Ashwin P.

From Astrologer's Whispers to Real Connections: Reclaiming Belonging in a Lonely Age Have you ever consulted an astrologer, their predictions swirling in your head, only to feel empty when your day takes a different turn? The emptiness might not be about the details themselves, but about seeking outside approval for your happiness. This same feeling can creep in even when you achieve success. Remember climbing the career ladder, landing that dream apartment, only to find yourself lost in a quiet emptiness? In India's bustling cities, it's a familiar, painful emotion. We're surrounded by people, yet there's a little loneliness at the edges of our lives. Thinking back to Mrs. Deshmukh, your friendly neighbour with the legendary Til Gur Barfi's, who brought the whole neighbourhood together with tea and friendly chats. Those evenings of shared stories and laughter, a web woven by simple human connection, feel like a distant memory in our super-connected yet broken world. We chase success with thumbs glued to screens, building online bridges that leave us feeling more alone than ever. The pressure to create a perfect online self-drowns out the whispers of our own desires. But here's the real deal, that shiny designation and fancy car can't fill the hole left by genuine connection. There's hope, though! We can rewrite this story. Let's ditch the small talk and chase deeper connections. Share your fears and worries, break free from feeling isolated in this sea of ambition. Remember the warmth of family gatherings, the joy of shared childhood games? Revive those small traditions. Pick up the phone for a real heart-to-heart conversation rather than What's Apping. Every act of connection, no matter how ordinary, how small, builds a more satisfying life. Imagine hearing back from an old friend, reliving an old laugh, and being surrounded by people who truly see us, where we belong. Isn't that what life is all about? Together, one conversation, one meal, and one act of kindness at a time, we can tear down the walls of loneliness. We can rewrite the narrative of modern society, where connection becomes the foundation of a life well lived. It's not too late, or is it? #HumanConnections #BelongingMatters #OvercomeLoneliness #RealConversations #MeaningfulRelationships #CommunityOverConnectivity #AuthenticLiving #SocialWellbeing #RedefiningSuccess #TraditionsRewoven #FightIsolation #VulnerableAndReal #KindnessRevolution #SmallActsBigImpact #ReconnectingHumanity #IndianSociety #UrbanLoneliness #DigitalDetox #QualityOverQuantity #ConnectionCures Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

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I am honored to receive a Certificate of Appreciation from senior director Amol Farkade, director Avinash Gatty, and my manager Rajeev Karnatak for my role in a significant project at GEP. We've successfully redesigned and launched the Spend Self-Serve application on GEP’s low code platform, Quantum. Key highlights of this project: 1. 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Rebuilt from scratch on Quantum, enhancing flexibility and speed. 2. 𝐂𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭: Successfully migrated 100+ customers to the new system, ensuring continuity and improved service. 3. 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐡𝐚𝐮𝐥: Redesigned both the user interface and backend architecture, integrating MongoDB to enhance performance and scalability. 4. 𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: Expanded the application's capabilities to serve as a generic data processing tool, capable of handling various forms of Big Data. 5. 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐃𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐩𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: Engineered the new version in under a year, a significant enhancement over the previous version which took two years. This achievement underscores our commitment to efficiency and innovation, leveraging GEP's Quantum platform to expedite the development process without compromising quality. This project was a massive team effort, and it’s gratifying to see our hard work pay off in such tangible ways. I'm excited about continuing to innovate and drive future projects forward. #technology #innovation #teamwork #GEP #Quantum #BigData #AI #Spend

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amazing article ALSHAMA M S ! you outlined the essence of mentoring elegantly, showing how wisdom and skill flow seamlessly, if guidance and support is imparted delicately, patiently and responsibly! never knew stories assembled from real-world experiences could be so insightful! 🎉

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Harness the power of AI to streamline your workflow, boost productivity, and drive better results. Get started with GenAI today and take your product management game to the next level! 💡 #Chisel #GenAI #ProductManagement #SaaS #Innovation

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OTN requires new multi modal user agent (like browser in case of internet) for discovery and executing transactions. Imagine prescription is uploaded by someone from tier5 and User Agent will understand , discover the business serving with lower price and make an order. Multi modal User Agent makes OTN truly accessible to billion people. Every transaction on earth should be powered by OTN (b2c, b2b, b2g, g2g). So every business application(sap, netsuite, etc..) should act as an agent. Onboarding businesses should be uber easy like enter type of business and your catalogue is ready. (this is possible only with universal Item registry). This will be true semantic web.

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I have known Avni for almost ten years and I am super glad (and not surprised) that her customer-focused approach remains unchanged. We were fortunate to have Avni Savant speak to our teams at G2 India. The session was inspirational, and we learned a lot from her. Avni has a wealth of experience, and we are grateful for the valuable insights she shared with us. During the session brilliantly moderated by Aravind Raj, we discussed several topics and gained a few key takeaways: ⚡ Creating an environment that supports a "fail fast" mindset fosters innovation, and consistent leadership support is essential. Interestingly, this is something that Roger Valade aligns with strongly, and we are just in the middle of an innovation sprint. :) 🧠 We explored areas where AI can be implemented to solve product use cases. Avni stressed that we don't need to reinvent the wheel; instead, we should learn from companies that have successfully adopted AI. The most doable areas for AI implementation are to improve developer productivity and summarize insights and discoveries. 📊 We discussed how squad-specific goals (OKRs) can be integrated with the company's larger goals. For example, we can analyze if improving our product's onboarding experience impacts the adoption rate, and understand if the release was successful. Avni emphasized the importance of using data to make feature iterations and prioritization decisions. 💬 We discussed the significance of product development teams being close to the customers and leveraging customer interviews, and feedback from pre-sales, sales, and support teams. 💗 Lastly, Avni highlighted the importance of self-drivenness and having a clear point of view in one's career. She noted that this proactive approach is valued and appreciated. We are truly grateful to Avni for her time and lessons!

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Here's another successful framework they have applied. Suppose, you are against the surrender of the villages or against government actions. If you raise the voice, then you could be considered as a supporter of northern corporate and you are automatically triggered by other citizens as "not worthy to listen to" - Nir Eyal describes this as an internal trigger. Moreover, the framework has developed a manual, that was evolved and played out exceptionally well by the northern corporate and the government authorities. This is a plan prepared over the years, developed and infused into society. This framework is not new, but as Social Media was emerging, so-called analysts, political figures, YouTubers, military and other telegram authors, bunch of commentators were grown for a sole purpose - to develop a "Habit forming behaviours in citizens". These people are players. As data manipulation became easier, the developed behaviours started to ensure that regardless of the actions taken, majority of the society will not act against in order to avoid being triggered by the players and less knowledgable supporters of the actions. On the other hand, some other simple citizens don't think about the depth of messages and actions and most of them lack critical thinking, they do not try and look other ways, they are looking into the "manual", which leads to the most simple interpretation - "what is good or bad for me ?" or "whatever manual insists is the right thing to do for me". The choice is simple, it's based on the manual. Others who act or raise the voice, become internally triggered by the supporters of the actions and either getting muzzled or silenced or becoming obsolete (these people usually won't come back to make another try). The framework develops a vicious circle, that can not be broken, unless a better "reward" (I am not gonna talk about this though) is proposed to the citizens and sometimes players in order to develop a switch of the vector. The book here describes an ability of brain manipulation for creating good, habit forming products that actually hook people to improve their lives. However, Nir mentions an important aspect of building habit forming products. That is if they are not done for the good they become evil. With AI emerging and content creation/curation becomes easier, this framework will emerge too and will most probably create other, more complex instances, which can self-educate, those can potentially erase the line of morality and truth, deceiving the reality in unprecedented level. We'll be facing superpowers, that can be used for evil. Here and now or tomorrow in the future, it's up to the people to decide how we will progress, because as it is said - "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." Now it can be misattribution, but in a way it's true. P.S. There is no evidence that Edmund Burke said the last quote in my text, so no reference to him.

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I was just having a conversation with an old friend over coffee yesterday evening who also worked for me in past and he asked me about question on leadership to handle a situation about some poor performance case and handling them.. As a philosophy I always believe in As a leader your job is just not to focus on your top performer but your role is to elevate and support the least performer to make them top performer. You never know that a shining star may come out of coal mine... Just give the chance, mentorship, role rotation and your people will shine as long as you are willing to invest time on people. #Leadership #ShiningStar #PeopleFirst

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Insightful session on how AI can bring benefits throughout different stages of the SDLC, including code explanation, generation, testing, code reviews, and monitoring in the production environment

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I was hot headed, typically obnoxious, and overtly arrogant when I started working at my first job. Chirag and Pravin dai will attest to that 😂.   I remember this one incident very clearly. Mahesh was my QA guy and we were building #MONyog, an agentless #MySQL monitoring tool. We missed a customer meeting. Just plain forgot. Obviously the boss' "blood (was) boiling" and his "head exploding" -- phrases we heard a lot those days! He rescheduled the meeting and stood over us while we took the call.   The problem the customer was facing was that every time MONyog started up his network usage shot up for the first few minutes and used up most of the available bandwidth. He showed us #Nagios graphs. Without thinking I asked him what the size of his error log was. He said it was around 1TB.   Every time MONyog booted up, it was reading 1TB of data using SFTP. How did I know? I had no idea. Boss looked at me, "How did you know?". All I said was: "I felt it". Sufficed to say that my boss' blood was no longer boiling over, and his ire was redirected at Sandhya who built the feature 🤣.   It's been over a decade since that incident, and I was reminded of it as I was reading Daniel Kahneman's #ThinkingFastAndSlow. His work, it shines a light on the dark recesses of my mind. It's incredible how the brain works, and we owe it to ourselves to take care of it, to nurture it. I had no idea, when I picked up the book, that Daniel would pass away just a day or two later. God rest his soul. Share your story. Show up.

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Thanks, Amnic team, for hosting me on your podcast. I enjoyed the conversation with Sathya narayanan Nagarajan. We have many things in common from our learnings from working on CD-based products where perfection was the expectation in the first iteration to today, when Amnic and Mindtickle are taking big bets on GenAI and Cloud to delight our customers. In this podcast, I shared my experiences of more than twenty years of building and deploying large-scale systems at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Mindtickle. The podcast also covers my learnings from moving from large enterprises to a relatively smaller company where being agile and nimble is paramount. #Microsoft, #Meta, #Google #Mindtickle.

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Generative AI is reshaping the field of K-12 education. Educators are finding new efficiencies in everything from lesson creation to personalized feedback and grading, helping them save time and effort while enhancing learning outcomes. Register now: https://lnkd.in/g9HyNVcP #MicrosftASEAN #Education #MicrosoftAdvocate

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Solve Locally, Impact Globally!! As an engineer, your own curiosity and zeal to solve your own challenges often lead to solutions that are helpful for everyone. Personally, my love of tinkering with MBR to boot several OS (BeOS, Slackware and 10 more :) on a 400MHz Compaq led me to a journey of automating virtual appliances at VMware. Similarly, at Box, when building Box Graph, the challenge of interacting with too many 'Jeffs' led to the creation of a real-time recommendation platform. I believe that when you solve for yourself, you empathize with the user. While building Box AI, we are addressing problems that everyone encounters daily in a business setting. How do I organize my content and find information efficiently? How can I keep up-to-date with research? Last week, we made a plethora of Box AI announcements, including beta releases and product updates. For instance, Box AI Hubs (https://www.box.com/hubs) has been highly beneficial internally and is regularly used. This is how I stay informed about changes in benefits year-over-year for my specific case, communicate with our Go-to-Market Team about in-flight products, and facilitate engineers' migration from one observability stack to another, among many other uses. It's difficult to explain the joy you get when you make mundane tasks easier for yourself and others. There are more innovations to come with Box AI, offering better solutions for the common challenges we all face. Stay tuned! #boxai

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This post is triggered by a post in Facebook about someone complaining about their salary vs the owner's riches. Here are a few points to always remember. Particularly for the younger readers 1. The only purpose of a business is to increase shareholder value. This is the classic, straight to gut definition. Possibly unpleasant and certainly devoid of virtue signalling. Everything else is a byproduct 2. Optimization is essential to business. Otherwise it goes bust. 3. Money is in most cases a direct correlation to the perceived value you bring to business. There will be statistical variance on this. That is, some of your peers will be better or worse paid, or better or worse placed for similar work across industry. So the shareholders, who really like their money, are paying ceo more because they perceive him to bring better value. And that value is sometimes not visible or understood. For example, a powerful network. 4. Value creation (yours) is a continous process. It is neither easy, nor pretty. Burning the midnight oil never really ceases. 5. Petulance and jealousy is a terrible trait. Learn from success of others, celebrate and improve yourself. Don't whine. It is annoying. 6. If you do not feel valued, have an honest conversation, skill up and chart your path. Cribbing but not doing anything to change will solve nothing

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We wrapped up our discussion, "Leveraging AI to Transform Learning: Insights from the Product Development Journey" for the Association of Test Publishers (ATP) #ecpssummit. I gain something new every time I speak to industry experts. Kudos and thanks to Oscar Santiago, Ashok Sarathy, Paul Muir, and Ada Woo for being a part of this wonderful discussion. #testingmatters #aiinassessment

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Presenting at #MRCVegas2024 was a true pleasure and the response to our session, "Future of Strong Auth – Passkey" was fantastic. Shout out to Anand Bahety, Mahendar Madhavan, and the team for their invaluable contribution in enabling passkey capabilities for eBay users. Also, thanks to Kathryn Irwin and Julie Fergerson, CPFPP from #MRC for the opportunity and for making this conference possible. A few things to share on the topic of Passkey and its impact on payment risk management: 1. Passkey has significant potential as an option for 3DS, a standard currently in draft at EMVCo. If anyone is interested in learning or collaborating further, feel free to reach out to Ulrich Herberg, Ph.D. from eBay who has been actively involved in these discussions. 2. It would be particularly intriguing to see how EU regulations will classify passkey—whether as a two-factor or as a single-factor authentication method. 3. I learned from some of my friends about how some EU banks are already adopting mobile apps for verification over SMS. Similar innovations in the U.S. would be awesome! I'm eager to hear your thoughts on the following topics: 1. Has the widespread adoption of 3DS in the EU indeed resulted in lower chargebacks compared to the U.S.? 2. Given Passkey's potential, do you think it has the capability to not only safeguard accounts but also mitigate first-party chargebacks?

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𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐁𝟏𝐀 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐬: 𝐀 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 Public speaking can be a powerful tool in demonstrating the extraordinary ability required for the EB1A visa application. As a category designed for individuals who have risen to the top of their field, showcasing your expertise and influence through public speaking can significantly strengthen your case. 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐁𝟏𝐀: 1. Demonstrates Expertise: Speaking at conferences, seminars, and workshops highlights your knowledge and expertise in your field. It shows that you are recognized by peers as a leader and authority. 2. Exhibits Influence: Engaging with large audiences and impacting others through your presentations reflects your ability to influence and shape your industry. 3. Provides Evidence of Acclaim: Invitations to speak at prestigious events, keynotes, and panels serve as evidence of your significant achievements and recognition by your professional community. 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐄𝐁𝟏𝐀 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: 1. Document Speaking Engagements: Keep records of all your speaking engagements, including invitations, programs, and promotional materials. Highlight any keynotes or major presentations. 2. Collect Testimonials and Feedback: Gather testimonials from event organizers, peers, and attendees. Positive feedback can support your claim of extraordinary ability. 3. Showcase Media Coverage: If your speaking engagements have received media coverage, include articles, interviews, and press releases as part of your evidence. 4. Highlight Prestigious Venues: Emphasize speaking engagements at high-profile events and renowned institutions. These venues add weight to your accomplishments. 5. Include Videos and Publications: Provide links to videos of your presentations and any publications or papers resulting from your talks. This demonstrates the tangible impact of your work. 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐔𝐬𝐞: An accomplished data scientist and public speaker, I used my extensive speaking engagements at international AI conferences to strengthen my EB1A application. By showcasing my keynotes at leading tech events and positive feedback from peers, I provided compelling evidence of my extraordinary ability and influence in the field of artificial intelligence. 𝐊𝐞𝐲 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲: Public speaking is not just about sharing knowledge; it's a strategic asset that can significantly enhance your EB1A visa application. By documenting your speaking engagements and their impact, you can provide robust evidence of your extraordinary ability and professional acclaim. --- Harness the power of your public speaking experiences to achieve your EB1A goals! #EB1A #PublicSpeaking #ExtraordinaryAbility #Immigration #CareerAdvancement #VisaSuccess

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