Photo by:
Krishnan Raman
Vandana Photography
The Wonderful Wizard of Ads
By: Dr. Brian Pasko ENMU Associate Professor of Mathematics Krishnan Raman (MA 09) came to ENMU in fall 2007 after having worked as a financial systems engineer for Goldman Sachs for several years. His wife Vandana was an oncologist at Plains Regional Medical Center and Krishnan decided to attend Eastern to pursue graduate study in math. “Upon arrival, I walked up to the assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dr. Tom Brown and convinced him to let me into the graduate program despite having zero formal credentials in undergrad math! To this day I am flummoxed why he did so, and I remain in his debt for taking a chance on me.” Since leaving Portales, Krishnan has moved across three states, worked at three different companies, and currently lives in California. He first pursued a master’s in financial mathematics at the University of Chicago, following which he was hired by Bank of America in Charlotte, North Carolina as a quantitative analyst, where he worked on mathematical valuation models to estimate the risk within commercial mortgage portfolios. During that time, his family welcomed their son Arjun, now 5 years old. Krishnan was then hired by Twitter as a data scientist on the Cloud Infrastructure team and moved across the country to the San Francisco Bay area. At Twitter, he built a capacity utilization model using LAD (Least Absolute Deviation) to predict memory and CPU utilization of millions of jobs processing on the cloud. Two years later, Krishnan accepted a new job as a principal data scientist at Marin Software where he now leads the machine learning efforts. Marin is an adtech firm that enables ad-serving, the technology that chooses and
Krishnan Raman with his wife Vandana and their five-year-old son, Arjun.
releases ads on your search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), social media feeds (Facebook, Instagram), and the display retargeting space (the space on a website where customized ads are placed about a product you had perviously searched for on another site). Advertisers bid on a particular web page in auctions where prices are analyzed via “machine learning.” Krishnan’s group is “… also interested in the Lagrange dual optimization problem, where we seek to maximize ad revenue while constrained to a fixed budget.” He uses a formula called the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to find the minimum value of the cost-to-function ratio. To obtain optimal prices for ads placed on Facebook, Krishnan uses a ‘multi-armed bandits’ model which is based on the theory of probability for slot machine lever pulls (one-armed bandits) and other variables to the highest expected payoff. He also repurposes algorithms that were originally created to recommend movies on Netflix, to find similar audiences for the ad space. “Essentially, my career graph can be summarized as fervently sticking to the math I learnt at ENMU, and using it at every opportunity I obtain in the industry,” said Krishnan. “I continue to learn and hope to return to academia in the near future. I’m married to an oncologist and we have a five-yearold who recites his factorials, squares and cubes every night before he heads off to sleep!”
James Tapley
and the Chalkboard Car
ENMU senior James Tapley has worked on a few cars over the years; about three years ago, he was asked to fix his friend’s late 1990s Mazda Miata that they were looking to sell. However, the fate of unused cars befell it as it never sold, and the Miata was left sitting outside. In October 2016, nearly two years later, James rescued the Miata. “It needed a lot of cosmetic work,” he said. “The paint was ruined, the entire back shelf area was rusted through, and it needed a new top window. I had seen chalkboard paint at the store and decided that if it was going to be my fun car, why not make it fun for my five nieces and nephews as well?” James, his fiancée and his brother set to work. Two days and many patches later they had the chalkboard Miata.
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Green & Silver | December 2017
While James is in class, he leaves his car and a box of chalk in front of the ENMU Art and Anthropology Building. He usually comes back to some amazing designs.
Photos by: Chelsé Craig
By: Chelsé Craig
