Nirmal Patel

Nirmal Patel has extensive experience in the field of educational data and technology. In 2010, they worked as an Educational Game Developer for Playpower Foundation, where they developed several award-winning edtech applications, most notably Battleship Numberline, which has been played by children across the world millions of times and has been a subject of extensive scientific research. In 2012, they joined Playpower Labs as Chief Technology Architect, where they built the founding technology for the startup and led technical innovations in infrastructure for large scale online RCTs in educational games and an MVC framework to develop educational games. In 2013, they were a Summer Intern at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where they worked with Dr. Ken Koedinger and their colleague Derek Lomas to design learning science experiments in their flagship fraction estimation game Battleship Numberline. In 2016, they became the Chief Data Scientist at Playpower Labs, where they led the data science team and worked with some of the biggest education organizations in the world. In 2020, they co-founded and became the CEO of Smart Paper, which is designed to digitize and analyze formative learning data on paper resources that students use every day.

Nirmal Patel obtained a Bachelor of Technology in Information and Communication Technology from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology between 2010 and 2014. In addition, Patel has obtained numerous certifications from Coursera and edX, including Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter tuning, Regularization and Optimization, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Building Data Visualization Tools, Building R Packages, Advanced R Programming, Process Mining: Data Science in Action (with Honors), The R Programming Environment, Probabilistic Graphical Models 1: Representation (with Honors), Parallel Programming, Functional Program Design in Scala, CS110x: Big Data Analysis with Apache Spark, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, CS105x: Introduction to Apache Spark, CS120x: Distributed Machine Learning with Apache Spark, Machine Learning, and Red Hat Certified Engineer.