Raazesh Sainudiin

Raazesh Sainudiin (Raaz) is a Researcher in applied mathematics and statistics at Department of Mathematics, Uppsala University. His interdisciplinary work focuses on applying custom-built mathematical and statistical models to solve real-world problems. He enjoys experiments in the kitchen that challenge culinary conventions with his wife and daughters, field plant taxonomy, poetry, pluralisic histories, comparative philosophy, and tongue twisters in English, Sanskrit and Tamil.

Raaz obtained a BS in Mathematics and Biology (summa cum laude) at Minnesota State University, an MS in Biometrics and a PhD in Statistics at Cornell University. He was a Research Fellow of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 in the Mathematical Genetics Group, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Raaz has over two years of experience in the data industry and enjoys research collaborations between academia and industry.

Raaz likes to work at the interface of mathematics, computing and statistics. This inter-disciplinary research aims broadly to use computers to solve real-world problems using custom-built mathematical and statistical models.

He has worked on theoretical and practical aspects of a range of real-world decision problems from population genetics, phylogenetics, ecological genetics, air-traffic management, identification and control of gas turbines, natural language processing, collaborative filtering, terrorism studies, statistical physics of complex fluids, cross-domain data-fusion and knowledge-graph extractions for security-related applications, nonparametric self-exciting point processes on networks for crime-risk prediction, scalable geospatial computing of GPS trajectories on OpenStreetMaps, models of transmissions on networks and their inference for meme evolution from Twitter streams, classical problems in nonparametric density estimation and applied interval analysis. See http://lamastex.org/ for more details.

Raaz is currently passionate about models of meme evolution based on analysing real data collected from the twitterverse. Such models can shed light on how extremist ideologies spread and echo-chambers emerge and persist in social media.