Aayam Shrestha

Ph.D. Candidate, Oregon State University

I am currently a Graduate Research Assistant at OSU advised by Dr. Alan Fern. My research aims to combine the reasoning abilities of symbolic AI planners / RL Agents with the rich representations learned by deep neural networks. This lets an AI Agent ground their abstract plans into the real sensory world - enabling optimal execution. I am interested applying my research to enable spatial computing agents to reason and act in virtual and real 3D environments.

Designed and implemented Upselling module for Oculus Store. The Averagers recommendation module extends support for items, consummables as well as bundles for upselling. Offline evaluation demonstrated 150% improvement on suggested purchase conversion over KNN baseline. Also constructed User Journey Dataset for modelling in-app purchases over time across the oculus store.

Designed and Implemented Page Level Reward for Cross-Slot Widget Ranking. This tackles the fundamental problem of defining reward which is aligned with different business metrics while factoring for page level interactions of users. Also built a prediction model that increases the modelling accuracy by 300% for rewards (over baselines) and 50% improvement for overall business metric predictions - across different world regions.

Developed and maintained large-scale enterprise Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence solutions for Off-shore clients; Alex & Ani, Holland and Barett, Gander Mountain, and Makro. I was also invovled in Customer Experience Analytics over in-house data lake sourced from customer call audio, text reviews and curated twitter feeds.