Rohan Das

Who am I?

Armed with a bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, I have spent the last 5 years as a full stack developer at Hyland, building industry leading products in the Financial Process Automation space. I bring to the table a diverse array of technical skills combined with deep industrial knowledge in Enterprise Content Management to build robust and scalable software systems with an intuitive and thoughtful user experience.

What I do during the day?

I split my time between three things:

• designing and building the backend of an array of scalable cloud and multi tenant microservices catering to Financial Process Automation use cases.
• hunched over a browser fidgeting over the smallest pixel of a button that finds its place on one of the feature rich web apps that consume these microservices.
• squeezing out every ounce of performance when the backend and frontend pieces come together.

What keeps me up at night?

Language plays a vital role in the dissemination of knowledge. I want to answer questions such as, how does language shape the way we divide the world into concepts? How do seemingly arbitrary squiggles on paper carry meaning? I aim to create user experiences that are contextually, socially and emotionally-aware.

Specifically, I am interested in applications of Natural Language Processing in Fact-Checking, Misinformation Detection, Argumentation Mining, and Conversational Agents. Although these happen to be diverse topics, there are many specific questions I intend to investigate computationally and experimentally. For example, with the increase in accessibility to information via numerous social media platforms, how can we effectively control the spread of fake news and clickbait? What are the computational aspects of human argumentation? How can we build ‘socialbots’ that can engage in a coherent discussion with humans on popular topics like sports or politics?