Data Science · Machine Learning · Founder
Data scientist and ML engineer, currently finishing a master's in Data Analytics and Computational Social Science at UMass Amherst. I came in through psychology, so I start with why people behave the way they do and build the system from there.
The argument
I started in psychology because I wanted to know why people do what they do. Four years in, I realised the answers I wanted were sitting inside datasets nobody had bothered to build properly. So I went and learned that too: a postgraduate diploma at UT Austin, then the DACSS master's at UMass Amherst. I am not the person who stops when something works. I am the person who asks what it would take to make it right, and then goes and does that part as well.
Stage 01 · Observe
I spent months doing Applied Behaviour Analysis with autistic children, recording every prompt and every response, session after session, under HIPAA. That job taught me something no course did. The data you end up with is a product of the question you asked and the room you asked it in. I have never been able to look at a dataset the same way since.
Where
Law, wellness, clinical therapy, telecoms, and a dining hall I ran for five and a half years while earning the degree that got me the rest. Different rooms, same job underneath. Find the behaviour in the data, then build the thing that acts on it.
Co-founder · Venture studio
Six ventures. Three prizes. One partner I have never built anything without.
Kinnovation is what Kinjal Pandey and I do outside the day job. We are not an incubator and we are not a consultancy. We build the things ourselves, we take them into rooms full of judges, and we keep the ones that survive it. Every venture below is joint work and every prize was won together.
In-kind giving you can trace from your door to the person who needed it.
AI verification of an item's condition and fair market value from photos, matched to charities that actually need that item, with an audit-ready tax receipt at the end. Nonprofits drown in the wrong donations while the right ones never find them. Karnah closes that gap.
$750, second place at UPitch Spring 2026
You already shot it. You just cannot find it.
Nobody has nothing to post. They have eleven thousand photos and no idea which one fits the format that is working this week. Trendify reads what is trending, indexes the library you already own and puts the two together. The hard problem is finding the right eight seconds inside forty thousand files.
$300, Minute Pitch winner
A calendar that reschedules itself when the day breaks.
Intelligent scheduling built on behavioural modelling instead of calendar rules. I worked as its behavioural data analyst, doing the predictive modelling and the A/B testing on smart-calendar features, on AWS, MongoDB, Node and React.
$500, Apex Center for Entrepreneurs
Finding what actually worked for children whose symptoms match yours, not whose diagnosis does.
A machine learning platform for neurodivergent support. I co-led the interdisciplinary team, using clustering and supervised methods to surface therapy-efficacy signal. It is the question every parent asks and almost no dataset is arranged to answer, which is exactly why I wanted to work on it.
What to eat, when and where, from your body, your calendar and what is within walking distance.
A nutrition guidance app in Dart and Flutter. It is constraint satisfaction more than recommendation. The hard part was never knowing what is healthy. It is what is healthy, open, affordable and reachable in the forty minutes you actually have.
A record of what people saw, kept sealed until the person it happened to asks for it.
Thirty people see it happen, none of them know each other, and within hours the details have blurred. Camera footage is overwritten in a day. Witness holds accounts while they are still accurate and releases them only with consent from everyone involved. A neutral evidence vault, deliberately not a reputational database.
$1,550in prize money, across two universities. All of it won with Kinjal Pandey. Neither of us has ever pitched alone.
UMass Amherst Entrepreneurship Club
Sponsored by the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship
Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship
Isenberg School of Management
Apex Center for Entrepreneurs
Pamplin College of Business
What I’ve built
Everything here is public. Clone it, run it, check my numbers against my data. The drawing on each card is generated live from the method that project used: two distributions pulling apart, ten sources feeding one pile, a search tree going dark as alpha-beta prunes it. Motifs, not results. The numbers are in the write-ups.
25,886posts and comments
I pulled 6,398 posts and 19,488 comments out of three mental health subreddits and put three classifiers against each other on the sentiment labels. Every file is in the repo.
519documents, 10 universities
A scraper that builds one comparable dataset out of ten universities that all publish their crime alerts differently. 519 documents, HTML and PDF, with full provenance on every row.
24years of charts, scrollytold
A D3 and Three.js scrollytelling piece on how pop music changed across 24 years, built on Billboard chart data joined to Spotify audio features.
0.82shard move budget
An adversarial search agent for misere Nim. Iterative-deepening minimax, alpha-beta pruning, transposition caching, and a domain evaluator, all inside a one second per move limit.
On GitHub
Not a curated highlight reel. This is everything public on @rishav-dev, including the coursework. The interesting ones have write-ups; the rest you can just read.
Recognition
LISC Massachusetts and the IXL Center · 2025
Given for leading the digital upgrades through the LISC Digital Growth Accelerator. The name of the award is the part I liked. It was for executing, not for proposing.
Franklin County CDC · 2026
Selected for the Spring 2026 cohort out of an open application round.
Education
M.S. · Data Analytics & Computational Social Science
I chose DACSS specifically because it refuses to treat the social science as decoration. Network analysis, experimental design and causal inference sit alongside the modelling, which is exactly the combination I had been trying to assemble on my own.
Postgraduate Diploma · Data Science & Business Analytics
Eight months, applied end to end, taken while I was still finishing at Virginia Tech. I wanted the quantitative foundation properly rather than picked up in pieces.
B.S. · Psychology, minor in Computer Science
The computer science minor started as curiosity and turned into the other half of what I do. I have stopped thinking of them as two subjects.
Certification