Engineering Portfolio & Master CV
Saksham Kapoor
Executive Profile
High-impact Machine Learning Researcher and Systems Engineer specializing in mechanistic interpretability, real-time streaming architectures, autonomous multi-agent systems, and high-performance microservices. Appointed as peer reviewer for leading AI venues (NeurIPS, ICML) and state-level presidential AI initiatives.
🎓 Education & Fellowships
University of Maryland, College ParkExpected December 2027
B.S. in Social Data Science (Psychology Track)
🛠 Technical Skills
Languages & Frameworks
Systems & Infrastructure
AI & Interpretability
GIS & Visualization
💼 Professional Experience
International Student Research Mentorship (ISRM)
AI Research Mentor
- Mentor a cohort of 7 students through independent AI/ML research, from problem formulation and literature review to experimental design and manuscript planning.7mentees
- Guide reproducible evaluation, responsible AI research practices, and scientific writing for students preparing original work for peer-reviewed submission.
Trufflow
Machine Learning Engineer Fellow
- Real-Time Monitoring: Built an enterprise anomaly detection system handling 1.2M+ events/sec peak load utilizing Polars data pipelines.1.2M+events/sec
- Precision Optimization: Designed a graph-aware model mapping component topology, achieving a 73× PR-AUC improvement over static baselines.73×PR-AUC improvement
- Debugging Workflows: Replaced static thresholds with relative deviation scaling, resulting in a 28× debugging speedup for unpredictably scaling tenants.28×debugging speedup
Handshake AI
Model Validation Expert (MOVE) Fellow
- Applied academic subject-matter expertise and human judgment to evaluate, challenge, and improve frontier LLM outputs through specialized validation workflows.
- Reviewed model behavior for reasoning quality, domain specificity, and safety-relevant failure modes, translating qualitative feedback into actionable model-evaluation signals.
Child Development Lab, UMD
Machine Learning Researcher (CV & NLP)
- NIMH-Supported Study Infrastructure: Optimized a Meta SAM 2 pipeline for the Mother-Child Dynamics study, automating behavioral coding and reducing video processing time from 105 to 19 minutes.105→19min processing
- FFmpeg Speech Pipeline: Coordinated end-to-end speaker diarization integrating WhisperX and pyannote.audio for 100+ dyadic sessions in the NIMH-supported Mother-Child Dynamics study.100+sessions
- Sentiment Contagion: Fine-tuned RoBERTa models to analyze emotional synchronization using Linear Mixed Effects Models in R, validating bidirectional associations across positive (β = .27) and negative (β = .30) valences.β = .27positive valenceβ = .30negative valence
AI Alignment, Safety & Interpretability
Circuit Stability · Mechanistic Interpretability · Autonomous Alignment Agents
Dedicated to dissecting the internal representations of deep learning models, auditing agent execution pathways, and building self-healing alignment mechanisms to prevent cognitive failure modes in production.
Identified a novel "Calculated Liar" failure mode where Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct correctly computes math steps in its Chain-of-Thought (CoT) but flips the final answer to satisfy a high-authority sycophantic persona.
An agentic-web accessibility engineer that audits live websites, traces WCAG violations to source components, proposes self-healing patches, and packages fixes into pull-request-ready changes.
A stress-testing platform utilizing LangGraph to simulate adversarial debate paths and evaluate prompt robustness.
Authored a theoretical position paper defining the absolute constraints between autonomous agent capability, alignment safety, and computational efficiency.
Audio, Speech & Multimodal AI
Speaker Diarization · Real-Time Voice Streaming · Multimodal ASR + Sentiment
Engineering high-fidelity, low-latency audio processing pipelines — from contact-center telephony and live voice proxying to academic multimodal sentiment extraction.
Bypasses legacy "Sandwich" pipeline latencies (Whisper STT → LLM → TTS) by proxying real-time audio streams directly to Gemini 1.5 Flash's Native Multimodal Audio API.
A highly modular, hexagonal Go server for telephony stream processing with active agent coaching features.
A production research pipeline automating speech processing and sentiment extraction across 100+ parent-child study sessions.
Real-Time Streaming & High-Performance Systems
Low-Latency Networking · High-Throughput Orchestration · DevTools & Observability
Building distributed systems operating at extreme throughput — from petabyte-scale AI agent observability platforms to event-driven supply chain microservices with guaranteed Saga consistency.
A Datadog-style tracing platform engineered to visualize multi-agent call trees, token costs, and latency hotspots across complex workflows.
A highly resilient microservices cluster utilizing the Saga pattern to guarantee strict transactional consistency across distributed logistics operations.
An agentic routing system prioritizing fault tolerance for high-stakes medical query processing.
Open Source & Upstream Infrastructure
Core ML Compilers · Inductor Optimization · Distributed Runtime Deadlocks · Edge Lowering
Targeting deep-stack engineering problems inside Tier-1 open-source ML compilers, edge execution engines, and cloud orchestration systems — verified and merged by recognized industry maintainers.
High-impact core infrastructure PRs merged upstream into leading ML compilers, edge execution runtimes, and distributed workflow orchestrators.
Open and maintainer-approved pull requests resolving autotuning cache misses, operational lowerings, transactional queueing, and video frame scaling.
Scientific Modeling, GIS & Causal Inference
Physics-Grounded ML · Structural Causal Models · Spatial-Temporal Systems
Leveraging advanced spatial-temporal GIS pipelines, agent-based terrain simulations, and structural causal models to solve high-impact academic and real-world societal problems.
A PyTorch library fusing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with Normalizing Flows for exact density estimation and counterfactual query generation.
A high-moat geospatial framework modeling physical power grid topology vulnerabilities against satellite remote-sensing indicators.
An analytical GIS simulation modeling lost person movement vectors within the critical first 72-hour window.
An Outcome-as-a-Service (OaaS) platform designed to automate high-stakes behavioral data coding and forecast trial recruitment timelines.
Cryptography, Compliance & B2B Startups
Zero-Trust Ledgers · Automated Legal/Security Audits · HIPAA & SOC2
Building enterprise-grade tools that automate compliance auditing, establish zero-trust record custody on decentralized ledgers, and eliminate high-ticket billing disputes.
A cryptographic record system eliminating billing disputes by hashing operational states and securing them on decentralized permanent storage.
An automated legal ops assistant flagging missing protective terms and drafting tracked-change replacements directly in Microsoft Word documents.
A fully audited, HIPAA-compliant platform automating behavioral annotation and drafting ICH E3 Clinical Study Reports (CSR) for pediatric research.
A security dashboard executing Open Policy Agent (OPA) Rego rules to continuously audit AWS cloud environments for HIPAA and SOC2 drift.
Interactive HCI, Immersive 3D & Generative UI
WebGL Engineering · Cognitive Psychology UX · Immersive & Gaming
Merging cognitive science principles with WebGL graphics to create immersive, psychologically-informed digital interfaces that feel alive — from sentiment-reactive 3D orbs to psychology-backed flows.
A 3D ambient journaling platform that translates user writing sentiment into a live-morphing WebGL orb, making emotional states visually tangible.
A time-management dashboard that transforms calendars into a peaceful, scroll-driven meditative storytelling experience.
An intelligent cart system that reflows product layouts based on the buyer's decision-making psychology style (analytical grid vs. intuitive flow).
A curated, interactive portfolio hub demonstrating experimental R&D projects with live demos, structured project cards, and animated transitions.
Academic Leadership, Judging & AI Peer-Review
Community Leadership · Technical Judging · Academic Peer Review
Independently selected to validate, review, and evaluate cutting-edge Machine Learning research and implementations for presidential initiatives, top-tier international conferences, and cloud provider symposia.
- State & Regional Judge - White House AI Presidential Challenge (2026): Evaluated advanced student AI applications and technical architectures for the US President-backed K-12 artificial intelligence literacy and development initiative.
- Technical Judge — 10+ National AI Hackathons (2024–Present): Served as an expert panelist auditing software architecture, model parameters, API pipelines, and algorithmic efficiency at Anthropic × Maryland, HackGT, HackTX, TartanHacks, Bitcamp, HackDuke, and Hacklytics.
- Judge - COVID Information Commons Student Paper Challenge (2025): Evaluated student COVID-19 research papers connected to the NSF-funded CIC research ecosystem, applying criteria around intellectual merit, broader impact, reproducibility, and public-health relevance.CIC Student Paper Challenge
- Ethics Reviewer - NeurIPS 2026 Main Track: Selected to review ethical, societal, dataset, and evaluation risks for main-track submissions; also reviewing for the Evaluations & Datasets track.NeurIPS
- Program Committee (PC) Member — AIES 2026: Appointed to evaluate peer-reviewed scientific literature assessing ethical, societal, policy, and safety implications of AI systems for the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
- Peer Reviewer — COLM 2026: Selected to review technical manuscripts for the Efficient Reasoning track of the Conference on Language Modeling.
- Technical Workshop Reviewer — ICML 2026: Selected to review scientific submissions for AIWILD and SCALE workshops at the International Conference on Machine Learning.
- Workshop Reviewer — NeurIPS 2025: Selected as a technical reviewer evaluating research papers for the Empirical Research (ER) and Machine Learning for Physical Sciences (ML4PS) workshops.
- AWS-MLU Research Presenter (Amazon HQ2, Fall 2025): Presented first-author applied ML research on multimodal pipelines and behavioral ML at the AWS Machine Learning University symposium.
- ISDP 2025 Travel Award: Earned a highly selective, merit-based travel grant reserved strictly for the Top 50 Abstracts globally.
- ISDP 2026 Oral Presentation (Accepted): METMAP - A Machine-Learning Approach for Mobile Eye-Tracking Gaze Coding selected for an oral presentation at the 59th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology (Paper O3.6, 11:50-12:00).
- Vice President — Big Th!nk AI (UMD, 2024–Present): Direct ML workshop curriculum, hackathon operations, and technical infrastructure for UMD's premier AI organization serving 1,500+ active members.1,500+members
- Lead Instructor — Introductory ML Bootcamp (Summer 2026): Architected and taught a multi-week evening curriculum covering Python and PyTorch fundamentals for students with zero prior programming experience.
- Intro to CS (CS111) Piazza Instructor (Rutgers, Jan–May 2024): Guided introductory computer science students through foundational programming concepts, debugging workflows, and algorithmic problem-solving.
- AI Project Lead (Incoming) — AI4ALL (Summer 2026): Selected to lead technical machine learning projects, orchestrate model training pipelines, and mentor engineering cohorts.
- AI Research Mentor - International Student Research Mentorship (2026-Present): Mentor 7 students through independent AI/ML research, experimental design, reproducibility, and manuscript development.7mentees
- Vice President of Administration - Student Alumni Leadership Council (UMD, 2026-Present): Direct operations for the UMD Alumni Association's student arm, connecting students, alumni, and donors through university programming and traditions.UMD SALC
- Parliamentary Intern & Exemplary Leader (Green Governance Initiative, Oct 2020–Jan 2021): Developed sustainable policy inputs for the Indian Government's Vision 2030, culminating in an internship with the Office of a Member of the Indian Parliament (Lok Sabha) to integrate UN SDGs into active policy drafts.