TigerGraph Community: July Updates

This month we’re featuring Akash Kaul, a Computer Science Student at Washington University in St. Louis. Last year during covid, Akash lost an internship. Instead of finding another internship, he decided to join the Futurist Academy, a non-profit community that fosters the development of the next generation of Futurists by focusing on exploring, building, and applying emerging technologies to reshape the future. While he was in the Futurist Academy, Akash learned TigerGraph. From there, he quickly built out open source projects, wrote blogs, and developed webinars, which ultimately led to us hiring him as an intern. Read more from his interview below:

• What do you like about TigerGraph:

• • Everyone in the community is friendly, welcoming, and willing to help each other out. Also, TigerGraph is the best graph database on the market because the competitors don’t have the same computing power- TigerGraph is much faster. I like how TigerGraph is insanely powerful, intuitive, and querying is done with GSQL, so whoever has a data science and SQL background has an easier time learning TigerGraph. Another noteworthy feature is the Graph Studio UI. TigerGraph prioritizes making it easy to use and intuitive for its customers.

• Why you got into it:

• • I was in the Futurist Academy that Jon Herke started. When he saw I was looking for a job, he offered me an internship. Next, he introduced me to TigerGrpah and Graph databases, where I did some sample projects and blogs. I worked at TigerGraph as an intern on the Developer Advocate Team. Some of my functions included building out demos and sample projects, documenting and writing blogs, and building out the ecosystem. Recently, I’m now interning at US Bank and looking to use TigerGraph for their Anti-Money Laundering Practice.

• How TigerGraph relates to your education.

• • I didn’t have any exposure to graph databases in college because graph databases are a new concept for colleges, and colleges haven’t started teaching them yet. Now, I’m doing research using TigerGraph. The research includes using medical data from patients, drugs, and their ECG readings. Currently, we’re using TigerGraph for people getting ECG readings at hospitals. I’m looking at patients and their ECG readings, drug history, lab tests, and other related things to find correlations in the data or to better answer questions about why a patient has a specific ECG reading. The goal is to predict what set of factors caused the patients to have an irregular ECG. We predict we’ll find that a patient may have taken a drug that affected their heart, which caused their ECG reading. We’re seeing that maybe drug interactions are driving this problem or other factors through this analysis.