Rhythm Syed
Research Intern at Toyota Research Institute
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRhythm Syed is a research-focused software engineer and CS PhD student at Columbia with eight years of experience building scalable analytics, ML infrastructure, and web applications that improve decision-making and user experiences. Currently interning at Toyota Research Institute and conducting doctoral research in robotic perception and interaction, Rhythm blends foundation-model and agentic-AI work with hands-on systems engineering. Past roles include leading ML infrastructure at Verizon—where they delivered a 120x speedup for large-scale scoring pipelines and built tools that saved $20M annually—and developing contract-processing and simulation systems at AT&T and other organizations. They teach NLP and speech in Columbia’s Executive AI program and have designed graduate curricula and open-source tools for ontology and entity-linking problems, showing a rare mix of production impact, pedagogy, and research. Notably, Rhythm’s work spans low-level embedded systems and cloud-native distributed platforms, reflecting an uncommon breadth from drones and indoor positioning to large behavior and vision-language agents.
8 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at Georgia Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Engineering at Purdue UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Columbia University
Hindi, Spanish, Bengali, English
Github Skills (5)
jupyter2
widgets2
rdf2
graph2
knowledge-graph1
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
RhythmSyed/KnowledgeGraph_Builder
Dec 2020 - Feb 2021
Contributions:51 commits, 44 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
RhythmSyed/NAS_PerformanceEstimation
Oct 2020 - Feb 2021
Contributions:17 commits, 18 pushes, 1 branch in 4 months
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