Bio: Shikhar is a Data Scientist at Global Policy Lab. He holds a M.S in Computer Science from State University of New York, Buffalo and a M.S in Development Economics from University of San Francisco. Previously, he has worked in various data and cloud engineering roles in private sector. He has also worked as a research associate managing randomized control trials for BRAC and IPA.
Research: Shikhar is interested in working on development interventions that are easy to scale and sustainable in long run. His recent work has focused on extracting insights from big data sources such as call detail records and satellite imagery to support a large scale COVID-19 aid program and answer policy relevant questions.
Fields of Interest: Development economics, Data Science, Big data engineering
Publications:
Mobile Phone Data Reveal the Effects of Violence on Internal Displacement.
Nature Human Behavior, 2022
Public mobility data enables COVID-19 forecasting and management at local and global scales
Do Economic Shocks and Environmental Factors Shape Personality Traits? Evidence from the Ultra-Poor in Uganda
Mapping Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan Using Satellite Imagery
4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS ’21), 2021.
Also accepted at the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’21), Workshop on Humanitarian Mapping
PigOut: Making multiple Hadoop clusters work together
