Janhavi Dadhania
ML Engineer @ project44
building models that move things through the real world. writing about the systems underneath everything else.
# about
I spend my days getting transformer models to predict when trucks will show up (harder than it sounds) and my evenings wondering whether consciousness is computable.
Before logistics I was at Razorpay routing payments with reinforcement learning, and at ShareChat figuring out face detection on phones that cost less than a textbook. The through-line is: I like problems where the real world refuses to cooperate with your model.
Outside of work I read too much (economics, philosophy, history, whatever's lying around), run two Substacks about complex systems and the strange loops in everything, and occasionally get lost in papers about foundational models and multimodal architectures.
IIT Dharwad CS, class of 2022. Arctic Code Vault Contributor on GitHub (which mostly means I was in the right repo at the right time, but I'll take it).
location : bangalore focus : deep learning, RL reading : too many books writing : two substacks github : arctic code vault cgpa : 8.7/10
# work
project44 ML Engineer 2
Building a transformer-based ETA prediction model for logistics trucks. Improved accuracy with lane embedding and hex-level geospatial features. Also built an NL2SQL chatbot using LLM-based RAG that automated customer data queries, cutting latency from 30s to 20s.
Razorpay Data Scientist
Designed RL-based payment routing algorithms handling hundreds of transactions per second. Pushed success rates from 80% to 93%. Built an XGBoost model for predicting order returns before they happened.
ShareChat & Moj ML Engineer
Optimized deep face landmark detection for low-end mobile devices. Built image-text search across a 3M item fashion catalog for video commerce.
Entrupy + Ultrainstinct
Siamese networks for 3D point cloud registration at Entrupy. Multimodal deep networks for video captioning on ActivityNet at Ultrainstinct.
# research
Multi-Image Visual Question Answering
BTech project at IIT Dharwad. Proposed a new dataset for VQA with multiple image inputs and a single ground truth. The final model used ResNet + RCNN image features with BERT embeddings, inspired by stacked attention networks. Achieved 39% word accuracy and 99% image accuracy on CLEVER+TinyImagenet.
Video Captioning on ActivityNet
Introduced WAFTM (Weighted Additive Fusion Transformer with Memory Augmented Encoders) for video captioning. Used a novel feature fusion method and memory-augmented transformer encoders. CIDEr of 92.4 on MSVD, METEOR of 0.091 on ActivityNet.
# writing
Complex Systems in the World
The more serious one. Chaos theory, consciousness, Hindu cosmology meets quantum mechanics, how minds simulate reality. Basically: what are the rules underneath the rules?
- Does God Play Dice to decide your future? — chaos, order, cosmology, quantum mechanics
- What is Consciousness? — the hard problem, quantum biology, Penrose-Hameroff
- Production of Ideas — how minds build models of reality
Personal Substack
The everything-else one. Language preservation through a math lens, AI personified as narrative, culture as organism, old scientific diagrams that happen to be beautiful.
- Mathematical Look at Why Language Preservation Matters — computational irreducibility
- What Does It Mean to Be AI? — narrative essay, AI as character
- Stories as DNA of Culture Organisms — Sapiens through a complexity lens
- Aesthetically Pleasing Old Time Science — visual essay on historical diagrams
Older writing from the archives:
# reading
A partial list. The full one would crash your browser.
economics & systems
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith
- Making Globalization Work — Joseph Stiglitz
- The Value of Nothing — Raj Patel
- Why Nations Fail — Acemoglu & Robinson
- The End of Poverty — Jeffrey Sachs
- Random Walk Down Wall Street — Burton Malkiel
- The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham
- Fault Lines — Raghuram Rajan
india & politics
- India After Gandhi — Ramachandra Guha
- India 2020 — APJ Abdul Kalam
- India Uninc.
- Understanding Power — Noam Chomsky
- The Age of Reform — Richard Hofstadter
- Ancient and Medieval History — Hayes & Moon
- The Coalition Years — Pranab Mukherjee
philosophy & everything else
- The Story of Philosophy — Will Durant
- No Logo — Naomi Klein
- Animals & Men — David Katz
- The Extreme Future — James Canton
- Outline History of English Language — Frederick T. Wood
- Play Bigger — Ramadan, Lochhead, Peterson, Maney
- Getting Things Done — David Allen
# contact
$ cat contact.txt email : janhavivdadhania@gmail.com linkedin : janhavi-dadhania github : JanhaviDadhania substack : complex systems | personal