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Basanth Periyapatna Roopa Kumar

Building things that live at the intersection of data, design, and human experience.

About

Who I am

During my first year of engineering, two people I love survived sudden cardiac arrest. Watching a cardiologist trace every millisecond on an ECG print-out — and pinpoint the exact moment each heart faltered — was a revelation: data, interpreted with precision, saves lives.

Those late-night explorations into HMMs, SVMs, and arrhythmia detection set my compass. Coming from a family of professors, I learned that knowledge is worthless unless it's shared for social good. Today I'm a data-science practitioner who enjoys connecting the dots — ideas across disciplines, people across teams, applications across industries.

Backed by 4+ years translating complex datasets into clear actions for stakeholders in telecom, logistics, and e-commerce — I'm now pursuing an M.S. in Applied Data Science at SJSU, sharpening statistical rigor and entrepreneurial vision toward a healthcare-focused analytics startup that empowers NGOs to improve outcomes for underserved communities.

4+Years building
10+Projects shipped
4Certifications
AZ-900DP-900PL-900IIT-M · Master Data Science
PythonRC++GoPyTorchApache KafkaAWSAzureKubernetesNext.jsSQLApache SparkLangGraphScikit-learnPower BITableauDAXTypeScriptTerraformPower PlatformPythonRC++GoPyTorchApache KafkaAWSAzureKubernetesNext.jsSQLApache SparkLangGraphScikit-learnPower BITableauDAXTypeScriptTerraformPower PlatformPythonRC++GoPyTorchApache KafkaAWSAzureKubernetesNext.jsSQLApache SparkLangGraphScikit-learnPower BITableauDAXTypeScriptTerraformPower Platform

Selected Experience

Jan 2025 - Present
Jan 2025 - PresentT+16M

SJSU Research Foundation

research

Built an end-to-end AI pipeline for automated wildfire defensible space compliance using UAV imagery at 1-3 cm GSD. Engineered a Graph-RAG system over California PRC 4291 and IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home standards, representing regulatory rule chains as a NetworkX knowledge graph and injecting structured compliance context into multi-VLM reasoning chains. Applied Grounding DINO + SAM 2 for precise object detection and segmentation of trash cans, propane tanks, and vehicles. Benchmarked GPT-4o Vision, Claude Vision, and GeoChat-7B with few-shot Geo-CoT prompting as built-in XAI, producing the first peer-reviewed automated aerial parcel-level HIZ assessment system targeting California's 750K WUI properties.

"Pioneered first automated aerial combustible object detection system for wildfire HIZ compliance"

PythonGraph-RAGGrounding DINOSAM 2VLMsNetworkXUAV / Geospatial
Aug 2025
Jun 2025 – Aug 2025T+3M

NASA Ames Research Center

internship

Selected for the NASA Ames and SJSU FireSage program, a competitive research initiative at the intersection of fire ecology and geospatial remote sensing. Applied Python-driven machine learning and deep learning to production wildfire research workflows alongside active NASA scientists. Engineered a fully automated Python pipeline to retrieve and cross-validate structure built-year records across multiple public property data sources, implementing confirmation logic that measurably improved data reliability before integration into parcel-level wildfire risk datasets. Accelerated research team output by translating complex ML and deep learning concepts for non-technical collaborators, and gained hands-on HPC and distributed deep learning experience mentored directly by NASA research scientists, bridging those techniques to live project workflows.

"Engineered multi-source property intelligence pipeline validating parcel-level built-year data for NASA wildfire risk models"

PythonMachine LearningDeep LearningRemote SensingHPCData PipelinesFire Ecology
Jun 2024
Apr 2023 – Jun 2024T+15M

AtkinsRéalis

Full-Time

Developed Kafka-backed event-driven microservices on Azure Databricks with exactly-once semantics. Deployed RESTful XGBoost inference APIs via blue-green deployments, slashing infrastructure costs by $400K and reducing unplanned operational failures by 20%.

"Designed event-driven Azure tracking algorithms for 1.8M IoT signals & ML optimization"

Azure DatabricksKafkaData EngineeringXGBoostPython
Sep 2022
Sep 2021 – Sep 2022T+13M

6D Technologies

Full-Time

Built low-latency RESTful APIs in Python/C++ for production messaging architectures. Engineered stateful stream processing via Kafka, refactored PostgreSQL materialized views tuning query latency (-28%), and deployed zero-downtime microservices using GitLab CI/CD and Docker.

"Stabilized concurrent PostgreSQL databases handling 15k+ req/sec & modernized CI/CD"

PostgreSQLC++KafkaDockerCI/CD

Academic Work

Research & Papers

Peer-ReviewedBig Data · Healthcare2025

A Big Data Pipeline Approach for Predicting Real-Time Pandemic Hospitalization Risk

Vishnu S. Pendyala, Mayank Kapadia, Basanth Periyapatna Roopa Kumar, Manav Anandani, Nischitha Nagendran

A dual big-data pipeline for real-time pandemic triage combining a streaming epidemiological risk prediction system (XGBoost + Bloom filter pre-screening on 3M+ CDC COVID-19 records) with a chest X-ray classification pipeline (EfficientNet-B0 + Grad-CAM). A lightweight GPT-based reasoning layer generates auditable ALERT/FLAG/LOG triage comments. CTGAN validates streaming robustness under synthetic load. Provides scalable, explainable, near-real-time decision support for public health readiness.

XGBoost Minority F1

0.76

Chest X-Ray Accuracy

99.5%

CDC Records Processed

3M+

Generative AIHealthcare2025

A Multimodal Generative AI Framework for Cancer Pathology Classification

Mayank Kapadia, Basanth Periyapatna Roopa Kumar, Nischitha Nagendran

A multimodal generative AI framework combining histopathology image classification, clinical note classification via ClinicalBERT with SFT/TAPT/LoRA fine-tuning, and prompt-driven clinical captioning using RAG. Establishes baselines on PatchCamelyon (262K images) and curates TCGA BRCA clinical notes into a balanced dataset of 2,380 reports for unified multimodal cancer diagnostics.

ViT-Base/16 ROC-AUC

0.9601

ClinicalBERT LoRA F1

0.94

PCam Test Images

32,768

Deep LearningRemote Sensing2025

FireSense: Multispectral Fire Detection with Channel Attention and Probabilistic Calibration

Basanth Periyapatna Roopa Kumar, Nischitha Nagendran, Nandhakumar Apparsamy, Nitya Rondla

A deep learning framework for automated wildfire detection in Landsat-8 satellite imagery. Combines ResNet34-UNet with Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM) across all 10 spectral bands, introduces soft labels from multi-annotator consensus to capture boundary uncertainty, and applies temperature scaling for calibrated probability estimates ready for operational deployment.

Mean IoU

69.6%

vs. Classical Baselines

+45.6%

ECE Reduction

86.1%

Knowledge GraphsML2025

Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Traffic Optimization System for the Bay Area

Anshu Reddy Dhamana, Basanth Periyapatna Roopa Kumar, Manav Rajesh Anandani, Nischitha Nagendran, Nitya Rondla, Srithareddy Devireddy, Vinuthna Papana

A knowledge graph-based traffic optimization system for the San Francisco Bay Area fusing traffic flow, weather, incidents, and events into a unified semantic graph. Node2vec embeddings power a stacking ensemble achieving 92% prediction accuracy with the connects_to relationship, delivering actionable insights into weekday vs. weekend traffic patterns for city planning and commuter support.

Prediction Accuracy

92%

Graph Relationship Types

6

Graph Nodes

550+

CapstoneLLM Fine-Tuning · RAG2026

Professor in a Box: Personalized CS Tutoring via Fine-Tuned LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Basanth Periyapatna Roopa Kumar, SJSU MSDA Team 2

An end-to-end AI tutoring system that fine-tunes Mistral-7B and DeepSeek-R1-7B using QLoRA on curated CS Q&A corpora and serves them via a production RAG pipeline. Students upload study materials; the system retrieves semantically relevant context using Gemini embeddings and ChromaDB, then streams grounded answers token-by-token from LoRA-adapted models running on serverless A10G GPUs. A three-tier fallback chain (OpenAI, DeepSeek, Gemini) ensures continuous availability.

Fine-Tuned Models

2

VRAM Footprint

~4 GB

RAG Retrieval Top-K

5

Work

Shipped

Sequential Horizon→
01◆ F1 Prediction Engine
Data ·Python / XGBoost / Monte Carlo

F1 Prediction Engine

A triple-model ensemble (XGBoost, Monte Carlo, Bayesian) predicting the 2026 F1 era with 38.9% accuracy.

02◆ LLM Multilingual Deficit
Data ·NLP / Tokenization / LLMs

LLM Multilingual Deficit

Quantifying the structural 'Token Tax' and economic inequality disadvantaging non-English languages in global LLMs.

Data Science & Machine Learning

Applied projects

AI/ML

Australian GP 2026: V1 Prediction — Russell 38.9%

Season opener under the biggest regulatory reset in F1 history. XGBoost loved Hadjar at 35.2%; Monte Carlo gave Russell 75.8% from pole physics. The ensemble resolved at 38.9% — and documented three V1 failures for V2.

AI/ML

Japanese GP 2026: Antonelli on Pole at Suzuka

Post-Australia recalibration tightened the model's variance. Antonelli's first career pole at 19, Verstappen buried in P14 from an ERS error. Mercedes 1-2 probability: 84.5%. The Suzuka circuit amplifies what qualifying says.

AI/ML

Chinese GP 2026: V2 — Sprint as Tier 0 Data

First sprint weekend of 2026. V2 rebuilt with live sprint race results as the highest-weight input layer. Hamilton re-rated to 21.2% after his V1 underestimation. The fp1_to_quali_divergence feature corrected a systematic blind spot.

Research

The Multilingual Deficit: Tokenization Inequality in LLMs

Kannada requires 3-5× more tokens than English for equivalent semantic content. Quantifying the Token Tax, the $262K-$365K annual cost premium for Hindi API services, and the three architectural bottlenecks that cascade from tokenization.

AI/Health

Cognivi — Stroke Detection

A privacy-first, multimodal AI system built at TreeHacks 2026. MediaPipe arm-drift + facial asymmetry detection fused with a PubMed-grounded RAG pipeline feeding Claude 3 for neurologic speech grading — all from a 60-second smartphone video.

Writing

Transmissions

[AI + GOVERNANCE]

Secure AI Governance with the Applied Intelligence Systems Club

Nov 2, 20255 MIN READRead original ↗

Library

What I'm consuming

Books read & screens watched in 2025. Hover to read my take.

The Design of Everyday Things
★★★★★

The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

Design
Sapiens
★★★★★

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

History
The Creative Act
★★★★★

The Creative Act

Rick Rubin

Creative
Zero to One
★★★★★

Zero to One

Peter Thiel

Business
Thinking, Fast and Slow
★★★★★

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Psychology
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
★★★★★

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Eric Jorgenson

Philosophy
Show Your Work!
★★★★★

Show Your Work!

Austin Kleon

Creative

Quotes

Words I live by

Vision

Thepeoplewhoarecrazyenoughtothinktheycanchangetheworldaretheoneswhodo.

Steve Jobs

01 / 05
Design

Simplicityistheultimatesophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci

02 / 05
Growth

Youdon'thavetobegreattostart,butyouhavetostarttobegreat.

Zig Ziglar

03 / 05
Agency

Thebestwaytopredictthefutureistocreateit.

Peter Drucker

04 / 05
Life

Stayhungry.Stayfoolish.

Stewart Brand

Whole Earth Catalog

05 / 05

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