[Book] The Mars Imperative
I m posting the first 10 pages of a book that I wrote in 2015 but never got around to publishing. This was written by a
Govind Chandrasekhar
Latest posts
Second Order Effects of AI Search: From Keywords to Intent
The way we search is changing rapidly. For years, we’ve learnt to translate our thoughts into keywords, to make it easy for Google or Amazon
Life Games
Do you dream of quitting your job, even if things are going quite well? Do you fantasize about doings something totally different, perhaps changing careers,
LLMs as Rankers, a Blueprint (AI for Ecommerce Search)
In “What it takes to Build Effective Search”, we discussed why Ecommerce search relevance is hard to get right without significant investment. In this article,
What it takes to Build Effective Search
Onboarding a search tool like Elastic or Algolia is easy to do — create an account, install a library, upload a catalog and boom, you’ll
AI, Mental Health & The Meh Generation
Are heading towards a post-work dopamine-addicted future? An odd affliction seems to have struck a significant percentage of my social circle. These are educated folk
The AI Founder’s Ballad
On Emotions Exhilaration and disbelief, a constant thrill ride,With the perennail fear of invalidation side by side.With OpenAI releases sweeping over you like an endless
[Book] Early-Stage Startup Mistakes & How to Avoid Them
Late 2020, after I parted ways with Semantics3 a startup I co-founded between 2011-2020 I made an attempt to chronicle my learnings from
Eight things you need to know when moving from a startup to an established tech company
Switching from a tech role at a startup to one at an established tech company should be relatively easy. Engineering, product and design skills are,
Beyond Toilet Paper – Essential Products with the Highest Demand Online
A look at best selling categories and brands in the US from a basket of “high priority” goods Amazon recently announced that it would focus on
Shopping for Hand Sanitizers Online in the Age of COVID-19
On 4x price increases, rapid price fluctuations, upstart brands and fake listings COVID-19 has led to a spike in demand for products like hand sanitizers
7 Elements of AI Product Strategy
A playbook for building ML powered products, teams and businesses Building and selling machine learning (ML) products is hard. The underlying technology keeps evolving, requiring
Predicting the Demand of Products Sold Online
Can the demand for an item be predicted before its market launch? How about 1 month into launch, once the initial numbers are in? Which
Introducing Attribute Extraction from User-Generated Content
Attribute Extraction from ecommerce data the generation of structured fields from unstructured text is a popular product offering of ours. Our customers use it
Patterns in Shipment Delays of Imports into the USA
This is the second in a multi-part series in which we attempt to unearth dynamics of the shipping industry, by analyzing publicly available import shipment
To Read Less — My 2020 Resolution
Each December, I religiously set a list of personal targets for the new year. Usually, the first item on this list is a reading target,
Shipping Line, Port and Route Dynamics of US Shipment Imports
This is the first in an article series in which we attempt to unearth dynamics of the shipping industry, by analyzing publicly available import shipment
Using AI to Automate Web Crawling
Writing crawlers to extract data from websites is a seemingly intractable problem. The issue is that while it’s easy to build a one-off crawler, writing
Experiments with Shrinking my Garbage Footprint
I wrote this post back in 2017, but left it languishing in my drafts folder. Present day reflection at the end of this article. “Garbage
Neutralizing Emissions from International Air Travel — On Project CORSIA and its Shortcomings
If you were to take a flight from India to the United States, to which country would the carbon emissions produced be attributed to? To
The Problem with the Way We Measure Carbon Emissions
I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal
Weak Supervision & Active Learning – Essential Tools for Machine Learning Projects
Here s a standard storyline I ve seen played out across organizations many times over: Lots of wasted resources. But critically, opportunities lost. Why does this happen, even
The Ecommerce Knowledge Graph – Semantics3 Labs
Over the past 7 years, we ve built an extensive Universal Product Catalog, by curating and understanding public data from across the public e-commerce web. This
AI-based HTS Code Classification: 5 Technical Ideas for Building Solutions that Work
Imports, exports and tariffs are quite the theme in the news these days, be it in the context of Brexit, the US-China trade war or
The State of Ecommerce – 2019 Report
Over the course of two weeks in February 2019, two Semantics3 engineers crawled the entire universe of dotcom domains looking for ecommerce sites. We built