I was born in the beautiful city of Kolkata , India in the early 80’s (around the same time the Space Shuttle Discovery was taking its first flight into the orbit). After my schooling at Baranagore Ramakrishna Mission, I joined Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur, one of the most serene and magical places I have ever seen.

In 2003, I joined Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, where I received my B.Stat and M.Stat degrees. I spent the best years of my life at ISI and made a few wonderful friends. In 2009, I moved to Mumbai and joined Barcalys Bank, PLC where I worked as an analyst for the credit cards risk team. In August 2009, after one year of working at the bank, I decided to pursue a higher degree in Statistics / Machine Learning and found a position at Purdue.

I met my soulmate, Shalini when we were both studying for PhD at Purdue. We are now a family of three, complete with our little terrier Raja Maxwell Choudhury. You can follow Max on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jyotishkadatta/ and Max will surely follow you everywhere if you promise treats and cuddle.

We love road-trips, specially the long ones with a car full of books and CDs, and every year you will find us driving up and down the sinewy roads on the blue ridge parkway.

My stories 

I am an aspiring author, I mostly write fictional stories and poems these days and I used to write screenplay/scripts for theater (almost another life). If you can read Bengali or know someone who can read them to you, please visit my blog here and leave your comments. The stories on these blogs are not connected to my research or my university in any way. I started writing as a desperate attempt to save my childhood memories and my growing days for our next generation, perhaps because everything changed too quickly and there’s no museum for time. 

I dabble in a bit of everything that I find interesting: I draw cartoons / caricatures, I can play a handful of melancholic songs on the guitar (fortunately not publicly!) and I turn to painting when I can’t draw any more words.

Most of these creations vanish as time goes, but a few remain to remind of me of the friendships and laughter that I miss. Here is a t-shirt artwork that I made for my friends at the Dave-Lab and in three days, they made an awesome board-game out of it !