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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.

Right now I train robot manipulation policies as a Graduate Research Assistant at San José State, and build the data and evaluation pipelines behind them. Before grad school I was a software engineer at Sapaad, moving five million rows a day through a multi-tenant platform.

LinkedInGitHubHugging Face

92%
pick-and-place success, 50 physical rollouts at the trained cube position
49,633
demonstration frames published as an open dataset, across 50 episodes
5M+
rows a day through multi-tenant ETL at Sapaad
0.87 s
median end-to-end latency per retrieval-grounded explanation

Everything I've built and measured

17 projects, covering physical robotics, distributed systems, data pipelines, speech and vision models, product engineering, and applied AI. Each one carries what it does, the numbers it produced, and a link to the code, the data, or the write-up behind it. The6 I would lead with are below; the rest are one click under them. Filter to the work that bears on your team and every match is shown, opened or not.

Filter by the kind of role you're hiring for:

Showing 6 of 17 projects

The other 11 projects

  • ML EngineeringAI EngineeringData Engineering

    Explainable Network Threat Detection

    Condensed 27 million raw network connection logs into a map of which machines talked to each other, flagged the suspicious pairs with a graph neural network, and had a language model explain every alert in plain English.

    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
    • PyTorch Geometric
    • Airflow
    • dbt
    • Snowflake
    • Pinecone
    • +1 more

    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.
    Data EngineeringML Engineering

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

    Trained a delay predictor on 9.5 million U.S. flights, then ran it inside a live stream so each incoming flight gets a delay probability within seconds. Where a flight lands and when it leaves drove most of the signal.

    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
    • Python
    • PySpark
    • Spark MLlib
    • Spark SQL
    • Kafka
    • +3 more

    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.
    Robot LearningSoftware Engineering

    Real2Sim2Real: Mirroring a Real Workspace into Simulation

    Locates the real cube and bowl with printed markers and a calibrated overhead camera, then places them at matching coordinates in a physics simulation, so policies train against the real table's layout.

    • Python
    • NVIDIA Isaac Sim
    • ROS 2
    • OpenCV
    • ArUco
    • +2 more

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

  • Data EngineeringML Engineering

    Live Wikipedia Edit Sentiment

    Streams every English Wikipedia edit as it happens and scores the tone of each edit summary, so you can spot pages turning contentious in real time.

    • Python
    • Kafka
    • RoBERTa
    • Hugging Face

    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.
    Data Engineering

    Stock Market Analytics Pipeline

    Pulls daily stock prices into a warehouse, computes the indicators traders actually use, and keeps a full history of every revision to the data.

    • Airflow
    • dbt
    • Snowflake
    • Docker

    Personal project · Oct to Nov 2025

  • ML EngineeringSoftware Engineering

    Thyroid Recurrence Predictor

    A cancer-recurrence model taken the whole way to production: trained, wrapped in an API, containerized, and redeployed automatically on every commit.

    • Python
    • scikit-learn
    • FastAPI
    • Docker
    • GitHub Actions
    • +1 more

    Personal project · Apr 2025

  • Data EngineeringAI Engineering

    Semantic Article Search Pipeline

    A scheduled pipeline that converts articles into vectors and makes them searchable by meaning rather than exact keywords.

    • Airflow
    • Sentence Transformers
    • Pinecone
    • Docker

    Personal project · Nov 2025

  • Software EngineeringData Engineering

    Event-Driven Yelp Clone

    A Yelp-style application rebuilt so services communicate through events instead of calling each other directly, letting each part fail and recover independently.

    • JavaScript
    • Kafka
    • Docker

    SJSU DATA 236, Distributed Systems · Spring 2026

  • Robot LearningSoftware Engineering

    ROS 2 + Gazebo, Containerized

    Runs ROS 2 Jazzy, Gazebo Harmonic, RViz, and a TurtleBot3 model from one command, identically on macOS and Linux. A built-in desktop makes the GUI tools work without fighting X11.

    • Docker
    • Docker Compose
    • ROS 2 Jazzy
    • Gazebo Harmonic
    • TurtleBot3
    • +1 more

    Personal project · Mar 2026

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

Tools I've shipped with

Everything in the four groups above is attested by a project on this page, a role I held, or both. The last group is the honest remainder: used, but not the thing I would claim to be strong at.

Machine learning & robotics

  • PyTorch
  • CUDA
  • scikit-learn
  • pandas
  • LeRobot
  • ACT
  • SmolVLA
  • Imitation learning
  • Teleoperation
  • NVIDIA Isaac Sim
  • MuJoCo
  • ROS 2
  • OpenCV
  • Weights & Biases
  • Hugging Face Hub

Data & pipelines

  • Python
  • SQL
  • PySpark
  • Databricks
  • Spark SQL
  • Delta Lake
  • Parquet
  • Airflow
  • dbt
  • Snowflake
  • Kafka

LLM applications & retrieval

  • LangGraph
  • LangChain
  • Llama 3.3
  • Llama 3.2 Vision
  • Groq
  • Pinecone
  • ChromaDB
  • Sentence Transformers

Services & delivery

  • Docker
  • FastAPI
  • GitHub Actions
  • AWS EC2
  • React
  • TypeScript

Also worked with

  • JavaScript
  • SwiftUI
  • Vite
  • Chrome MV3
  • Gemini Nano
  • Cloud Firestore
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • MySQL
  • Streamlit
  • PyTorch Geometric
  • RoBERTa
  • Grad-CAM
  • Cross-attention fusion
  • Mel spectrograms
  • Fine-tuning
  • Retrieval-augmented generation
  • Gazebo
  • CycleGAN
  • Pix2Pix
  • Variational autoencoders
  • SSIM

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.