Research Experience

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AI/ML Research Intern
Jun 2026 – Aug 2026 · Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, Idaho
  • Developed signal grammar-based representation learning for open-set recognition and detection of unknown RF waveforms.
  • Built a multi-stage framework with cross-SNR temporal representation learning, RF tokenization that stays stable at low SNR, and uncertainty-aware grammar modeling.
  • Trained models on INL's HPC infrastructure across multiple clusters with multi-GPU nodes.
Graduate Research Assistant
Jan 2025 – Present · Human-Machine Perception Lab, University of Nevada, Reno
  • Implemented audio AI agents for UNR's nursing school, including automated EHR documentation and nursing evaluations.
  • Proposed the first hyperbolic text-image retrieval approach on the CBIS-DDSM breast cancer benchmark (Recall@1 69.72, Recall@10 78.47), outperforming Euclidean embedding baselines.
Research Assistant
Jul 2024 – Dec 2024 · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
  • Designed and evaluated OCR benchmarking experiments for Sinhala and Tamil, analyzing accuracy, robustness and failure cases.
  • Built an OMR-based auto-grading system for handwritten MCQ answer sheets, used in production across the department since 2024.
Research Assistant
Nov 2022 – Mar 2023 · UAVR Lab, University of Colombo School of Computing, Sri Lanka
  • Curated a multispectral UAV dataset for marine debris detection and environmental monitoring.
  • Implemented multimodal fusion of multispectral images and mmWave captures.
  • Improved Faster R-CNN marine debris detection accuracy by 6.7% with 65% less labeled data using self-supervised pretraining.
Undergraduate Researcher
Aug 2021 – May 2022 · Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Thiruvananthapuram, India
  • Developed a real-time facial emotion recognition system for satellite ships that handles pose variation, occlusion and difficult lighting.
  • Improved the state-of-the-art model's performance by 7.9% under controlled conditions, with better handling of planar 2D rotations.