Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute — UC San Diego
Sep 2025 – Jun 2027M.S. in Data Science
shashank@257:~$ whoami
Shashank Reddyhalli Rakesh
Data Scientist · AI / ML Engineer · MS Data Science @ UCSD · GenAI & LLMs
Architecting production-grade, end-to-end AI systems at the intersection of generative AI, deep learning, and trustworthy ML. From LLM-powered RAG pipelines and transformer architectures to adversarially-robust models — transforming state-of-the-art research into scalable, real-world impact. 4× published AI researcher, community builder, and founder.
5+
AI / ML Projects Built
4×
Published AI Papers
10K+
Community Members Built
6th
Global · ML Hackathon
# education
Visvesvaraya Technological University
Nov 2021 – Jun 2025B.E. in Computer Science & Engineering
# experience
Digitide — Data Scientist Intern
Feb 2025 – Jun 2025Architected end-to-end ML pipelines — large-scale data processing, cleaning, EDA, feature engineering & NLP across 100k+ records — and deployed production-grade predictive & time-series forecasting models achieving a 0.98 F1 score. (Digitide, formerly Conneqt Digital.)
University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad — Product Manager
Apr 2025 – Aug 2025Led product development & workflow design for an AgriTech e-commerce platform, collaborating with startups to tackle supply-chain challenges and ship technology-driven, data-informed solutions.
Blueed — Research & Development Intern
Jul 2024 – Nov 2024Engineered data-driven features and real-time analytics for WaitKyu, a queue-management platform with 2000+ active users — leveraging ML-powered insights to optimize UX and drive product decisions.
EdVedha — Full Stack Web Developer Intern
Nov 2023 – May 2024Built and maintained production full-stack web applications end-to-end under the guidance of the EdVedha team.
Bharat Intern — SDE Intern
May 2023 – Sep 2023Built robust backend systems in Python & Java and mentored junior engineers across the team.
# leadership & communities
TechForge — Founder & President
Oct 2023 – Jul 2025Founded and scaled a technology & entrepreneurship club empowering thousands of students from tier-2/3 cities with real-industry exposure and a thriving startup ecosystem; now serving as mentor to junior teams.
FOSS United — City Chapter Lead
Sep 2023 – Aug 2025Led events, national conferences, city chapters & hackathons — championing open-source software across the nation.
ParrotSec (Hack The Box) — Community Lead
Mar 2020 – Jun 2025Rose from volunteer to national community lead for Parrot Security OS — driving operations, contributions & user engagement.
Cybernity — Co-Founder
May 2020 – May 2025Co-founded a cybersecurity community, scaling a 10,000+ user platform worldwide advancing ethical pen-testing & cybersecurity education.
# projects & publications
AudioVeritas
DOI ↗State-of-the-art deepfake audio detection — SVM pipeline with MFCC & spectral feature extraction hitting 95.7% validation accuracy. Peer-reviewed, published & funded research advancing AI-driven media forensics.
Colorectal Cancer Detection via Speech
DOI ↗Deep learning CNN pipeline for non-invasive early cancer screening from vocal biomarkers — cost-effective, AI-powered clinical decision support.
Hierarchical DL Intrusion Detection
DOI ↗Hierarchical deep learning + ML intrusion detection with an adversarial-example detector — adversarially-robust, resilient AI for evolving threat landscapes.
Security in Deep Learning Frameworks
DOI ↗Comprehensive threat modeling mapping attacks to defenses across deep learning frameworks — advancing Responsible & Secure AI.
AgriTech E-commerce Platform
Live ↗Product-led AgriTech e-commerce platform tackling agricultural supply-chain challenges with technology-driven, data-informed solutions.
# skills & tech stack
Languages & Query
PythonRSQL
CC++Java
JavaScriptBash
Machine & Deep Learning
PyTorchTensorFlowKeras
Scikit-learnXGBoostLightGBM
CNNsRNNs / LSTMsTransformers
Ensemble LearningBayesian Modeling
Hyperparameter Tuning
Generative AI & LLMs
LLM Fine-tuning (LoRA / PEFT)RAG
Prompt EngineeringHugging Face
LangChainLlamaIndex
Vector DBs (FAISS / Pinecone)Embeddings
Diffusion ModelsAgentic AI
Multimodal AI
NLP & Speech
NLPNamed Entity Recognition
Sentiment AnalysisText Classification
Speech / Audio MLMFCC & Spectral Features
Semantic Search
MLOps & Data Engineering
DockerGitCI/CD
MLflowModel Deployment
Data PipelinesApache Spark
AirflowREST APIs
Model MonitoringFeature Stores
Cloud & Databases
AWS (SageMaker / EC2 / S3)GCP
MongoDBPostgreSQL
Analytics & Visualization
PandasNumPyMatplotlib
SeabornPlotlyTableau
Power BIExcel
EDAStatistical Modeling
A/B TestingTime-Series Forecasting
AI Security & Trust
Adversarial MLDeepfake Detection
Model RobustnessThreat Modeling
Responsible AIExplainable AI (SHAP / LIME)
# achievements & awards
1st Place & 6th Globally — SmashHack ML Hackathon (UC San Diego), for an innovative machine learning solution.
Outstanding Achievement & Contribution Award — JNNCE, for academic excellence, leadership & contributions to technical communities.
Runner-Up — Hack for Hire Hackathon (Anvesana TBI), for an AgriTech product solving real-world agricultural challenges.
4× Peer-Reviewed Publications across AI, cybersecurity & healthcare — deepfake detection, medical deep learning & adversarial ML.