Farewell to Deep Forest Sciences

2024-08-19

I first interacted with Dr. Bharath Ramsundar when I invited him for a machine learning paper reading group which I organised at PSG College of Technology. It was 2020 and institutions were closed due to the COVID-pandemic. He is one of the rare people who are kind-enough to share their time and knowledge with others. The seminar took place on Oct 31st, 2020 where he introduced the DeepChem project (the slides of the talk which he shared with us after the talk can be found here). Soon after, I completed my college in May 2021 and joined IIT-Madras as a project assistant.

My work at IIT-M was remote and it was during this time that I started contributing to the open-source project DeepChem, interested mainly by deep learning, chemistry (one of my favorite subject in high school) and the community - a warm and welcoming community. The community has a weekly call and I started attending the calls, in which Dr. Ramsundar encouraged me to make my first contributions to the project. I started with small contributions, mostly documentation improvements, fixing tests and adding examples. Of my many contributions to DeepChem over 2021-2024, my favorite is one of the earlies contribution - the addition of tutorial notebook on Introduction to Material Science.

I greatly admired Dr. Ramsundar. He had good problem solving skills across multiple domains - chemistry, biology, mathematics, computer science etc and as a person, he was kind and patient as he sat through innumerable sessions solving problems, not to mention the network issues on online-calls.

When Dr. Ramsundar founded Deep Forest Sciences, I was one of the first few individuals working at the company. The early days of work at Deep Forest Sciences is arguably some of the best days. During that period, I had one of my steepest learning curve in software engineering - I learnt a little bit of many domains - backend development, CI/CD, infrastructure orchestration, frontend dev, machine learning, cloud services etc. Lastly, my ears also got tuned to American English.

There used to be a one-on-one call between me and Dr. Ramsundar every day during the first few months, in which we designed the core machine-learning platform for Deep Forest Sciences (the work resulted in a patent application). The experience provided me with confidence as I had a lingering doubt over my skills. When I had self-doubt on my skills, the work here was a source evidence - I could point at the company's webpage and say that this is what I built and thus, extinguish my self-doubts.

Deep Forest Science made me who I am as a software engineer and I sign off by wishing the best for Deep Forest Sciences.