deep learning techniques.
DravidianLangTech-EACL Workshop, Apr 2021 Shared research on language technologies for Dravidian languages.

Services

TASME Liaison for University of Moratuwa, 2023 – Present
Representing the university to facilitate collaborations and conference engagements.
Student Mentor at Aaivu, Jan 2022 – Present
Guiding students in research and project development in machine learning and NLP.
Program Committee Member at Dravidian-CodeMix Workshop, 2021
Reviewed and curated submissions for the workshop on code-mixed language technologies.
Reviewer for FIRE Workshop, 2021
Evaluated research papers on information retrieval and multilingual NLP for the workshop.
Founder and President at Development Committee of Education, 2019 – 2022
Led initiatives to improve educational resources and opportunities in local communities.

Contact me via Google Meet via Google Calender

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