A Master of Science in Business Analytics student, Soumya Nambi Ganesh tested her data science skills working with the Agile Decision Dashboard team as part of her Karsun Innovation Center internship. In taking on this project, which reports key metrics to executive and management-level decision-makers, she tackled everything from requirements gathering to data pipelines to transforming the data and constructing visualizations. Discover how Soumya worked with the Innovation Center Research and Development (RnD) team to build this dashboard and find her next.

First please tell us about yourself. Where are you going to school? What are you studying? What do you like to do in your free time?

Hi, I’m Soumya Nambi Ganesh. I’m pursuing a Master of Science degree in Business Analytics at the University of Southern California in LA. In my free time, I enjoy reading, writing, playing badminton and watching all genres of movies.

Could you share a little bit about the project you worked on as part of this internship? What challenge does it solve? What technologies and tools are you using?

As part of my internship at Karsun, I worked on building an Agile Decision Dashboard. This dashboard includes interactive visualizations built on company – data in terms of Objectives, Key Results, Costs, Management, Quality and Schedule. I was given the opportunity to be a part of the project right from the beginning – where I met with the executives of the company for personal interviews on their requirements for the dashboard. I worked on the entire data pipeline, which involved identifying various data sources, building scripts to extract data and transforming the data into desirable formats. I then worked on computing new metrics and eventually constructing visualizations that are to be used for intuitive decision-making by the executives. 

What is your favorite part about working with the Karsun Innovation Center? Is there a weekly meeting or ritual you enjoy? The opportunity to learn more or get a new certification?

My favorite part of working at KIC is the opportunity to meet with colleagues with different skills and expertise, in a close-net team and learn of their various perspectives. I love a good challenge and working with the KIC team offered me new tasks, with changing requirements in a sort of RnD environment. This pushed me to get out of my comfort zone, quickly learn new tools and methods and implement the same. 

I also was able to enhance my data science skills by undertaking a course on Udemy, through Karsun, which was a bonus to my learning here! 

What is your biggest takeaway from your experience as an intern at Karsun?

My main takeaway would be bridging the gap requirements and data. This involves understanding executive-level and management-level requirements and then finding a way to clean messy data, transform them into meaningful metrics and display them as visualizations to answer specific business questions. I was also able to improve on this process through the continuous feedback I received from various members of the team, for which I am grateful. 

Soumya completed her internship as part of the Karsun Innovation Center. Learn Karsun accelerate Data Solutions adoption. Connect with Soumya on LinkedIn to learn more about her experience.

Every summer Karsun embeds interns in our Innovation Center to work alongside our technology experts, prototyping solutions to support our customers. 2022 Intern Akhilesh Varanasi used synthetic data to address a common privacy concern, personally identifiable information (PII.) Using synthetic data, an artificial set of data is created to perform ML/AI work preventing exposure of sensitive PII. In the interview below, Akhilesh describes his experience in the Karsun Innovation Center and his synthetic data internship project.

First, please tell us about yourself. Where are you going to school? What are you studying? What do you like to do in your free time?

Hi all! My name is Akhilesh Varanasi. I’m currently a rising junior at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I’m a double major in Computer Science and Astronomy. In my free time, I like reading and playing basketball.

Could you share a little bit about the project you worked on as part of this internship? What challenges does it solve? What technologies and tools are you using?

For most of my internship, I worked on the Synthetic Data project. The purpose of this project was to create PII anonymized ‘fake’ data for Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence use cases. I mostly worked with Python, the Synthetic Data Vault libraries, and graphing frameworks like matplotlib. My main tasks were to create accurate Synthetic Data models and to find generic ways to graphically represent all forms of tabular data. I also worked with AWS Lambda and the AWS CLI to run tests.

What is your favorite part about working with the Karsun Innovation Center? Is there a weekly meeting or ritual you enjoy? The opportunity to learn more or get a new certification?

My favorite parts of working at the Karsun Innovation Center were the input I had in the development process and the team I worked with. I always felt like my opinion was respected at meetings, even in a room full of people that were far more experienced than me. I also had a great time working with the team, everyone was so willing to help each other and it felt like a comfortable, collaborative environment.

What is the biggest takeaway from your experience as an intern at Karsun?

My biggest takeaway from my experience at Karsun is that taking initiative is important. To be a valuable part of a team I have to research topics by myself and come up with goals to structure my approach to a problem.

Akhilesh was mentored by Srikanth Devarajan, Director, Karsun Innovation Center Data Practice.