I am a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Initiative on Digital Economy @ MIT sponsored by Prof. Sinan Aral. My research broadly involves making careful empirical measurements (both causal and predictive) from big data and draws on ideas from Computer Science, Marketing, Statistics, Sociology & Applied Econometrics. Substantively, I am interested in understanding the value drivers in digital & social products and the strategies that firms should adopt in developing and marketing such products. In particular, I am interested in a). Digital Transformation of News-media & b). Social Advertising. In one stream of research I am investigating digital paywall strategy for newspapers (in partnership with The New York Times and Boston Globe). My second stream of research involves finding efficient targeting strategies in social networks (to maximize the size of viral diffusion cascades) and in another stream of research I am working on understanding the anatomy of the strategic advantage bestowed on individuals by their social network structure. I hold an A.M. in Statistics and M.S.E & Ph.D. in Computer & Information Science (CIS), all from the University of Pennsylvania. My doctoral dissertation won the Morris & Dorothy Rubinoff Best Dissertation Award. My doctoral work, which was on statistical Machine Learning & Natural Language Processing (NLP), proposed simple linear spectral learning methods that give accuracies comparable to or better than state-of-the-art "deep-learning" algorithms on text data and has been published in top tier journals/conferences.