Nikhil Prakash
PhD Candidate
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNikhil Prakash is a research-focused software engineer and PhD student at Northeastern University with nine years of experience spanning front-end development and mechanistic interpretability of large language models. He combines hands-on engineering—contributing UI and component refactors to the widely used Oppia learning platform—with deep research into model internals, including attention superposition and variable binding in LMs. Currently a Research Fellow investigating binding mechanisms and affiliated with Stanford's SERI-MATS, he has interned at Apple and worked with leading researchers such as Neel Nanda and Atticus Geiger. His background bridges industry roles at Accolite and product internships with academic visits to KAIST and MPI-SP, reflecting comfort moving between production systems and exploratory research. Known for pragmatic problem-solving, he prioritizes implementing learned techniques to solve real problems rather than learning for its own sake. Based in Boston, he brings a rare mix of UI craftsmanship and mechanistic ML expertise aimed at making AI systems more understandable and reliable.
9 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Northeastern UniversityBachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Telecommunications Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), Telecommunications Engineering at RV College Of Engineering
English, Hindi
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (10)
html10
css10
typescript10
javascript10
typescripts10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
angular10
ui-design9
accessibility7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
oppia/oppia
Jan 2017 - Jan 2018
A free, online learning platform to make quality education accessible for all.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 22 PRs, 143 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Nikhil primarily focused on enhancing the user interface and user experience of the Oppia learning platform. Their contributions included adding and modifying UI elements such as buttons and navigation bars. The user also worked on extracting and refactoring components like the `FocusManagerService` and creating new directives for features such as the continue button and abbreviated solution explanation. Additionally, the user addressed layout and visual alignment issues.
appenginereactpythonlearning-platformquality-education
Nix07/imad-2016-app
Sep 2016 - Apr 2017
Contributions:755 pushes in 7 months
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