| ID | Forename | Surname | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Saurabh | Nandedkar | Independent |
dynamic-lobster
India
Description and Rationale
Who I am
Saurabh Nandedkar, an engineer based in Mumbai, India, working in applied ML and infrastructure. Outside work I run an AIS receiver station tracking vessel traffic, and I’m setting up an ADS-B station next — partly to feed back into the networks I take data from.
Why I registered
Two reasons.
The first is that I already spend my spare time on the receiving end of this kind of data. Running an AIS station teaches you quickly how much of the interesting signal is in what the raw messages don’t say — gaps, timing, and the state of the world you have to infer around them. Taxi-out is the same shape of problem. The movement records tell you when things happened, not what was happening on the surface; the work is reconstructing runway queues, sequencing and configuration from timestamps alone. That’s the part I want to do.
The second is the open-science framing. Open data, public code, and a paper at the end is the right shape for a competition. I’d rather spend a month on something that leaves a public artifact behind.
How I’m approaching it
Solo, in Python. Gradient boosting over engineered features rather than anything exotic — I expect the work to live in feature construction and validation design, not model architecture. Planning month-disjoint splits given that the ranking months sit at both extremes of the year, and bringing in open weather data for the winter cases. Code goes on GitHub regardless of where I place.
Details
- Type: Independent
- Country: India
- Number of team members: 1