Valliappa Lakshmanan
Co-Founder And CTO at O'Reilly
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inGoogle Cloud Platform Development Essentials
Valliappa Lakshmanan is a seasoned AI and data leader with 10+ years of experience building production ML systems, now serving as Co-Founder and CTO of ObinAI and an ongoing author at O'Reilly. He has led data and AI teams at Google and Silver Lake and previously built market-leading weather products as Director of Meteorology at The Climate Corporation, blending domain science with scalable engineering. He’s authored multiple books on GenAI, ML design patterns, BigQuery, and ML platforms, translating complex techniques into practical, repeatable patterns for practitioners. An active contributor to GoogleCloudPlatform repos, his hands-on work includes image captioning, TFRecord pipelines, BigQuery data pipelines, and reproducible ML workflows—code that supports popular educational and production examples. He combines deep academic training (PhD) with product-focused leadership, often bridging research, tooling and business impact. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic architectures that move models from notebooks into reliable, cloud-native deployments.
10 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Electrical & Computer Engg., PhD Electrical & Computer Engg. at University of OklahomaHigh School, High School at St. John's Besant NagarHigh School, High School at P. S. Senior Secondary SchoolIndian Institute of Technology MadrasMS Electrical & Biomedical Engineering, MS Electrical & Biomedical Engineering at The Ohio State University
Stackoverflow
3,986reputation
424kreached
164answers
18questions
google-bigquery
top-1%
sql
top-5%
tensorflow
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google-cloud-storage
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python
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google-cloud-platform
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Github Skills (43)
google-bigquery10
google-cloud-platform10
bigquery10
data-pipelines10
python10
evaluation10
data-science10
gcloud10
machine-learning10
bash10
image-annotation10
gcp10
data-preprocessing10
keras10
eval10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
GoogleCloudPlatform/practical-ml-vision-book
Nov 2020 - Dec 2021
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:107 commits, 1 PR, 122 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Valliappa implemented image captioning functionality by making changes to the 04_problem_types/04_image_captioning.ipynb notebook. The changes include taking out stop words and narrowing word selection during prediction. The user also created a notebook for labeling, and integrated the created dataset for use with a convolutional neural network. Further changes were made to a python script to convert jpeg files to TFRecord files, and the related shell scripts that use it.
GoogleCloudPlatform/ml-design-patterns
May 2020 - Apr 2021
Source code accompanying O'Reilly book: Machine Learning Design Patterns
Role in this project:ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:36 commits, 1 PR, 68 pushes in 11 months
Contributions summary:Valliappa contributed to a machine learning design patterns repository, primarily focusing on reproducibility and data representation. They implemented code changes to include tf transform working in an existing notebook, and created a notebook demonstrating text embeddings within BigQuery. Additionally, the user added a Python script for preprocessing and experimented with the integration of embeddings for data retrieval using the Keras autoencoder architecture.
machine-learning-bookmachine-learningpatternsdesign-patternso-reilly
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