I’m Nikhil, a machine learning engineer and interdisciplinary researcher. My current research focuses on LLM collaboration, evaluation, and agentic reasoning. I also conduct empirical, mixed-methods research in human-AI interaction and enjoy publishing at both AI and HCI venues that bridge the two communities.
As a strong advocate for open-source AI development, I recently completed the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 program with the UC-OSPO org, focusing on building trustworthy LLMs and AI agents.
In early August 2022, I joined VMware’s Propel Rotational Program as a Machine Learning Engineer II at their Palo Alto, CA headquarters in Stanford Research Park to work on Enterprise NLP, LLM problems on private data. My team worked on inventing cutting edge transformer based models that generate representation of textual HTTP headers in absence of natural language syntax and semantics, a first of its kind!
Previously, I was a CS graduate student in the honors program at the University of Southern California in sunny Los Angeles. I wanted machines to not just learn, but also understand complex ideas the way we do, especially with natural languages. My master’s thesis proposed new methods in lexical complexity-driven representation learning, which achieved state-of-the-art (2021) on two NLP-ML shared tasks (NAACL 2018): 1. Complex phrase detection, 2. Complex word detection, and probed 3. Grammatical sentence correctness detection, encapsulated for the eventual goal of lexical simplification of English text. I was also a TA (course producer) for USC’s popular course CSCI 570: Analysis of Algorithms led by Victor Adamchik.
Before joining USC, I spent about two wonderful years (2017-19) as a Machine Learning Research Engineer in the Department of Computer Science at IIT Bombay. I was advised by Pushpak Bhattachary at the Computation for Language Technology lab. My research broadly focused on Machine Learning and Natural Language Understanding (sequence and token classification tasks).
During the summer of 2017, I worked on Probabilistic Models for Intelligent Text Input Processing as a Machine Learning research intern in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group at the IDC School of Design (IDC Dept), IIT Bombay, where I was advised by Anirudha Joshi.
In spring 2017, I worked on Multi-Scale, Multi-Channel 3D Convolutional Neural Network models during my 6 months Machine Learning Co-op/internship at NVIDIA, where I was lucky to be jointly advised by Dr. CP Mammen and Dr. Kalpathy Crammer (MGH, Harvard Medical School).
I like the outdoors. In my spare time, you’d find me hitting sixes on the cricket pitch. If there is anything I can help you with, please feel free to email, or message me on LinkedIn!
The research page lists my latest research projects and interests.
Updates:
| • Jun 2024: | I will serve as a reviewer for AAAI ICWSM 2024 |
| • May 2024: | Thrilled to be accepted to the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2024 program with the UC-OSPO org. My work will focus on building Trustworthy LLMs and Agents. |
| • Apr 2024: | I will serve as a reviewer for ACM MobileHCI 2024, IDC 2024, and UIST 2024. |
| • Mar 2024: | I will serve as a reviewer for ACM CUI (Conversational UI) 2024, and EICS 2024 |
| • Feb 2024: | I will serve as a reviewer for CHI 2024 - Late Breaking Work and ACM IMX 2024 |
| • Apr 2023: | Attended 2023 Annual Affiliates Meeting at Stanford University (Generative AI and Foundation Models Workshop) |
| • Jul 2023: | Attended RADIO 2023 - VMware's flagship R&D conference |
| • Nov 2022: | I was a contestant on TV show - The Price is Right! :) [blogpost forthcoming] |
| • Sep 2022: | I joined VMware as a Machine Learning Engineer II to work on Enterprise NLP-ML problems; rellocated to Palo Alto, CA. |
| • Aug 2022: | I defended my master's thesis on lexical complexity driven representation learning at USC! |
| • May 2022: | Thrilled to receive M.S. CS Honors by the USC CS Department. |
| • Jan 2021: | Received Teaching Assistant (TA) position for academic year 2022-2023 at USC (see teaching section for summary). |
| • May 2020: | Received Course Producer position for CSCI 570: Analysis of Algorithms (Fall 2020, Summer 2020) at USC |
| • Jan 2020: | Started Masters in CS at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. |
| • May 2019: | Attended & presented work on text input processing at ACM SIGCHI Summer School 2019 at IIT Bombay |
| • Sept 2018: | One paper to appear at NLP-BEA@NAACL 2018 on effectiveness of ensebling for lexical complexity prediction. |
| • May 2017: | Presented paper on Probabilistic Models for Intelligent Text Input Processing at INTERACT 2017. |