Ali Prasla

Portfolio Projects & Blog Posts

  • Forecasting Private Equity Capital Calls

    Forecasting Private Equity Capital Calls

    Back in 2018, during my MS in Business Analytics program, Daniel Quijano, Tomas Fernandez, and I did some consulting work for the University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO), the UT and Texas A&M endowment that currently manages $65 billion in assets under management. We wrote a (non-published) white paper on a novel methodology to Read more

  • Blog Launch Announcement

    Blog Launch Announcement

    I was sitting on my bed the first time I used ChatGPT. Earlier that day, I had been scrolling through (what was then called) Twitter and I had noticed a buzz for this new research preview by OpenAI. People were posting some pretty incredible screenshots. My immediate impressions were… bad. I created an account where Read more

  • Understanding the Data Science Landscape

    Understanding the Data Science Landscape

    Machine Learning has been around for decades starting with academic research in the 1950s. While there were important theoretical advances and applications, widespread commercial adoption of ML was slow until the 2010s. But as talent became more available, open-source software libraries matured, and compute became cheaper, we saw a Cambrian Explosion of startups and enterprises Read more

  • AI-driven site to identify your handwritten digits

    AI-driven site to identify your handwritten digits

    For many years, the MNIST dataset has been the introductory data for all computer vision enthusiasts. I built a production implementation of a Convolutional Neural Net MNIST classifier. The final website, with a full AI, can be found here if you want to play around: http://mnist-classifer-alb-1431583388.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/(The site doesn’t work well on mobile, so I’d recommend Read more

  • Building my own robo-advisor

    Building my own robo-advisor

    Back in 2019, I was using Charles Schwab Brokerage as my main investment account. They had a product called “Schwab Intelligent Advisors” – basically a robo-advising product. While I did not pay any management fees, the product was investing my money in an unnecessarily conservative manner. For the sake of interest income, Schwab was keeping Read more