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Rakesh Ravi

Research Assistant Professor

Bio

Rakesh Ravi is a Research Assistant Professor and a Data Scientist at NC State University. Rakesh specializes in analyzing unstructured text and converting unstructured information to structured visualization patterns. He is currently the lead developer on a three year R&D project with the American Coatings Association. The project involves building a full stack open source natural language processing engine and a visualization platform to analyze health and environmental impacts of materials of interest used in the paint and coatings industry. 

Rakesh teaches Web Development for Business Applications to undergraduate students at the Poole College of Management. The course involves learning about HTML and CSS concepts and using those skills to develop a Web Application in Django. He also teaches Business Analytics to undergraduate students which involves descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

In parallel to the ACA project and teaching responsibilities, he also works on innovation projects with the Center for Innovation Management Studies. Projects usually involve using big data analytics to answer strategic questions. Rakesh handles the data gathering of unstructured information by using web based crawl spiders or by using APIs. Once data is gathered, it is cleaned, parsed and stored in a database to be analyzed and visualized.

Rakesh graduated from NC State University with a masters degree in Computer Networking. 

Before he began his graduate life in the U.S., Rakesh worked as a Software Engineer for Tecnotree Convergence Ltd which is a Finland based Telecom Company for four years. At Tecnotree he worked on designing modules for the convergent charging platform and designing databases that hold subscriber information. He has also spent time in Lima, Peru as a deployment specialist as part of his tenure at Tecnotree. Rakesh completed all his primary and secondary education in Bangalore, India.  

When not working, Rakesh enjoys spending his time playing basketball and board games. He has recently picked up playing Chess.

With respect to work, he enjoys coding in Python, analyzing datasets and creating dashboards.