Atharva Vikas Jadhav

Machine Learning Engineer | NLP & Speech Systems | LLM + RAG

MS Computer Science & Engineering researcher at the University at Buffalo. Passionate about building inclusive, low-resource language technologies, scalable AI infrastructure, and state-of-the-art multi-task learning models.

About Me

I am a researcher and software engineer driven by the desire to build accessible language technologies. Witnessing firsthand how technology can empower individuals facing language barriers, I pivoted from traditional software engineering to computational linguistics and ML.

Currently, under Dr. Nasrin Akhter, my thesis focuses on Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition using multi-task learning to address data scarcity for low-resource languages. I aim to bridge computational capabilities with linguistic theory to build systems that adapt to users rather than forcing users to adapt to standardized dialects.

Work Experience

University at Buffalo

Mar 2025 – Present

Graduate Research Assistant

  • Built a generative pipeline to create phonological foils for a language-learning Maze app, extracting phonetic boundaries using the Montreal Forced Aligner.
  • Generated 3D t-SNE projections for 5,680+ words from Wav2Vec2 embeddings, validating acoustic clustering and phonetic separation (avg. edit distance: 3.5).
  • Analyzed similarity trajectories across 24 transformer layers to quantify representational depth reductions in synthetic versus human speech homophones.

Crimsonbeans Ltd

Dec 2021 – Apr 2024

Software Engineer

  • Developed PyTorch LSTM models and Flask APIs to forecast supply and demand for AEMO trading, reducing customer budget overruns by 8%.
  • Built responsive frontend dashboards using React and Node.js to visualize real-time market data and LSTM-driven price surge forecasts, driving a 29% increase in app engagement.
  • Scaled a high-throughput notification pipeline via Kubernetes and GCP, ensuring 98% uptime for thousands of daily alerts across microservices.

Research & Publications

Scalable and Personalized Conversational Agent Framework for AAC Users

ACM IUI 2026

Built a RAG-based conversational framework and fine-tuned LLMs on HPC clusters, evaluating 200 synthetic profiles to enhance personalized AAC communication.

Read Paper →

Low-Resource Rhythm Learning of South Asian Rhythmic Structures

AAAI EAIM 2026

Designed an ML pipeline for rhythmic analysis of a 4.1-hour Nattuvangam dataset, achieving 70% classification accuracy on HPC systems.

Read Paper →

Caribbean Spanish Speech-to-Speech Pipeline

Advisor: Dr. Melissa McCarron

Leading the end-to-end development of a real-time speech feedback pipeline (Flask) for dialect acquisition. Curating a specialized audio corpus and fine-tuned ASR/TTS models on dialect-specific phonological features using UB's LakeEffect HPC cluster.

Key Projects

Multilingual Speech Emotion Recognition (Thesis)

Architected a multilingual SER model on NVIDIA H100 nodes using multi-task learning (ASR auxiliary) to boost low-resource classification. Approached SOTA performance via cross-lingual transfer without language-specific fine-tuning.

PyTorch HPC

Wikipedia Chat Bot

Built an intelligent search and summarization system over 50,000 Wikipedia articles using a SOLR indexing pipeline on GCP, with zero-shot classification, BlenderBot, and T5 for response generation.

NLP GCP Solr

Traffic Light Automation (SumoRL)

Implemented Q-Learning and Deep Q-Network (DQN) algorithms in the SumoRL simulation environment to prioritize emergency vehicles at intersections, dynamically adjusting traffic phases to cut average wait times by 45%.

Read Case Study →
Reinforcement Learning SumoRL

Distributed Sorting with MPI

Engineered a distributed sorting algorithm in C++ using MPI for HPC environments, optimizing inter-process communication by eliminating large-scale all-to-all data exchanges.

C++ OpenMPI

In-Place Convolution with OpenMP

Developed a C++ program applying a 3×3 kernel to a 1D float array using OpenMP multithreading, achieving ~70% parallel efficiency across 64 processors on an HPC cluster.

C++ OpenMP

Technical Skills

Languages & Frameworks

Python JavaScript (Node.js/React) C++ SQL Flask

Machine Learning & AI

PyTorch Transformers HuggingFace Scikit-learn RAG Reinforcement Learning

Speech & NLP

Wav2Vec2 Speech-to-Text (STT) Text-to-Speech (TTS) LLM Fine-tuning Multi-task Learning

Systems & Infrastructure

CUDA OpenMP / OpenMPI Kubernetes Docker GCP Solr

Education

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Aug 2024 – Jun 2026

MS in Computer Science & Engineering (Research Track) GPA: 3.81/4.0

Courses: Reinforcement Learning, NLP, Information Retrieval, Computational Linguistics, Parallel & Distributed Processing

Symbiosis International University

MS in Computer Application, AI & Data Science | GPA: 8.83/10.0

2020 – 2022

Bachelor in Computer Application, Software Engineering | GPA: 7.93/10.0

2017 – 2020