Arnav Paruthi

ABOUT ME

Hello! I am Arnav Paruthi

I believe there are three pillars of a great life: Relationships, Work, and Health. Neither is more important than the other, and it's all worthless if any one of them is absent. I work to maximize all three.

If I had to make a choice, I'd say this is the most important aspect of a great life. For me, great relationships are about having people around you that you care about, trust, and are comfortable with and open around. Relationships like that are quite precious, they take years to build. But that's typical of things that are truly worthwhile.

Work's greatly prioritized in western societies. And I think it is important, but for different reasons. Money is necessary to live, but it doesn't entirely explain why we work. I think people would still work if they had plenty of money, most billionaires at least do. In my mind work provides a sense of purpose. My purpose is to push civilization forward.

Technology is the best tool I've found to do that. It can't solve all problems, but quite a few of them it can. That's why I've learnt so much about it. Technology's also just really cool! Playing with tech and creating things doesn't really feel like "work" to me.

This part breaks down further into diet, exercise and sleep. Eating well, exercising regularly and sleeping when you're tired is about all it takes. Simple in principle, difficult in practice. Mental health is also essential, but for me, I've found it's mostly taken care of by having great relationships.

I’ve always been interested in technology. As a child, my interests jumped between iPhones, drones, graphene, and Tesla. At age 14, I started learning to code. I’d tried it before and was discouraged by its difficulty, but after doing a course on Codecademy everything started to make sense.

While watching coding videos, I came across this new concept called AI. Recognizing faces was cool, but I was blown away by the fact that these algorithms could beat world-class human players at Atari games and Go (an ancient Chinese board game, considered the hardest classical game). I started building my own AI projects and learning about the field. My projects landed me a summer internship at fleetops.ai on the engineering team.

Late 2019, after completing an AI project, I thought about what I wanted to do next. While considering my options, I realized that everything I’d done so far wasn’t real. Nobody was actually using it, it wasn’t impacting people, and what’s the point of building something that doesn’t have a purpose.

So I started researching potential problems I could help solve through technology. Spring of 2020 I did a consulting project with Kidogo, a company that runs early childhood development centres in Nairobi’s slums. We aimed to develop a strategy to decrease the ratio of children to caretakers without compromising profitability. Through that project, I learnt about the enormous amount of food that’s wasted. I then started looking at ways to reduce food loss in the developing world. Specifically, we were figuring out how to distribute hermetic bags in rural China.

COVID-19 hit, the world shut down, and everyone's focus shifted to the virus. Our project came to a halt as it became difficult to move forward. My focus for the next year shifted to doing well at school and university applications. Spring of 2021, I decided on attending the University of Toronto's Engineering Science program, one of the world's best engineering programs.

As high school came to a close and university applications concluded, I started looking for summer positions and landed a role at Zerodown. It was awesome to work in that sort of high standards, fast-paced environment. I built products that used computer vision to automatically collect data about a home and neighbourhood, simplifying the home search process.

First-year university went well. Engineering Science is a tough program with a lot of work, but I met a lot of really smart, driven people and got a great technical foundation. I also somehow got absurdly high grades. Summer 2022 I worked at Munich Re (World's largest re-insurance company) on the integrated analytics team, building products that better estimate risk and simplify the insurance process, allowing more people to get insured.

I loved my time at Munich RE, and decided to take a return offer with them in NYC summer 2023. That was an absolute blast! It was awesome to work with Munich RE for another term, and being in NYC was a lot of fun – there’s so much energy, ambition and talent there, it raised my bar of what’s possible.

Now I’m in third year EngSci, specializing in Machine Intelligence. Excited for what the future holds!

Tech can't solve everything, but it can solve many things

My work invovles using software and the intelligence of ML algorithms to dramatically increase effeciency and reduce costs in a variety of industries.

SEE MY EXPERIENCES

My Resume

May 2023 - August 2023

Software Engineer - Munich RE

Built a web application for Alitheia, our risk assessment as a service platform. Took the application from wireframes to production and it is now set to be sold to clients.

May 2022 - August 2022

Data Engineer - Munich RE

Worked to migrate one of Munich Re’s core products from Redis streams to Kafka leading to a 30% decrease in runtime. Deployed the product’s micro-services using Docker and Kubernetes.

July 2021 - August 2021

ML Engineer - Zerodown

Worked to implement ML algorithms that allowed Zerodown to filter and categorize homes at scale. Specifically I worked on a transformer based image segmentation model and an object tracking pipeline.

July 2019 - August 2019

Data Scientist- Fleetops.ai

Worked alongside the lead data-scientist to build and deploy a knowledge graph based recommendation algorithm suggesting shipments to the company’s 227k truck drivers.

2021 - 2025

Engineering Science - University of Toronto

EngSci is UofT's most prestigious engineering program. It's an interdisciplinary program that attracts a diverse group of students.
The first two years students gain a strong mathematical and scientific foundation, while the latter two years they specialize into one of 8 majors. I've decided to specialize in Machine Intelligence.

Full Resume

MY WORK

Portfolio

ALL
Projects
Articles
Videos

Kidogo reccomendation deck

Article featured in Montreal AI Ethics Institute

Text to image conversion algorithms

Philosophy Articles

Epictetus Laozi

Buddha Epicurus

Plato Socrates

How big companies can take advantage of their data

Focus-Net - Using BCIs to understanding how websites affect your focus

How Robots Work

Artificial General Intelligence Explained

Using AlphaZero to Play Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe

Explination of the AlphaZero Algorithm

How Image Recognition Works

Using Reinforcement Learning to play Breakout

Presenting at Walmart's Head Office

An Explination of AI Hardware Accelerators

Using Reinforcement Learning to Play OpenAI's Taxi Game

Updates

What I've been up to

aUToronto Tracking Team Lead

Date:02-09-23 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

aUToronto is UofT's self driving car team. We participate in the SAE Autodrive competition and placed first place overall for the first five years, and second place in the 6th year.
I joined aUToronto in my second year of university, and I'm now proud to be leading the object tracking team! We take in object detections from the 3D OD, 2D OD and Radar teams, and employ the Hungarian algorithm, Kalman filters and a HMM to update our object position, velocity and class estimates. Leading a team has been a really great learning experience. I'd never before taken on any sort of “management” role, and although I still can't quite say I'm an expert, I think I can now competently lead a team. It's also very fulfilling to help team members develop new skills and explore their interests. I'm glad I can give back to the community in this way 😊.

Returning to Munich RE in New York!

Date:31-05-21 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

After a great summer with Munich RE in the Toronto office, I received a return offer in NYC. I really enjoyed my time with the team so I decided to take it!
NYC was an absolute blast. There’s a certain energy, ambition and drive there that’s present in perhaps only a few places around the world. This summer raised my bar of what’s possible. The city’s also incredibly diverse in every way. I met people from all walks of life. It truly expanded my world view.

Munich RE Internship

Date:26-08-22 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

Munich RE is the world's largest re-insurance company. They essentially sell insurance to insurance companies (I know, mind blown right 🤯). I worked on the Integrated Analytics (IA) team in the Toronto office as a data engineer, building products to better determine risk. Overall it was a great experience. IA feels like a startup within a big company. I learned so much about how to architect and deploy applications for massive scale. It was also interesting to work on a large team and align various stakeholders. I had many more meetings than I did at startups 😅. Munich RE also had a bunch of fun events! Like an escape room in Casa Loma, a Blue Jay's game, and a team trip to Six Flags. I also went to NYC for a week to meet the team there and do our final presentation! That's me at The Edge in Hudson Yards 😄.

Attending the University of Toronto!

Date:31-05-21 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

I've decided to attend UofT's Engineering Science program! EngSci is a unique interdisciplinary program that fosters the integration of various scientific disciplines to address engineering and societal challenges. Courses cover a wide range of topics although there's a strong focus on math and physics. I'm fairly set on pursuing a career in tech, but I think that EngSci's breadth of knowledge will be useful in creating connections across disciplines, which often lead to great innovation. I also really like EngSci's diverse student population. It seems like everyone in CS just wants to work in Big Tech, but EngSci's have very different ambitions. I've met incoming EngScis who want to build rockets, work in biotech and pursue fundamental scientific research. It's been awesome talking to people in a world very different from tech.

Reducing Food Loss

Date:30-06-20 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

About 1/3 of all food produced worldwide is wasted—an outrageous 1.3 billion tonnes per year. Over the last 3 months, I worked with a group of friends to try and reduce this wastage, specifically in China: the world's largest food producer. We did mountains of research and spoke to experts. However, making a difference halfway around the globe while not speaking Mandarin proved difficult. We decided to stop working on the project, but I learnt so much and it was super fun working with the team.

Kidogo Challenge

Date:05-04-20 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

Kidogo is a non-profit which runs early childhood development (ECD) centers in Nairobi's slums. During a child's early years, quality care is critical in laying the foundation of their social, cognitive, and emotional development. We worked to reduce the ratio of children to staff (increasing personal attention) while maintaining profitability. Kidogo liked our recommendation, and we would have implemented our solution if it weren't for the pandemic.

View the recommendation here!

Fleetops Internship

Date:30-08-19 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

Fleetops is a startup building a platform to match shippers with truck drivers using AI. This means drivers find loads more quickly and have a larger percentage of their truck full, while shippers get a better price. I built data pipelines using apache beam, and a recommendation system suggesting truckloads to drivers. This was an awesome experience and I learnt so much!

Walmart Challenge

Date:07-12-18 | Posted By Arnav Paruthi

My partner and I had the incredible opportunity of presenting our recommendation at Walmart's head office. Our solution was to use a concept in behavioural psychology called "nudging", to encourage customers to maintain cleanly shelves, reducing the amount of time employees would have to spend zoning.

Watch the Presentation

Hi, I'm Arnav Paruthi