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Aakash Madabhushi

I build and evaluate learning systems, from robot policies running on real hardware to the data pipelines that feed them.

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Selected work

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Showing all 17 projects

  • The SO-101 arm on the lab desk beside the marked cube it picks up and the clear container it places the cube into.

    Scored 92% pick-and-place success and 2.49 cm mean placement error over 50 physical rollouts, by training an Action Chunking Transformer on 50 teleoperated demonstrations and scoring it against a protocol locked before evaluation.

    Robot LearningML Engineering

    Graduate Research Assistant, SJSU Applied Data Science · Mar 2026 to present

  • Benchmark chart comparing single-instance against multi-replica deployment at 500 concurrent threads, plotting response time beside requests served.

    Kept résumé parsing and embedding matching off the request path across 17 containers, by routing them through Kafka and caching profile reads in Redis for 6× faster repeat lookups, with an AI assistant that pauses for human approval.

    Software EngineeringAI EngineeringData Engineering

    SJSU DATA 236, Distributed Systems · Spring 2026

  • Four panels from the report, one per emotion class, naming the facial region the model attended to for each: mouth and jaw for angry, the full face for happy, diffuse for neutral, eyes and brow for sad.

    Matched models 30 to 50 times its size on a four-class emotion benchmark with a 1.57M-parameter audio-video network trained from scratch, then showed which facial regions and frequency bands drove every prediction.

    ML Engineering

    SJSU deep learning course, team project · Feb to May 2026

  • System diagram of the taxi platform: data sources feeding Airflow-orchestrated jobs into a Snowflake warehouse, then out to BI dashboards.

    Served the same taxi data to dashboards and to live monitoring, by building it twice: a scheduled Airflow, dbt and Snowflake warehouse joined with weather, and a Kafka path that validates trips on arrival and publishes rolling metrics.

    Data Engineering

    Personal project · Nov to Dec 2025

  • The extension dashboard in dark mode, showing the activity grid, focus session counters, and per-site breakdown panels.

    Keeps everything you read on your own machine, with zero external API calls, by running Gemini Nano on-device inside a Chrome MV3 extension paired with a SwiftUI iOS app that tracks focus sessions across both.

    Software EngineeringAI Engineering

    Personal project · Jul 2026 to present

  • Blocks 100% of payment actions until a person approves them, by reading invoice amounts and dates with Llama 3.2 Vision, scoring its own confidence in each field, and gating every write behind a LangGraph human-approval step.

    AI EngineeringML Engineering

    Personal project · Jun 2026

  • Reached 0.90 F1 flagging suspicious host pairs in 27.1 million Zeek flows, by condensing them into a connection graph with Airflow, dbt and Snowflake, classifying links with a graph neural network, and having Llama 3.3 explain each alert.

    ML EngineeringAI EngineeringData Engineering

    SJSU capstone, team project · Feb to May 2026

  • Two charts from the report: a bar chart ranking which features predict delay, and a pie chart showing the top five predictors against all other factors.

    Reached 0.711 F1 predicting flight delays across 9.5 million U.S. flights, by training a Spark MLlib random forest on 15 monthly BTS files and running it inside a Kafka stream so each incoming flight gets a probability within seconds.

    Data EngineeringML Engineering

    SJSU big data course, team project · Dec 2025

  • The physical robot arm on the lab desk beside the monitor running the simulator it is matched against.

    Takes physical robot time out of the iteration loop, by locating the real cube and bowl with ArUco markers from a calibrated overhead camera and mirroring their coordinates into Isaac Sim, so policies train against the real table's layout.

    Robot LearningSoftware Engineering

    Personal project, built on NVIDIA's Sim-to-Real SO-101 workshop · Aug 2026 to present

  • Surfaces Wikipedia pages turning contentious in real time, by streaming every English edit through Kafka as it happens and scoring the tone of each edit summary with RoBERTa.

    Data EngineeringML Engineering

    Personal project · Nov 2025

  • System architecture diagram of the stock analytics pipeline, tracing ingestion through Airflow and Snowflake to dbt models and the BI layer.

    Keeps a full history of every revision to the data, by loading daily stock prices into Snowflake on an Airflow schedule and computing the indicators traders actually use as dbt models with snapshots.

    Data Engineering

    Personal project · Oct to Nov 2025

  • Took a cancer-recurrence model the whole way to production, by wrapping scikit-learn in a FastAPI service, containerizing it, and redeploying to AWS EC2 automatically on every commit through GitHub Actions.

    ML EngineeringSoftware Engineering

    Personal project · Apr 2025

  • Detects an API failure, diagnoses a root cause, and acts on it without a human, by wiring FastAPI health probes into a Railtracks LLM agent that tunes its own alert thresholds from prior incidents. Built in five hours at a hackathon.

    AI EngineeringSoftware Engineering

    SJSU Applied Data Science Hackathon 2026 · Mar 2026

  • Makes articles searchable by meaning rather than exact keywords, by embedding them with Sentence Transformers on an Airflow schedule and serving nearest-neighbour lookups from a Pinecone index.

    Data EngineeringAI Engineering

    Personal project · Nov 2025

  • Reconciled 112 years of California field measurements into one trainable table, by resolving units and station naming that changed repeatedly between 1913 and 2025, then predicting a water-quality score with scikit-learn in Streamlit.

    ML Engineering

    SJSU DATA 245, Machine Learning · Nov to Dec 2025

  • Let each part of the system fail and recover independently, by rebuilding a Yelp-style application so services communicate through Kafka events instead of calling each other directly.

    Software EngineeringData Engineering

    SJSU DATA 236, Distributed Systems · Spring 2026

  • Reduced robotics environment setup to one command on macOS and Linux, by packaging ROS 2 Jazzy, Gazebo Harmonic, RViz and TurtleBot3 into a version-pinned Docker Compose stack with a browser desktop that removes X11 failures.

    Robot LearningSoftware Engineering

    Personal project · Mar 2026

Select a project for the full detail and links.

Robot LearningML Engineering

Teaching a Robot Arm to Pick and Place

Scored 92% pick-and-place success and 2.49 cm mean placement error over 50 physical rollouts, by training an Action Chunking Transformer on 50 teleoperated demonstrations and scoring it against a protocol locked before evaluation.

Graduate Research Assistant, SJSU Applied Data Science · Mar 2026 to present

The SO-101 arm on the lab desk beside the marked cube it picks up and the clear container it places the cube into.

Results

92%
pick-and-place success, 50 rollouts at the trained cube position
2.49 cm
average placement error on successful trials
50
teleoperated episodes published as an open dataset, 49,633 frames

Built with

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • CUDA
  • LeRobot
  • ACT
  • SmolVLA
  • Weights & Biases
  • Hugging Face Hub
Software EngineeringAI EngineeringData Engineering

LinkedIn Simulation with an AI Recruiting Assistant

Kept résumé parsing and embedding matching off the request path across 17 containers, by routing them through Kafka and caching profile reads in Redis for 6× faster repeat lookups, with an AI assistant that pauses for human approval.

SJSU DATA 236, Distributed Systems · Spring 2026

Benchmark chart comparing single-instance against multi-replica deployment at 500 concurrent threads, plotting response time beside requests served.

Results

17
containers across 5 service groups
faster repeat profile lookups, under 100 concurrent users

Built with

  • FastAPI
  • Kafka
  • LangGraph
  • React
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Docker
ML Engineering

Reading Emotion from Voice and Face

Matched models 30 to 50 times its size on a four-class emotion benchmark with a 1.57M-parameter audio-video network trained from scratch, then showed which facial regions and frequency bands drove every prediction.

SJSU deep learning course, team project · Feb to May 2026

Four panels from the report, one per emotion class, naming the facial region the model attended to for each: mouth and jaw for angry, the full face for happy, diffuse for neutral, eyes and brow for sad.

Results

74.6%
validation accuracy, four-class CREMA-D on an actor-independent split
1.57M
parameters, 30 to 50× fewer than comparable multimodal baselines
12×
faster training epochs after caching decoded media, 1,100 s to 88 s

Built with

  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • CUDA
  • Cross-attention fusion
  • Grad-CAM
  • OpenCV
  • SpecAugment
Data Engineering

NYC Taxi Data Platform: Batch and Streaming

Served the same taxi data to dashboards and to live monitoring, by building it twice: a scheduled Airflow, dbt and Snowflake warehouse joined with weather, and a Kafka path that validates trips on arrival and publishes rolling metrics.

Personal project · Nov to Dec 2025

System diagram of the taxi platform: data sources feeding Airflow-orchestrated jobs into a Snowflake warehouse, then out to BI dashboards.

Built with

  • Airflow
  • PySpark
  • dbt
  • Snowflake
  • Kafka
  • Docker
Software EngineeringAI Engineering

Reader, an Attention-Management Browser Extension

Keeps everything you read on your own machine, with zero external API calls, by running Gemini Nano on-device inside a Chrome MV3 extension paired with a SwiftUI iOS app that tracks focus sessions across both.

Personal project · Jul 2026 to present

The extension dashboard in dark mode, showing the activity grid, focus session counters, and per-site breakdown panels.

Results

0
external API calls, because the AI runs on-device

Built with

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Vite
  • Chrome MV3
  • SwiftUI
  • Cloud Firestore
  • Gemini Nano
AI EngineeringML Engineering

InvoSense: Invoice Processing with a Human Approval Gate

Blocks 100% of payment actions until a person approves them, by reading invoice amounts and dates with Llama 3.2 Vision, scoring its own confidence in each field, and gating every write behind a LangGraph human-approval step.

Personal project · Jun 2026

Results

100%
of payment actions blocked pending human review

Built with

  • Python
  • LangGraph
  • Groq
  • Llama 3.2 Vision
  • Llama 3.1
  • ChromaDB
  • React
ML EngineeringAI EngineeringData Engineering

Explainable Network Threat Detection

Reached 0.90 F1 flagging suspicious host pairs in 27.1 million Zeek flows, by condensing them into a connection graph with Airflow, dbt and Snowflake, classifying links with a graph neural network, and having Llama 3.3 explain each alert.

SJSU capstone, team project · Feb to May 2026

Results

27.1M
Zeek network flows aggregated into the graph
0.90
F1 on 329 held-out host-pair links, 0.94 precision and 0.87 recall
0.87 s
median end-to-end latency per generated explanation

Built with

  • PyTorch Geometric
  • Airflow
  • dbt
  • Snowflake
  • Pinecone
  • Llama 3.3
Data EngineeringML Engineering

U.S. Flight Delays: Batch Analytics to Real-Time Prediction

Reached 0.711 F1 predicting flight delays across 9.5 million U.S. flights, by training a Spark MLlib random forest on 15 monthly BTS files and running it inside a Kafka stream so each incoming flight gets a probability within seconds.

SJSU big data course, team project · Dec 2025

Two charts from the report: a bar chart ranking which features predict delay, and a pie chart showing the top five predictors against all other factors.

Results

9.5M
flight records processed, 15 monthly BTS files totalling 3.1 GB
0.711
F1 for the random forest on a stratified 20% test split, 79.1% accuracy
0.3%
train-minus-test accuracy gap, against 1.6% for a single decision tree
78%
of random-forest importance mass held by the top five features

Built with

  • Python
  • PySpark
  • Spark MLlib
  • Spark SQL
  • Kafka
  • Structured Streaming
  • Streamlit
  • Docker
Robot LearningSoftware Engineering

Real2Sim2Real: Mirroring a Real Workspace into Simulation

Takes physical robot time out of the iteration loop, by locating the real cube and bowl with ArUco markers from a calibrated overhead camera and mirroring their coordinates into Isaac Sim, so policies train against the real table's layout.

Personal project, built on NVIDIA's Sim-to-Real SO-101 workshop · Aug 2026 to present

The physical robot arm on the lab desk beside the monitor running the simulator it is matched against.

Built with

  • Python
  • NVIDIA Isaac Sim
  • ROS 2
  • OpenCV
  • ArUco
  • LeRobot
  • Docker
Data EngineeringML Engineering

Live Wikipedia Edit Sentiment

Surfaces Wikipedia pages turning contentious in real time, by streaming every English edit through Kafka as it happens and scoring the tone of each edit summary with RoBERTa.

Personal project · Nov 2025

Built with

  • Python
  • Kafka
  • RoBERTa
  • Hugging Face
Data Engineering

Stock Market Analytics Pipeline

Keeps a full history of every revision to the data, by loading daily stock prices into Snowflake on an Airflow schedule and computing the indicators traders actually use as dbt models with snapshots.

Personal project · Oct to Nov 2025

System architecture diagram of the stock analytics pipeline, tracing ingestion through Airflow and Snowflake to dbt models and the BI layer.

Built with

  • Airflow
  • dbt
  • Snowflake
  • Docker
ML EngineeringSoftware Engineering

Thyroid Recurrence Predictor

Took a cancer-recurrence model the whole way to production, by wrapping scikit-learn in a FastAPI service, containerizing it, and redeploying to AWS EC2 automatically on every commit through GitHub Actions.

Personal project · Apr 2025

Built with

  • Python
  • scikit-learn
  • FastAPI
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions
  • AWS EC2
AI EngineeringSoftware Engineering

AgentForge, a Self-Healing API Monitor

Detects an API failure, diagnoses a root cause, and acts on it without a human, by wiring FastAPI health probes into a Railtracks LLM agent that tunes its own alert thresholds from prior incidents. Built in five hours at a hackathon.

SJSU Applied Data Science Hackathon 2026 · Mar 2026

Built with

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • LLM
  • Railtracks
  • React
Data EngineeringAI Engineering

Semantic Article Search Pipeline

Makes articles searchable by meaning rather than exact keywords, by embedding them with Sentence Transformers on an Airflow schedule and serving nearest-neighbour lookups from a Pinecone index.

Personal project · Nov 2025

Built with

  • Airflow
  • Sentence Transformers
  • Pinecone
  • Docker
ML Engineering

California Water Quality Prediction

Reconciled 112 years of California field measurements into one trainable table, by resolving units and station naming that changed repeatedly between 1913 and 2025, then predicting a water-quality score with scikit-learn in Streamlit.

SJSU DATA 245, Machine Learning · Nov to Dec 2025

Results

112 years
of field measurements reconciled, 1913 to 2025

Built with

  • Python
  • scikit-learn
  • pandas
  • Streamlit
Software EngineeringData Engineering

Event-Driven Yelp Clone

Let each part of the system fail and recover independently, by rebuilding a Yelp-style application so services communicate through Kafka events instead of calling each other directly.

SJSU DATA 236, Distributed Systems · Spring 2026

Built with

  • JavaScript
  • Kafka
  • Docker
Robot LearningSoftware Engineering

ROS 2 + Gazebo, Containerized

Reduced robotics environment setup to one command on macOS and Linux, by packaging ROS 2 Jazzy, Gazebo Harmonic, RViz and TurtleBot3 into a version-pinned Docker Compose stack with a browser desktop that removes X11 failures.

Personal project · Mar 2026

Built with

  • Docker
  • Docker Compose
  • ROS 2 Jazzy
  • Gazebo Harmonic
  • TurtleBot3
  • VNC

Hiring for one role in particular?

Filtering above narrows this list. These go further: each track has a page of its own with the positioning, the results, and the parts of my experience that bear on that role, and everything else left out.

Built from scratch: 14 earlier projects, language models first

Where I learned the internals rather than the API: a GPT-2 and a byte-pair tokenizer written from first principles, attention made measurably faster, a Phi-3 fine-tune, and then the same treatment for vision models and reinforcement learning. Smaller in scope than the work above, but several have live demos you can try in the browser.

Language models, from scratch and fine-tuned
ProjectWhat it doesLinks
GPT-2 from scratchBuilt and trained a GPT-2 language model from first principlesCodeLive demo
Transformers from scratchBuilt the attention mechanism, then made training measurably fasterCode
TokenizersByte-pair encoding tokenizer built for Hindi textCodeLive demo
Phi-3 fine-tuningFine-tuned Microsoft's Phi-3 model into a chat assistantCodeLive demo
Multimodal AI systemCombined text, image, and audio inputs in one modelCode
Vision & generative models
ProjectWhat it doesLinks
FastSAM segmentationFast image segmentation, deployed as a live demoCodeLive demo
Stable DiffusionImage generation with style-transfer experimentsCode
YOLOv9 object detectionTrained an object detector on a custom datasetCode
UNet & variational autoencodersImage segmentation and generative models, compared across variantsCode
Widget DetectorTurns hand-drawn UI sketches into Flutter componentsCodeLive demo
Grad-CAM explainabilityVisualized which pixels a classifier actually usedCode
Training foundations & reinforcement learning
ProjectWhat it doesLinks
Lightning + Hydra templateA reusable training setup for reproducible experimentsCode
CNN foundationsBackpropagation, normalization, and augmentation, worked through by handCode
PPO reinforcement learningAgent trained to land a spacecraft in simulationCodeLive demo

Hiring for a new-grad role?

I'm available from December 2026 and open to relocating. Email me and I'll reply within a day.