CV
General Information
Full Name | Vishwa Ramkumar |
Languages | English (Fluent), Tamil (Native), French (Basic) |
Education
- 2020 - 2025
Dual Degree (B.Tech + M.Tech) in Biological Engineering | Indian Institute of Technology Madras
- Specialization in Computational Biology with a Minor in Computing
Achievements
- Selected as one of 10 fellows from over 350 applicants for the Pi School of AI, with less than 3% acceptance rate. 2024
- Selected and successfully contributed to TensorFlow(SOTA Framework) through Google Summer of Code. 2022
- Chosen as one of 15 out of 1,200 candidates to showcase the final project at the GSoC Contributor's Day. 2022
- Admitted to India's most prestigious university by securing top 0.5 percentile (1.1 million applicants) in JEE. 2020
Publications
- 2025
Transfer Learning in Motor Imagery decoding - Reproducibility & Standardized Benchmarks | Machine Learning for Health Conference 2025 (Submitted)
- Authors: Vishwa Ramkumar, Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan
- Implemented key transfer learning techniques and open-sourced codebase to ensure reproducibility
- Proposed standardized evaluation protocols to compare performances across cross session and subject scenarios
- Performed ablation experiments and provided insights to quantify the sensitivity of the algorithms
Professional Experience
- Dec 2024 – Feb 2025
AI Fellow | School of AI, Pi Campus, Italy
- Finetuned YOLOv8 and Florence models, with a team of three, to extract handwritten dates from scanned receipts
- Achieved 10x cost efficiency and 89% character-level-accuracy, 2x improvement over the baseline Textract pipeline
- May 2024 – Aug 2024
Bioinformatics Intern | Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
- Created benchmarking strategies and evaluated foundational image segmentation models on multiple datasets
- Developed a pipeline for 3D thickness mapping of organs from MR scans during Systole and Diastole cycles
- Sept 2023 – Nov 2023
ML Engineer Intern | Fusic.co Ltd, Japan
- Implemented 3D camera pose estimation; used ContactHands and LightGlue models for various CV problems
- Implemented computer vision algorithms in place of existing ML modules to reduce latency for real-time execution
- May 2022 – Sept 2022
Student Developer | TensorFlow Org, Google Summer of Code
- Developed a 3D Unity game integrated with a microcontroller running a TinyML model for gesture-based controls
- Trained and Quantized a CNN-based model for digit recognition to run inference on edge devices within 1.2 secs
- Documented the projects and guides totaling 400+ pages in 13 Hackster.io blogs, which received 27000+ views
Research Experience
- Aug 2024 – April 2025
Transfer Learning using Riemannian Geometry for EEG Signal Analysis | IIT Madras (Guide - Prof. Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan)
- Trained and benchmarked EEGNet, DeepSleep, and EEGInception models on Motor Imagery and Sleep datasets
- Experimented and Reviewed new alignment techniques to achieve State-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks
- Jan 2023 – Jul 2023
Multisensory Integration in Hippocampal Formation | IIT Madras (Guide - Prof. Srinivasa Chakravathy)
- Optimized a Multimodal model for continual learning on image & movement data to emulate hippocampal formation
- Engineered Graph convolution layers to jointly represent the complex features of the image and movement data
Key Projects
- Sept 2024
Multimodal Approach for Image-based Entity Extraction | Amazon ML Challenge 2024
- Pipelined EasyOCR, Small LMs and entity matching algorithms for baseline textual extraction from product images
- LORA Finetuned MoonDream2 Vision Language Model to identify and extract specific entity values accurately
- Feb 2024 – May 2024
SCFasterBERT | CS6024 Course Project
- Developed a model that outlearns SOTA models for scRNA-seq data by enhancing scBERT with novel techniques
- Implemented RMS Norm, Flash Attention 2.0, SiLU, and Sparse MoE to enhance predictive performance
- Feb 2024 – May 2024
Image Captioning and Machine Translation | CS6910 Course Project
- Engineered an image captioning model using a CNN with NetVLAD as the encoder and an RNN-based decoder
- Built a machine translation model using LSTM networks, IndicBERT for Indian languages, and GloVe for English
- Engineered a transformer model based on the "Attention is All You Need" paper for language translation
- May 2021 – May 2022
Hardware Accelerator for Deep Learning | Electronics Club, CFI, IITM
- Coded forward propagation of MobileNet from scratch using tensors and loops, without the use of external libraries
- Implemented scalable CNN and FC neural networks in Verilog, designed unit tests for performance benchmarks
Coursework
Machine Learning & AI • GPU Programming • Fundamentals of Deep Learning • Special Topics in Reinforcement Learning • Nonlinear Optimization: Theory and Algorithms Computational Biology • Algorithmic Approaches to Computational Biology • Bioinformatics • Computational Neuroscience • Computational Biology Laboratory Mathematics & Statistics • Computer Simulations of Biomolecular Systems • Probability, Statistics, and Stochastic Process • Functions of Several Variables • Series and Matrices |
Leadership Roles
- May 2021 – May 2022
Coordinator, Electronics Club | Centre for Innovation (CFI), IIT Madras
- Proposed and conducted a series of workshops on PCB design and digital design, engaging 100+ participants
- Organized the Flagship Mega Session 2.0 in collaboration with the robotics club, attracting 180+ participants
- May 2021 – May 2022
Coordinator, Publicity Team | Shaastra, IIT Madras
- Conducted Shaastra Spark and Sampark campaigns, with a turnout of 9000+ participants, with 15+ coordinators
- Managed a team of 20 Campus Ambassadors for 3 months, significantly improving the visibility of Shaastra events
Co-curricular and Extra-curricular Activities
- Built an accessible voice AI assistant with Speech-to-Text, ChatGPT API and Text-to-Speech models. 2024
- Delivered practical workshops on Deep Learning, Transformers, and LLMs to over 50+ university students. 2024
- Conducted hands-on workshops on the Linux ecosystem and Bash Scripting to over 30+ university students. 2023
- Represented IIT Madras at the 10th Inter-IIT Technical Meet in Silicon Labs Healthcare ML Challenge. 2022
- Actively participated in and volunteered for the NSS events conducted in the institute. 2022