Niketan Pansare is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM Research Almaden, where he works on building scalable data processing systems for large-scale machine learning. At a high level, his research involves developing statistical models and building systems for analyzing large-scale and heterogenous data. He is particularly interested in investigating various challenges associated with automatic optimization of machine learning algorithms for various data and cluster characteristics. Prior to joining IBM, Niketan was a PhD student at Rice University where he was advised by Dr. Chris Jermaine.