The person behind the portfolio.
A short story of how I ended up here — and where I'd like to go next.
Hi again — I'm Akshata.
I'm a final-year M.C.A. student at Deccan Education Society, Pune University, specialising in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Before that, I did a B.C.A. with Honours in AI/ML at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research. The through-line across both: I keep gravitating toward problems where the right answer isn't obvious, and the only way through is to build, test, and read a lot.
Why AI/ML?
Because machine-learning sits on the boundary where mathematics starts behaving like craft. The honest answer to most research questions is: "it depends." I like living with that. My three internships have mostly been about the unglamorous parts — the data pipelines, the evaluation harnesses, the quiet work that lets a model actually ship.
What my internships taught me
At Dravita.ai, I spent eight months building the backend that an AI-driven nutrition platform runs on: data pipelines, PostgreSQL architecture, automation scripts. Not glamorous, but it's the layer the rest depends on.
At Detoxio.ai, I evaluated LLM security — writing adversarial testing frameworks and benchmarking model behaviour under 1000+ prompt scenarios. I learned to be systematic about failure modes.
At Defensium Labs, I researched AI vulnerabilities and built a deliberately-vulnerable generative model used for teaching. I also wrote blogs and made short videos — translating research into something people outside the lab could follow. That taught me how much of good research is actually good communication.
Research interests
Multilingual NLP (especially for low-resource languages), model security and adversarial robustness, and the broader question of how we evaluate AI systems in ways that match how they actually get used. My current paper, under review at a Scopus-indexed Q2 journal, is on network intrusion detection using the UNSW-NB15 dataset.
Beyond the screen
I draw. Watercolour, graphite, the occasional digital piece — I'm not precious about mediums. There's something restorative about making a thing that doesn't need to be benchmarked.
I read widely — fiction and non-fiction, roughly in balance. The books page is slowly becoming a reading journal.
And I volunteer. Small things, close to home. See the Volunteering page for specifics.
What's next
Finishing my M.C.A., shipping the mBART translation project, submitting another paper, and finding a team where I can work on hard problems with people who care about them. If any of this sounds like your team — come say hi.
What I work with
From the Skills section of my resume — grouped so it reads a bit less like a shopping list.