Hi I am Ashaya Sharma and I have always liked building things.
I am from Canada, by way of Nepal and am proud to call Vancouver BC my home. I grew up here and it is where I started building and tinkering with things and systems. My first real project I was proud of was an MP3 player I modded to make touchscreen when I was 10.
I took my interests to UBC and studied Computer Engineering. It is there where I started growing more interested in AI and large systems and started wrangling with NLP and Transformers (before they and myself both were good). I then wanted to start making AI do everything I did when I was younger. I was a Connect 4 city champion so then I wanted to build a model that could beat me. I enjoyed playing in local chess tournaments, tried to make models to do that. All my cracked friends in high school played Starcraft 2, especially when it came out and then when Open AI released the SC2 environment, that was the next thing I was obsessed with.I think that business is also like any other engineering system or problem and I think this building a buisiness is yet another hard technical problem that needs to be solved. This is why I started to build Honeycomb AI with my childhood friend Tamir to solve the problem of helping people with dietary restrictions find food. We have built the best AI powered menu experience for restaurants, used by over 2M users and some of the top restaurants. We built a mobile discovery application and powering everything was our AI models we call RAMS-E. Our models are state of the art at predicting ingredients, allergens and dietary factors used by some of the top food companies in the world.
I also spent time as the first software engineer at VoltSafe where I built the firmware and backend for the first commercial product. VoltSafe is revolutionizing the way we connect to power via patented, smart, safe, connected, magnetic plugs. During my undergrad, I did some research in observability and distributed systems and I think that is where I started to get interested in building systems that are scalable and can handle large amounts of data and published a paper on it.
I believe, like others, that we are in a transcendent time with AI and I am fortunate to have been in the field for a bit and have the skillsets to build in this space.