Available for ML engineering roles

Computer VisionMLOpsLLMsFederated ML

Hey, I'm Kaavin.

CS grad student at Rice working on ML engineering. I focus on the deployment side of things: fine-tuning, monitoring, and getting models to work reliably outside of notebooks.

Get in touch GitHub LinkedIn

LLM Fine-TuningMLOpsComputer VisionAWSFederated LearningModel MonitoringApplied MLLLM Fine-TuningMLOpsComputer VisionAWSFederated LearningModel MonitoringApplied ML

Projects

Featured

LLaMA Fine-Tuning for Research Classification

Fine-tuned LLaMA with LoRA on arXiv papers for research topic classification. Accuracy went from 40% to 67%, mostly through better data curation.

PyTorchHugging FaceLoRA

Featured

MLOps Sentiment Pipeline on AWS

End-to-end sentiment analysis pipeline on AWS EKS. Data versioning with DVC, experiment tracking with MLflow, production monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana.

AWSDockerMLflowDVC

Federated Learning for Wind Prediction

Federated LSTM for wind prediction using Flower. Each node trains locally and only shares model updates, keeping raw data on-site.

TensorFlowFlowerLSTM

COVID-19 Detection from Chest X-rays

Compared a custom CNN and VGG-16 for COVID-19 detection from chest X-rays. VGG-16 outperformed significantly with less training data.

TensorFlowKerasCNN

Face Liveness Detection

CNN-based liveness detection to distinguish real faces from spoofs. Used heavy augmentation to handle lighting variation across different environments.

TensorFlowOpenCV

Realtime Spam Detection

Real-time spam classifier connected to IMAP. Logs feature distributions over time for drift detection.

scikit-learnTF-IDFIMAP

Experience

Teaching Assistant, Automata, Formal Languages & Computability

Rice University

Aug 2025 - PresentHouston, TX

Office hours and grading for a graduate automata theory course. Helping students work through formal proofs is harder to teach than it looks.

TeachingTheoryPython

Software Engineering Intern

VIT Chennai

Jan 2024 - Apr 2024Chennai, India

Built a face-recognition attendance system used by 500+ students on campus. Optimized inference to under 0.5s and shipped a companion React Native app that went to production.

Computer VisionReact NativeOpenCV

Machine Learning Research Intern

VIT Chennai

Nov 2023 - Dec 2023Chennai, India

Built LSTM models for wind energy forecasting, improving on the baseline by around 10%. Also set up a federated training pipeline with Flower to keep raw data local across sites.

LSTMFederated LearningFlower

Technical Stack

Languages

PythonJavaRSQL

ML & Deep Learning

PyTorchTensorFlowKerasscikit-learnHugging FaceLoRALLaMAFlower

Data & Cloud

AWS (EKS, EC2, S3)DockerMLflowPrometheusGrafanaMongoDBDVC

Tools & Frameworks

OpenCVPandasNumPyMatplotlibReact NativeGitCI/CD

Publications

AI-Powered Attendance System Using Facial Recognition

IEEE Conference, 2024

Published from the VIT internship. Covers the system architecture and deployment decisions, including latency optimization and inference placement.

Enhancing Drug Repositioning Through Collaborative Metric Learning

IEEE, July 2024

Collaborative metric learning for drug-disease association prediction with improved ranking performance on CTD benchmarks.

AI Applications in Nutrition & Education

IEEE Conference, 2024

Survey of applied AI in nutrition and education, with a focus on deployment context and practical evaluation beyond benchmark accuracy.

Certifications

NPTEL - CSRNPTEL - Educational LeadershipNPTEL - Emotional Intelligence

Currently available

Let's build something together.

Especially interested in MLOps and LLM systems, but open to most things. Feel free to reach out.

kaavinb7@gmail.com