Nishit Anand

My name is Nishit Anand. I am a first-year MS CS student at the University of Maryland, College Park. I do research on Computer Vision and LLMs, particularly Foundation Multimodal Models under the guidance of Prof. Dinesh Manocha in the GAMMA Lab at UMD.

Before this, I worked in the industry as a ML Scientist at Radien, a Seattle-based AI startup funded by the Paul Allen Institiute for AI (AI2). I was the first ML hire in the team and built the ML pipeline of our product which helps front-end teams simplify their codebases using AI. There I worked on Vision-Language models, Code LLMs and on Image and Code Similarity for our product.

I also have experience as a Foundng ML Engineer at Ananas Labs, a LLM-focused startup based out of Bengaluru, founded by former Staff Research Scientist, Google Research India. There I built our Multilingual ML News product. I worked on Multilingual LLMs, News Article Summarization, Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech. I also did research on LLM tokenization and building novel Multilingual LLMs.

I also have full-time research experience. Previously, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Vision and Graphics Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi) under Prof. Chetan Arora. I worked on a Govt. of India funded project, where I created State-of-The-Art ViT-based OCR ML models for 14 official Indian languages, covering both Printed and Scene-Text modalities. I conducted research on long-context Line-Level OCR (Optical Character Recognition) as well.

Before that, I worked at the Autonomous Networked Systems Lab (Vision Lab) at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) under Prof. Saket Anand. At IIITD, I worked on the ALIVE Project (Autonomous Last mILe VEhicle), an autonomous driving project funded by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt. of India. I led the Driver Status Monitoring (DSM) module of the ALIVE project, where I created a Facial Landmark Detection ML model for predicting drowsiness and attentiveness of an autonomous vehicle driver.

I completed my B.Tech (Honours) in Computer Science from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology Noida (JIIT Noida) in 2022. I graduated in the top 5 percentile of the CS Department and scored the highest in all courses in my final year.