NIRUPAMA

Software / AI Engineer / Data Scientist

Nirupama Balasubramanian

Nirupama Balasubramanian

About

I am an AI Autonomy Intern at Skydio, building AI systems for the Autonomy team, and pursuing an MS in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (GPA 4.0/4.0). My experience spans agentic AI, applied computer vision, NLP, and ML platform engineering. I focus on turning research-driven models into practical production systems.

Experience

Skydio

AI Autonomy Intern

Aug 2026 – Jan 2027

  • Building AI systems for Skydio's Autonomy team
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Travelers

Data Science Intern, DSLDP

Jun 2026 – Aug 2026Hartford, USA

  • Built a 3-tier pipeline to flag auto-insurance pricing disparities: a deterministic engine flags variables, a grounded LLM generates narratives, and an agentic RAG chatbot with tool calling aids reasoning and report generation
  • Delivered the solution as a Streamlit dashboard spanning coverages and quarters; scaled to 20+ concurrent users on a modular plug-in architecture that enables onboarding without disrupting production workflows
  • Cut quarterly back-test review from 5 hours to 20 minutes at $0.05 per query in LLM inference cost, with 100% recall against analyst labels, enabling faster model refits and lower-latency pricing decisions for state teams
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Ascend Cargo Systems

AI/ML Engineer Intern

Jan 2026 – May 2026San Francisco, USA

  • Architected a production-grade agentic AI system with a custom Java Spring Boot MCP server and dual-LLM design, enabling real-time freight retrieval and autonomous carrier assignment across Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and web chat, reducing manual assignment by 80%
  • Built an asynchronous document-processing system leveraging GPT-4o Vision and Microsoft Graph API to automate proof-of-delivery verification, achieving 10× higher throughput and reducing latency from 3 hours to 10 min

Cogniverse Labs

AI/ML Intern, Product Engineering

Jan 2025 – Jul 2025Bangalore, India

  • Fine-tuned Faster R-CNN and YOLOv8 models to detect roadside garbage, footpath encroachments, and other urban infrastructure issues for a government Smart City project
  • Deployed the computer vision models using TorchServe, reducing manual inspection workload by 40%
  • Focused on minimising false positives in real-world street imagery and collaborated with the product engineering team to translate model development into practical urban-monitoring solutions

National University of Singapore

Machine Learning Intern & Teaching Assistant

Dec 2023 – Jul 2024Singapore

  • Developed a medical CV pipeline using Vision Transformer with progressive unfreezing and domain-specific augmentation achieving 96% diagnostic accuracy; deployed real-time inference via a Flask REST API
  • Architected and deployed an SVM-based churn prediction microservice for a Tier-2 telecom provider by engineering high-dimensional customer feature sets to achieve 92% accuracy
  • Served as a Teaching Assistant for the AIYA program in summer 2024, guiding around 45 students from India and the Middle East under Dr. Sanka Rasnayaka at NUS School of Computing
  • Supported hands-on ML model deployment with AWS SageMaker and chatbot development with AWS Lex while mentoring students through their project work
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Colt Technology Services

Data Science Intern

Aug 2023 – Sep 2023Bangalore, India

  • Automated sentiment extraction from employee feedback, by designing and training a BERT-based transformer model with end-to-end NLP pipelines, reducing manual analysis effort and achieving 90% model accuracy

Projects

Multilingual Online Polarization Detection

GitHub

PyTorch · XLM-R · NLLB-200

  • Engineered an XLM-RoBERTa framework for Polarization Detection across 9 languages using NLLB-200 for translation-based oversampling to resolve manifold collapse and increase Macro F1 from 0.63 to 0.80
  • Integrated Supervised Contrastive Learning, Focal Loss and Dynamic Thresholding to disentangle overlapping rhetorical labels, achieving a further 8% boost in multi-label assignment

Distributed ML Pipeline for Flight Delay Prediction

GitHub

ML · Python · PySpark · Spark MLlib · Pandas

  • Built a distributed flight-delay prediction pipeline on 1M+ records in PySpark, leveraging the Catalyst optimizer and lazy evaluation to scale 4× faster than Pandas
  • Tuned hyperparameters via grid search to achieve 0.88 AUC and validated scalability by benchmarking PySpark against Pandas

Publications

Diagnosis-based IQA and Enhancement for Low-Dose CT Images

View Paper

Published in Frontiers in Radiology, 2025 (PubMed Indexed)

Deep Learning · Image Processing · Image Enhancement

  • Authored a diagnosis-based Image Quality Assessment and enhancement technique for Low-Dose CT scans, leveraging feature extraction and spatial enhancement methodology
  • The SVR-GS model achieved a 0.969 PLCC, with enhancements clinically verified by Dr. Inthulan Thiraviraj

ANGEL: Automated Navigation Giving Emergency Location — A Robust Tracking System

IEEE Xplore

Published in 2025 International Conference on Information, Implementation, and Innovation in Technology (I2ITCON) — IEEE

Efficient Medical Diagnosis Using ML Algorithm: Comparative Study on Cataract Detection and Analysis

View Paper

Published in Advances in Electrical and Computer Technologies — ICAECT 2024 (CRC Press / Taylor & Francis, Scopus Indexed)

Certifications

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Verify

Foundational cloud architecture, security, and AWS service knowledge.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Verify

Design of scalable, secure, and cost-optimized cloud infrastructure.

Contact

Open to AI/ML engineering roles, internships, and research collaborations.

Experience photo