welcome to my humble abode
hi my name is sarim zafar.
i am a data scientist working at Din Global, an emerging fintech in Pakistan.
I have worked in all three domain, academia, research and industry.
i can be often found juggling between research/work & twitter.
outside of my work/academic life, i can either be found running outside, when the weather permits it
or enjoying random episodes from the office.
i also dabble in the mystic arts of cooking and baking cakes on weekends.
projects
developing a system to predict sql queries from nl input. the performance of the system will be evalauated using the wikisql dataset. i am solving this problem via slot filling approach. basically divide the problem into subtasks and then conquer them all one by one. for more details and project implementation please go to the following link.
cash problem has been a thoroughly researched problem and folks behind auto-sklearn are pretty much at the forefront. in their original 2015 nips paper they used bayesian optimization armed with meta-features to predict the whole pipline. i want to examine if their approach can be augmented or molded one way or the other to further improve the performance.
i've been a fan of urdu poetry for quite a while now. so naturally i wanted to see if i can make a bot. i used a traditional gru(a somewhat less popular variant of rnn) based neural network to write the poetry using a line of poetry as a seed. it works on character level so be prepared to see some new words perhaps. you can find it working over on twitter.
i've been working on the image colorization task for quite a while now.i never had access to sota gpu and that was a limiting factor. recently jason antic released deoldify to color old photos using a very curious no-gan based approach. so as a fun weekend project i created a twitter page that posts colorized version of black and white photos from 20th century pakistan. you can find it working over on twitter.
some more personal stuff