Saransh Chopra

New Delhi, India

I will be joining CERN through Princeton University this January to write my Bachelor’s thesis!!!

I am an engineering senior at the University of Delhi, pursuing a major in IT and Mathematics. In daylight, I work on my academic skills and professional commitments, and by night, I develop and maintain Open-Source Research Software (see /opensource), which I believe are the key to collaborative and reproducible research.

This summer I worked as a visiting student researcher (Mitacs GRI) under Prof. Jacques Carette at McMaster University. My work here revolved around Type Theory, Proof Theory, Functional Programming, Logic, agda, and agda-stdlib. I have previously worked as a Research Fellow at IRIS-HEP, Princeton University under Dr. Henry Schreiner and Dr. Jim Pivarski where my work revolved around jagged (awkward) Lorentz (HEP) vectors (Scikit-HEP/vector). I have also worked as a Google Summer of Code developer at PyBaMM (Python Battery Mathematical Modeling), NumFOCUS, and as Technical Writer at FluxML, which was funded by the Julia Language.

I am broadly interested in Research Software Engineering, Scientific Computing, Scientific Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Theory of Computation, Formal Verification (Type Theory, Proof Theory), Functional Programming and DevOps. I am extremely passionate about Open-Source and Open-Science. I am also developing some taste for pure Software Engineering research (runtime verification, new testing methods, etc). Finally, I possess a background in Android Development and Backend Development, but I don’t find them interesting anymore.

current and past affiliations

The organisations, institutes, and programs I am currently working for (or under/on), or have worked for in the past.

news

Sep 18, 2023	I will be joining CERN through Princeton University this January !!!
Sep 13, 2023	I have been added to Astropy’s GitHub organisation for developing a pre-commit hook for them!
Sep 10, 2023	I now maintain asmeurer/removestar and conda-forge/removestar-feedstock.
Aug 9, 2023	I have joined Open Science Labs Incubator and I now maintain osl-incubator/scicookie.
Jun 5, 2023	I have started working on agda-stdlib under Prof. Jacques Carette at McMaster University as a Mitacs Globalink Research Intern.
Feb 22, 2023	I will be supervising selected Google Summer of Code applicants working with the sub-orgs - PyBaMM (Python Battery Mathematical Modelling) and OSL (Open Science Labs) - under NumFOCUS (umbrella org).
Feb 20, 2023	Lightning talk titled “Lessons learned while working as a technical writer at FluxML” accepted at JuliaCon 2023.
Dec 7, 2022	I have joined PyBaMM’s Steering Council!
Oct 2, 2022	I have joined FluxML’s GitHub organisation.
Sep 6, 2022	I now maintain scikit-hep/vector and conda-forge/vector-feedstock.
Aug 22, 2022	Abstract titled “Constructing HEP vectors and analyzing HEP data using Vector” accepted at the 5th International Workshop on Python in High-Energy-Physics (PyHEP)) as a notebook talk.
Aug 9, 2022	Abstract titled “Compiling Awkward Lorentz Vectors with Numba” accepted at the 21st International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques (ACAT) in Physics Research as a poster session.
Jun 21, 2022	I have been awarded (one of the 500 recipients over the world) the Shubhra Kar Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarship in the “Developer Do-Gooders” category for my work on open-sorce research software.
Jun 12, 2022	I will be leading a talk at PyCon APAC 2022.
Jun 1, 2022	I have started working as a Research Fellow at IRIS-HEP - Princeton Research Computing with the Analysis Systems group (Scikit-HEP), under Dr. Henry Schreiner and Dr. Jim Pivarski.
May 26, 2022	I have started working as a technical writer at FluxML under Julia Season of Contributions.
May 19, 2022	I will be leading a talk at EuroPython 2022 on the topic “Code coverage through unit tests running in sub-processes/threads: Locally and automated on GitHub”.
Mar 2, 2022	I have received a grant to lead a workshop at PyCon Italia 2022 in-person.
Feb 21, 2022	Research software paper accepted in the Journal of Open Source Software - liionpack: A Python package for simulating packs of batteries with PyBaMM.
Feb 1, 2022	I will be supervising Google Summer of Code students under PyBaMM, NumFOCUS, on projects involving, but not limited to, documentation, DevOps, parameterisation, and visualization.
Nov 18, 2021	PyBaMM’s contributor community received the Faraday Institution Collaboration Award!
May 27, 2021	Won a hackathon conducted by Elastic out of 2500+ participants!
May 17, 2021	Started working as a Google Summer of Code student developer with PyBaMM (Python Battery Mathematical Modeling), NumFOCUS, under Dr. Valentin Sulzer, Dr. Ferran Brosa Planela, and Dr. Robert Timms.
Aug 31, 2016	Discovered an asteroid having a fixed orbit around Sun by analysing the data provided by the Pan-STARRS laboratory!! Asteroid temporarily named as - 2016 JC20 P10vKdL.

selected publications

liionpack: A Python package for simulating packs of batteries with PyBaMM

Tranter, Thomas G., Timms, Robert, Sulzer, Valentin, Planella, Ferran Brosa, Wiggins, Gavin M., Karra, Suryanarayana V., Agarwal, Priyanshu, Chopra, Saransh, Allu, Srikanth, Shearing, Paul R., and Brett, Dan J.

Journal of Open Source Software 2022

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Electrification of transport and other energy intensive activities is of growing importance as it provides an underpinning method to reduce carbon emissions. With an increase in reliance on renewable sources of energy and a reduction in the use of more predictable fossil fuels in both stationary and mobile applications, energy storage will play a pivotal role and batteries are currently the most widely adopted and versatile form. Therefore, understanding how batteries work, how they degrade, and how to optimize and manage their operation at large scales is critical to achieving emission reduction targets. The electric vehicle (EV) industry requires a considerable number of batteries even for a single vehicle, sometimes numbering in the thousands if smaller cells are used, and the dynamics and degradation of these systems, as well as large stationary power systems, is not that well understood. As increases in the efficiency of a single battery become diminishing for standard commercially available chemistries, gains made at the system level become more important and can potentially be realised more quickly compared with developing new chemistries. Mathematical models and simulations provide a way to address these challenging questions and can aid the engineer and designers of batteries and battery management systems to provide longer lasting and more efficient energy storage systems.
vector: vector utilities and classes

Schreiner, Henry, Pivarski, Jim, and Chopra, Saransh

Sep 2022

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Vector is a Python 3.7+ library for 2D, 3D, and Lorentz vectors, especially arrays of vectors, to solve common physics problems in a NumPy-like way. Main features of Vector: 1. Pure Python with NumPy as its only dependency. This makes it easier to install. 2. Vectors may be represented in a variety of coordinate systems: Cartesian, cylindrical, pseudorapidity, and any combination of these with time or proper time for Lorentz vectors. In all, there are 12 coordinate systems: x-y vs ρ-φ in the azimuthal plane × z vs θ vs η longitudinally × t vs τ temporally. 3. Uses names and conventions set by ROOT’s TLorentzVector and Math::LorentzVector, as well as scikit-hep/math, uproot-methods TLorentzVector, henryiii/hepvector, and coffea.nanoevents.methods.vector. Implemented on a variety of backends: pure Python objects, NumPy arrays of vectors (as a structured array subclass), Awkward Arrays of vectors, potential for more: CuPy, TensorFlow, Torch, JAX... 4. NumPy/Awkward backends also implemented in Numba for JIT-compiled calculations on vectors. 5. Distinction between geometrical vectors, which have a minimum of attribute and method names, and vectors representing momentum, which have synonyms like pt = rho, energy = t, mass = tau.