RISE Seminar: Anant Bhardwaj: Instabase: Design Challenges in Building End User Data Systems

October 12, 2017

For this week’s RISE Seminar, we will have Anant Bhardwaj who is the founder & CEO of Instabase.

Abstract

In this talk, I’ll highlight some of the design decisions we made in building Instabase — a software platform with a suite of applications to automate complex data operations. The software platform includes [1] a flexible data store (for managing data), and [2] an app store (end user tools/applications for various use-cases). The talk will touch upon some lessons learned in building the system, and highlight some interesting areas for future work.

Instabase is a software platform that enables organizations to automate complex business operations by combining various Instabase tools and applications together. The suite of services and applications include [1] tools for reading business documents from various sources such as scanned images, PDFs, word/excel documents, emails, and websites [2] tools for automatic extraction of different business fields using program synthesis and other techniques [3] extensible UDF system for custom business logic, [4] tools for building ML models (for use-cases such as automatic classification, prediction, and clustering), and [5] various tools for visual discovery and data science.

Bio

Anant Bhardwaj is the founder & CEO of Instabase. Prior to Instabase, he was a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, co-advised by David Karger and Samuel Madden. He received a M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University where he worked with Scott Klemmer, and Jeff Heer. His primary interest is in the areas of data management. His projects draw ideas from various fields such as databases, distributed systems, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.