Ronay Ak
Sr. Data Scientist
United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRonay Ak is a Senior Data Scientist with nine years of industry experience, currently at NVIDIA where he builds GPU-accelerated ML and recommendation inference pipelines and advances scalable data processing tools. His background blends research and engineering—PhD-trained in energy engineering with earlier work at NIST on smart manufacturing and contributions to PMML standards—giving him a rigorous approach to applied ML systems. He’s an active open-source contributor across high-profile GPU projects (cuDF, cuSpatial, NVTabular, Merlin), focusing on production-ready feature engineering, inference integration, and clear technical documentation. Comfortable at the intersection of large-scale data engineering and model deployment, he often translates complex GPU and ETL mechanics into usable libraries and reproducible examples. A less obvious strength is his dual fluency in deep statistical methods and developer-facing documentation, which helps accelerate adoption of advanced tooling in engineering teams.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Power (Energy) Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Power (Energy) Engineering at CentraleSupelecMaster's degree, Industrial Engineering, Master's degree, Industrial Engineering at Istanbul Technical UniversityBachelor's degree, Mathematical Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Mathematical Engineering at Yildiz Technical University
Turkish, English, French
Github Skills (34)
markdown10
pytorch10
recommendation-system10
restructuredtext10
python10
sphinx10
pandas10
machine-learning10
cudf10
rs10
datatable10
feature-engineering10
datatables10
data-preprocessing10
etl10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
NVIDIA-Merlin/Merlin
Mar 2022 - Oct 2022
NVIDIA Merlin is an open source library providing end-to-end GPU-accelerated recommender systems, from feature engineering and preprocessing to training deep learning models and running inference in production.
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:80 reviews, 44 commits, 48 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Ronay contributed to the development of inference pipelines and proof of concepts (PoC) for recommender systems within the Merlin framework. Their work involved modifying and deleting existing notebooks and related files, likely focusing on integrating models with Triton Inference Server and optimizing the overall inference process. Key changes included updating the example notebooks for multi-stage RecSys and implementing new features.
in-productiontrainingdeep-learning-modelsengineeringtensorflow
NVIDIA-Merlin/NVTabular
May 2020 - Dec 2022
NVTabular is a feature engineering and preprocessing library for tabular data designed to quickly and easily manipulate terabyte scale datasets used to train deep learning based recommender systems.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:58 reviews, 96 commits, 68 PRs in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Ronay primarily focused on updating and adding features related to the processing of tabular data, specifically within the `nvtabular` library. Contributions include updating documentation, adding a `Dropna()` operation to handle missing values, adding a filter operation, and implementing features such as target encoding. These additions and modifications enhance the library's functionality for feature engineering and data preprocessing, which is core to the repository's purpose.
tsneengineeringtensorflowpreprocessingnvidia
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