Debarghya Das

Debarghya Das, well known by his moniker Deedy Das, is an Indian IT leader, public writer, startup counselor, and software engineer. He is the founding team member and engineer at a Series C search startup, Glean.
Das is best known for "hacking" the Indian education system, making a popular resume template, and telling the story of how he lost weight based on data. He has led global teams in Google Search across New York, Tel Aviv, and Bangalore throughout his career, focusing on search quality. He is widely recognized as an open-source contributor and independent builder of popular software projects. Das has published research and patents and invests in early-stage startups as well.
==Early life and education==
Das was born in Calcutta, India. Das moved to the United States at age 3 and completed primary school in San Jose, California. He moved back in 2002 and later, in 2011, he graduated from La Martiniere for Boys in Calcutta, India. He ranked among the top fifty scorers at the 2011 Indian National Math Olympiad.
In 2014, Das earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science with an emphasis on machine learning from Cornell University. He completed the program in 3.5 years, spending 2.5 years on his bachelor's degree and the remaining year on his master's. During his time at Cornell University, Das conducted various research on machine learning, linguistics, and robotics under professors Ashutosh Saxena, Sam Tilsen, and Kavita Bala and published multiple research papers.
==Career==
In 2013, while pursuing his bachelor’s, Das was a contributor at Phabricator and has interned at Google and Coursera. At Google, Das worked with the YouTube captions Team and editing Automatic Speech Recognition Captions. While at Coursera, Das was a KPCB fellow on the Future Learning Experience Team.
In 2015, Das joined Facebook as a software engineer in New York. During his tenure, Das built UDF Finder and worked on several large scale applied machine learning projects in places, geo, and search.
In 2016, Das joined the Google New York office to work on search query understanding, knowledge graph, and machine learning. He later relocated to Tel Aviv to work on Sports on Goggle Search. In 2018, he built out the Sports team in Google Bangalore as a technical lead, focusing on cricket.
In 2019, Das joined Glean, now a $1B Series C search startup backed by Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and General Catalyst, as a founding team member and engineer. Das leads a team of engineers at Glean across Palo Alto and Bangalore that works on search and intelligence.
Das is also currently a judge for the Kleiner Perkins Fellows program for Engineering and Product. Das has published research papers and podcasts in machine learning and search technology. As an industry leader, he’s featured on many podcasts such as the Alldus AI in Action podcast and Infinite Machine Learning to speak about Search and ML in the industry. Das advises and invests in early-stage startups as well.
Das is well recognized for his June 2013 publication of Hacking into the Indian Education System, which presented glaring abnormalities in the grading of the two biggest national boards of education – CBSE and CISCE. His publication received widespread media attention and was covered by notable media sources and publications. This culminated in a Delhi High Court ruling in 2017 scrapping CBSE’s moderation policy.
In 2014, Das open-sourced a LaTeX resume template that became popular after trending on Reddit and HackerNews and currently has over 4400 stars and 1200 forks on its GitHub repository. The template is available on several online TeXing platforms and archives. It is among the top 10 most viewed Latex templates on Overleaf, with over 500,000 views. On its basis, the Open-Source community developed a Jade version and a Resume Generator that reached number two on HN.
In 2014, Das was featured as a speaker at TEDx Bangalore. He spoke to a 1600-person audience on some of the most significant issues plaguing Indian education and how online learning may be a viable solution. His other notable university speaking engagements and judging events in India and the United States include NIT Trichy, NIT Durgapur, BITS Pilani - Goa and Hyderabad, IIT Bombay, University of Texas Austin, and Vassar College, among others.
Das has been a long-time commentator on US immigration policies. In February of 2017, Das joined Bruce Morrison, a former congressman and the critical author of the H-1B Act of 1990, on Al Jazeera to discuss American H-1B visa (temporary worker visa) rules. In 2022, Das joined Mukesh Aghi, President of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, on CNBC to speak about the H-1B appointment crisis in India. Das has been featured on Today.com, Yahoo and even Chinese media articles to speak about immigration-related issues.
Das produced a two-part blog article from February to September 2017 describing the physical transformation and data-driven method he employed to reduce 66 pounds (30 kilograms) in eight months, which was featured on GQ and on the top page of Hackers News.
Additionally, Das is well-known for his public writings on his site Writes and Twitter. His tweets receive many retweets and have been featured on NDTV, CNBC, Hindustan Times, Reddit and Hacker News.
==Publications==
* Real-time articulatory biofeedback with electromagnetic articulography, published on Aug 1, 2014, Linguistics Vanguard with S. Tilsen, D. Das, and B. McKee.
* PlanIt: A Crowdsourcing Approach for Learning to Plan Paths from Large Scale Preference Feedback, published on June 10, 2014, International Conference of Robotics and Automation with A. Jain, D. Das, J. Gupta, and A. Saxena.
* Hacking into the Indian Education System, published on June 4, 2014.
* Permissions-aware search with user suggested results, published on Aug 18, 2022
==Awards and recognition==
* Credited as top 52 amongst the 2500 top KPCB Engineering Fellows (2014)
* Claimed the first position amongst the 50 other participants in the Microsoft Coding Competition held at Cornell University (2014)
* Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow (2014)
* Ranked among the top fifty scorers at the Indian National Math Olympiad (2011)
* Permissions-aware search with user suggested results
==In the media==
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==References==
==External links==
* Personal website
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* Debarghya Das on YouTube
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Category:1992 births
Category:Indian software engineers
Category:Indian writers
Category:Indian technology businesspeople