OpenMined Featured Contributor: May 2020

Interview with Sourav Das

GitHub: @souravcipher  | Slack: @Sourav | Twitter: @souravcipher

Where are you based?

"I’m currently based in Assam, India."

What do you do?

"I’m leading the Mentorship Team at OpenMined and Community Manager at GirlScript Summer of Code, I mostly work on Mobile Development, Deep Learning & Machine Learning! My background is Mathematics & Statistics and my favorite programming language is Python. I do volunteer work with many Open Source organizations. Recently, I mentored at Google Code-in for TensorFlow organization and volunteered as a Reviewer for Grace Hopper Celebration Scholarships at AnitaB.org & Rails Girls Summer of Code."

What are your specialties?

"I consider myself a Lifelong Learner, I study and work on a lot of stuff.

My interests are Mathematics, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, Research, Open Source, Music, Natural Environment and Mountaineering."

How and when did you originally come across OpenMined?

"I got to know about OpenMined from the Secure and Private AI Scholarship Challenge from Facebook where I learned about Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning & made a lot of amazing life-long friends in the Scholarship Community and then got involved with OpenMined as a Mentor."

What was the first thing you started working on within OpenMined?

"My first contribution to the OpenMined was as a Mentor and then I contributed to the Projects PySyft and Android Worker."

And what are you working on now?

"I’m leading a super talented team of mentors in the Mentorship Team at OpenMined, I’m currently focusing on Mobile Development with Machine Learning and learning more about PPML. Also, building a project named Climoto."

What would you say to someone who wants to start contributing?

"If someone is new to OpenMined I will recommend to visit the OpenMined Website and GitHub Repositories and join the OpenMined Slack Community! The community is super awesome and amazing, just feel free to ask questions in Slack!

We at OpenMined have awesome mentors who have been continuously working hard to guide their mentees and help to achieve their goals, whether it's getting started to contributing to a project, learning about a particular part of the code base, joining a dev or community team or learning something new!

Here is the application to Receive OM Mentorship Also, I highly encourage to check out the tutorials of the libraries PySyft, PyGrid and to take the Secure and Private AI course if someone wants to get started learning PPML and Learn about Differential Privacy, Federated Learning, Encrypted Computation etc.

Please recommend one interesting book, podcast or resource to the OpenMined community.

"I'm currently reading a book Grokking Machine Learning by Luis G. Serrano it’s awesome! I also recommend the book Grokking Deep Learning by Andrew Trask,  Podcast by Lex Fridman is awesome and OpenMined Blogs. You can also find more recommendations on my page!"