Nikhil Bhattasali
Doctoral Researcher at New York University
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolNikhil Bhattasali is a doctoral researcher at NYU specializing in neuroscience-inspired AI and embodied intelligence, with nine years of interdisciplinary experience spanning computer science, machine learning, mechatronics, and neuroscience. He builds biologically inspired computational models to control virtual agents and physical robots, producing NeurIPS-first-author work and projects supervised by leaders like Grace Lindsay, Lerrel Pinto, Yann LeCun, Tony Zador, and Sam Gershman. His background includes hands-on robotics hardware (a 31-DOF biomimetic hand), scalable systems engineering at Google, and open-science tooling at Stanford’s CodaLab, reflecting fluency from low-level C++ pipelines to high-level neural architectures. He combines theoretical rigor—designing theory-constrained models and ANN priors for motor control—with practical robot demonstrations that improve data efficiency and robustness. A 2022 Hertz Fellow with BS/MS degrees from Stanford, he often frames AI problems through a neuroscience lens and pursues uncommon cross-disciplinary threads such as commonsense reasoning and modular neural design. Based in Palo Alto, he brings a rare mix of experimental robotics craft and computational theory to neuro-AI research.
8 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science (Neuro-Inspired AI + Robotics), Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science (Neuro-Inspired AI + Robotics) at New York UniversityHigh School, GPA 4.52/4.00, High School, GPA 4.52/4.00 at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and TechnologyB.S., Symbolic Systems (Artificial Intelligence), B.S., Symbolic Systems (Artificial Intelligence) at Stanford University
English, Chinese, Spanish
Github Skills (96)
camera10
reproducible-science9
cli9
orbitcontrols9
reproducible-research9
smooth9
graph-layout8
datasets8
threejs8
annotations8
docker8
react8
layout8
semantic-segmentation8
slurm7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
vizstack/blog
Sep 2019 - Nov 2019
Contributions:90 commits, 80 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
nikhilxb/xnode-db
Jan 2018 - Aug 2018
Contributions:118 commits in 7 months
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