About
My name’s Sumeet and I’m a Bay Area native in my third year of studying computer science and mathematics at UC San Diego. Culture Quantified is my CAT 125 website for Fall 2018, and you can find my personal website here.
“Algorithms” and “big data” can seem very abstract to people who haven’t studied them, but they affect our lives in very real and concrete ways. The goal of this website is to demystify these concepts by analyzing them in the context of modern culture and at a high level: how Spotify has used algorithmic music curation to cement itself as a cultural fixture, how Facebook collects user data to tailor ads, etc.
As participants of society, we consume culture, actively or passively. Our environment is characterized by music streaming, social media, sports and entertainment (e.g. Hollywood), and other American trappings. These aspects of culture surround us and become unavoidable, but also give us a common understanding: we all know what Apple Music and Twitter are, who LeBron James and Kanye West are. And so, we can use these common cultural understandings as vehicles through which we can learn about more abstract concepts like collaborative filtering (how Amazon recommends products based on what similar users buy).
The audience for this website is anyone familiar with modern culture—understanding data science at Spotify requires a basic understanding of streaming (as an example)—and interested in (or curious about) algorithms and data.
I’ve been interested in computer science and mathematics since high school, and I’ve applied my knowledge of algorithms and big data across several industries, including cyber-security, server management, healthcare. Between my junior and senior years of high school, I interned at Zscaler, a global cloud-based information security company that was a startup at the time and is now widely recognized as an industry leader, and developed a web visualization of global cyberthreats using the company’s internal data. The summer after my freshman year at UC San Diego, I interned at Actiance, a communications compliance multinational, where I led a team of three interns in developing an anomaly detection and diagnostic service for product sites’ server configurations. And, I spend my most recent summer in Chicago developing data integrity and transformation tools for IBM Watson Health, a division of IBM Watson (best known for significantly outperforming the most successful contestants of the Jeopardy! game show) dedicated to solving some of the world’s most pressing health challenges through data, analytics, and artifical intelligence.