Download my CV Here (Last Updated January 16th , 2020)
Hi there! I’m Akhil (pronounced like SHAQUILLE without the ‘sh’). If you want to know a bit more about me, read on!
My passion is using deep learning to solve large problems in fields such as Natural Language Processing, Healthcare, and Computer Vision.
I became interested in machine learning during my senior year in college where I had the chance to use a classification algorithm for my senior design project. I knew I found my calling. And I wanted to explore more.
With the advice from my advisor in mind, I entered graduate school with a focus on Language and Speech Processing. More than half my classes were using or learning about machine learning techniques, so I dove in. I learned the fundamentals and some theories, which culminated in having a few projects under my belt. But my internship at Intel was where I gained a taste of deep learning in a real-world setting. My role was to build a multi-domain, multi-intent digital assistant (kind of like a digital secretary). So I expanded the existing dataset using artificial sentences produced from a LeakGAN and trained the existing BiLSTM network with these modifications. While there, I was exposed to InferSent and the work in deep learning for natural language processing.
After my internship, I finished my master’s degree and thesis project and decided I wanted to pursue deep learning. So I built a deep learning computer and worked on a few personal projects. These projects included turning my thesis work into a deep learning project (currently ongoing), generating an artificial dataset in Haitian Creole, and creating a direct speech-to-image network using only the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and images.
Currently, I am a researcher at Rebellion Research, an AI hedge fund, where I blog about the latest advances in the NLP, CV, and healthcare field as well work on my research in sound source localization with deep learning. I am open for other opportunities and collaboration on various academic papers.
Outside of the wonderful world of math and statistical learning, I enjoy bike riding, waterpolo, basketball, camping and a great detective series.