PhD Candidate
Ronak Tali
Electrical Engineering
I research at the intersection of Geospatial Analytics, Scientific Machine Learning, and Big Data Generation. Currently completing my PhD at Iowa State University under Prof. Baskar Ganapathysubramanian.
Publications
NURBS based sparse approximation of Digital Elevation Maps
In Collaboration with John Deere – Intelligent Services Group
Employing techniques from Solid Geometry to perform signal processing on USGS Digital Elevation Maps at 1m resolution.
A multi-electrode electrical clamp for rapid, non-destructive estimation of internal stalk cavity volume
Plant Methods
Evaluating an electrical sensing strategy for estimating internal cavity volume using a flexible multi-electrode clamp with gradient boosting models achieving R² ≈ 0.99.
FlowBench: A large-scale benchmark for flow simulation over complex geometries
Journal of Data-centric Machine Learning Research
Introducing FlowBench, a dataset for neural simulators with over 10K samples for benchmarking neural PDE solvers including FNO, CNO, and DeepONets.
SEARS: a lightweight FAIR platform for multi-lab materials experiments and closed-loop optimization
Royal Society of Chemistry – Digital Discovery
An open-source, cloud-native platform that captures, versions, and exposes materials-experiment data via FAIR, programmatic interfaces.
MPFBench: A Large-Scale Dataset for SciML of Multi-Phase-Flows: Droplet and Bubble Dynamics
Journal of Data-centric Machine Learning Research
A comprehensive dataset from 11,000 simulations comprising one million time snapshots for multiphase fluid dynamics ML modeling.
Byzantine Resilient Federated REINFORCE (GM-FedREINFORCE)
2023 International Conference for Machine Learning Applications
Introducing GM-FedREINFORCE algorithm that provides robust theoretical guarantees on convergence even under Byzantine attacks.
Research in Progress
Education
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering
Iowa State University
Ames, IA
M.S. Statistics
Utah State University
Logan, UT
M.S. Industrial Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA
Tools and Techniques
QGIS
Google Earth Engine
Python - Native
Scientific Computing
PyTorch
Computer Vision
React
Next.js
Professional Experience
Data Scientist
REI
- Built demand forecasting models using Prophet (GAM/STAN) achieving up to 99% accuracy
- Developed churn prediction model using GBMs with AUC near 80%
- Created fully in-house behavior-based marketing attribution model replacing industry vendor
- Designed multi-level clustering framework as organization-wide customer segmentation standard
Senior Revenue Science Analyst
FedEx Corporation
- Built customer lifecycle and churn model preventing losses of ~48,000 packages/day
- Created multivariate models for retail store location optimization
- Developed customer profile vectors to identify sales opportunities
Systems Engineer
TCS
- Developed server monitoring tool generating $100K+ in cost savings using Lean Six Sigma
- Implemented extensive software test automation reducing manual effort by 80%+
Contact
Let's Connect
I'm currently on the job market and open to opportunities in research, data science, and machine learning. Feel free to reach out!
References
Advisor
Prof. Baskar Ganapathysubramanian
Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Distinguished Professor in Engineering, Iowa State University
Reference
Prof. Soumik Sarkar
Walter W. Wilson Faculty Fellow in Engineering, Director of Translational AI Center (TrAC), Iowa State University
Reference
Dr. Talukder (Zaki) Jubery
Research Scientist – III, Translational AI Center (TrAC), Iowa State University