Nishit Anand

I am a final-year MS CS student at the University of Maryland, College Park. My research focuses on Multimodal LLMs, AI Agents, and Audio models under the guidance of Prof. Dinesh Manocha in the GAMMA Lab and Prof. Ramani Duraiswami in the PIRL Lab.

I worked as a Research Scientist Intern at Adobe Research San Francisco in Summer 2025, where I built the first speech model which can understand both the paralinguistic and acoustic aspects of speech. I have also collaborated with NVIDIA on multiple research projects, including the Audio-Flamingo series of models: Audio Flamingo Next and MMOU, a large-scale omni-modal benchmark.

Before my Master's, I worked as a Research Scientist at Radien, a Seattle-based AI startup funded by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). There, I built agents to predict visual similarity in UI elements and intelligently simplify codebases. I was also the Founding Research Engineer at Ananas Labs, a Bengaluru-based startup founded by a former Staff Research Scientist at Google Research India. I developed our low-latency Indic-SpeechLLM, optimizing it for our app using model quantization, and researched a novel multilingual phoneme-based tokenizer to reduce token inefficiency in Indic languages.

Prior to my industry roles, I was a Research Fellow at the Vision and Graphics Lab, IIT Delhi, under Prof. Chetan Arora. Working on a government-funded project, I created state-of-the-art Vision Transformer-based OCR models for 13 Indian languages, deploying them with inference optimization and caching techniques for higher throughput. Earlier, as a Research Engineer at the Autonomous Networked Systems Lab at IIIT-Delhi under Prof. Saket Anand, I led the Driver Status Monitoring (DSM) module of a $300K government-funded autonomous driving project. I trained and optimized facial landmark detection and object detection models for deployment on our custom Android app and NVIDIA Jetson devices.

I completed my B.Tech (Honours) in Computer Science from Jaypee Institute of Information Technology Noida (JIIT Noida) in 2022, graduating in the top 5% of the CS department and scoring the highest grades in all courses in my final-year. I have also had the privilege of collaborating with Prof. Salman Khan, Prof. Mohamed Elhoseiny, and Prof. Ruohan Gao, among other exceptional mentors.

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