AI Researcher & Engineer
Harsha Raj Kumar
Open to Summer 2026 Internships

Building the
Future of AI

MS Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. Research Assistant at VU-BEAM Lab specializing in self-supervised medical imaging and production NLP systems.

0% CNR Improvement
0% Build Failures Reduced
0+ GitHub Repositories

Current Work

01
VU-BEAM Lab Oct 2025 – Present

DAC-Learn: Self-Supervised Ultrasound Beamforming

Developing DAC-Learn (Depth-Aware Contrastive Learning), a novel self-supervised ultrasound beamforming method evaluated on the PICMUS benchmark against four baselines (supervised, CycleGAN, SimCLR, BYOL). Achieved 85% improvement in image contrast (CNR: 3.5+ dB) on held-out clinical cardiac data — built on multi-GPU infrastructure reducing training time by 40%.

PyTorch Contrastive Learning Multi-GPU Medical Imaging PICMUS
02
Vanderbilt Math Dept Sep 2025 – Present

Cloud IDE for Academic Textbook Authoring

Architecting a browser-based cloud IDE with Monaco editor, GitHub OAuth repo-loading, and a PreTeXt/XML → static HTML compilation pipeline inside a Dockerised toolchain. Cut build failures by 60% and deployment time by 75% via GitHub Actions CI/CD. Implemented CRDT-based collaborative editing with Y.js and a custom WebSocket sync server.

Node.js Y.js / CRDT Docker GitHub Actions

Featured Projects

Featured
AI / ML Intern Team project
API Security Scanner

Fine-tuned Code Llama 7B with QLoRA on a custom 10,000-sample dataset covering OWASP API Top 10 across 10+ languages. 3-stage pipeline: structural endpoint discovery → AI inspection → fuzzy OpenAPI policy validation. Streamlit dashboard + CLI.

Code Llama 7BQLoRAOWASPStreamlit
Repo
AI / ML Intern ▶ Live Demo
CleanOps OpenEnv

Realistic benchmark environment for evaluating AI agents on multi-step business data-cleaning workflows. Deterministic scores with reward shaping for partial credit. Includes task design, grading logic, and a deployable server/demo.

Agent EvalReward ShapingPythonFastAPI
AI / ML Intern
Malaria Diagnosis via CNN

TensorFlow CNN that classifies malaria parasites in microscopy images using TF Datasets. Ties directly to VU-BEAM medical imaging research — applied deep learning for healthcare diagnostics end-to-end.

TensorFlowCNNMedical AI
Repo
Featured
Full-Stack Dev + AI
FernOS — Crisis OS for Nashville

Full-stack crisis platform on a shared live PostGIS graph. Citizens get safe routing via modified Dijkstra with time-decaying edge weights. Responders get crew sequencing, ML-predicted circuit failures (XGBoost), and Claude-powered NLP triage — all synchronized via Socket.io.

TypeScriptPostGISSocket.ioXGBoostClaude API
Repo
Featured
SDE Intern
Production API Gateway

Node.js gateway with distributed tracing, SLO/error-budget tracking (Google SRE model), adaptive rate limiting via EWMA PID controller, chaos engineering lab, circuit breaking, and a 10-tab live admin dashboard. Benchmarked at 25k+ req/s, P99 < 15ms.

Node.jsRedisPrometheusDocker
Repo
Full-Stack Dev
BridgeAI — Real-Time Dispatch

Real-time mutual-aid dispatch platform for urgent community response. Combines intake, request prioritization, volunteer matching, live OTP handoff verification, and charity fallback — full production-grade system.

Real-TimeSocket.ioMERN
Repo

Publications & Recognition

IEEE Best Paper
Paper2Story

Multi-model NLP pipeline using Mistral 7B + LoRA for narrative generation from research PDFs. 15% ROUGE/BLEU improvement over baselines.

IEEE Published
API Vulnerability Detection

Hybrid ML framework to automate identification of RESTful API authentication flaws. Combines static analysis with behavioral pattern detection.

View on IEEE Xplore
Finalist
Global Good Hackathon

Finalist at Vanderbilt University's Global Good Hackathon — recognized for social impact and technical execution among competitive university teams.

The Stack

Research & ML
  • PyTorch / HuggingFace
  • TensorFlow / Keras
  • PEFT — LoRA / QLoRA
  • Contrastive Learning
Engineering
  • FastAPI / Node.js / React
  • Socket.io / Redis / SQL
  • Docker / AWS / CI-CD
  • Microservices Arch
Foundations
  • C++ / Java / Python
  • System Design / DSA
  • Binary Exploitation
  • Linear Algebra / Stats