Since 1999

My World Line

Story of My Life. World line refers to a unique path that I am traveling through our 4-dimensional world.

Last Job of Surjit Singh

In May 1998, I took up a job at HNC.

When my son, Jaideep got a full academic scholarship to study at Caltech and moved to Pasadena, all of us missed him. So, I applied for jobs in California. Almost got post-docs at Caltech, UCSD and at some colleges for teaching. But then I remembered Raj Kumar Pathria telling me that his son and younger daughter worked at a company in San Diego. I decided to check it out. I visited many Dilbertian cubicles and talked to many people. I was very encouraged to see that they were dressed without jackets and ties, and had books like Abramowitz and Stegun and Numerical Recipes in Fortran on their desks. They said they were doing applied mathematics to solve problems in financial fraud. I thought it might be fun, applied, got interviewed and joined. HNC makes a credit card fraud detection product, which is by far the major product used by credit card issuers to detect the use of lost/stolen credit cards all over the world.

In April 2002, the company was taken over by Fair, Isaac. This company created and sells the famous FICO score. Whenever you apply for credit (for buying a house, car or even insurance), the lenders obtain the industry standard FICO score. In fact, you can check your own FICO score and learn how to improve it at the myFICO website right now.
I retired in January 2014.

 

Colleges attended by Surjit Singh

Government College, Ludhiana (1963-1966)

Did good, won awards

I had stood first in the Ludhiana District in 9, 10 and 11 grades; so people knew me. This college had a reputation of producing first class first students in the Panjab University. So people from other cities had come to learn. In the first year examination, I stood first in the Panjab University by obtaining record marks. At this point, the students who were in the next 4 or 5 positions quit the Panjab university and went to other universities! One fellow called Hari Kishan Sahajwani went to the newly-formed Haryana University and stood first in that university in years 2 and 3. I took Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and English. I also took Honours in Mathematics. Won lots of books in the annual prize ceremonies. Of course, I stood first in the university in all the examinations and obtained University Medals. I was also given Pandit Hem Raj Medal for standing first in the Math. Honors examination.

My Patent

On August 12, 2014, I was awarded a US Patent. It was a joint work with my colleagues, Dr. Prodip Hore and Dr. Scott Zoldi and was performed when I was working at FICO.

The link to the patent is here. 

Fuzzy Tagging Method and Apparatus

Abstract

A computer-implemented method of tagging a transaction that includes tagging a transaction with one of a first tag value or a second tag value, forming a set of clusters associated with the tagged transactions having a first value, and forming a second set of clusters associated with the tagged transactions having a second value. The computer implemented method also includes determining a fuzzy tag value based on a relationship between the transaction and one of the centroids of the clusters having a first tag value, and one of the centroids of the clusters having second value. The method also includes replacing the first tag value or the second tag value with the fuzzy tag value.