Shashwat Singh
Doctoral Student at NYU Center for Data Science
New York, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolShashwat Singh is an incoming PhD student at NYU Center for Data Science with eight years of engineering and research experience focused on foundation models, interpretability, and AI safety. His work bridges hands-on systems programming—porting performance-critical video captioning components to Rust and integrating them with FFMPEG and OCR in the CCExtractor project—with deep-learning interpretability studies on steering, multimodal embeddings, and negation in pretrained LMs. He has contributed production-grade backend features to OpenWISP’s controller (Django, PKI, VPN configuration) and interned in quantitative research, demonstrating comfort across research, systems, and applied engineering. An active open-source contributor since Google Code-in and GSoC, he values maintainable code, testing, and pragmatic integrations between languages and tooling. Based in New York, he combines academic rigor with practical systems experience, often translating research insights into robust, deployable components. Notably, he mixes low-level systems work (Rust bindings for media/ OCR pipelines) with high-level ML interpretability, a blend that informs his research direction.
8 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Machine Learning, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Machine Learning at New York UniversityMS by research, Computational Linguistics, MS by research, Computational Linguistics at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH)High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Delhi Public School Megacity
Github Skills (17)
python10
image-processing10
django10
video-processing10
configuration-management10
c1110
c1710
subtitle10
rust10
ffmpeg9
database-migrations9
networking9
ocr9
ocra9
database-migration9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
CCExtractor/ccextractor
Feb 2022 - Oct 2022
CCExtractor - Official version maintained by the core team
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Systems Programmer
Back-end Developer & Systems ProgrammerContributions:7 reviews, 6 commits, 7 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Shashwat primarily contributed to the CCExtractor project by implementing new features, specifically related to hardsubx and closed caption extraction. They refactored existing code, added functionality to extract closed captions and burnt-in subtitles simultaneously, and improved code readability. A significant portion of their work involved porting hardsubx imgops and utility functions to Rust, integrating Rust modules, and creating bindings.
ccextractorimagepythonrustteam-core
openwisp/openwisp-controller
Nov 2018 - Feb 2019
Network and WiFi controller: provisioning, configuration management and updates, (pull via openwisp-config or push via SSH), x509 PKI management and more. Mainly OpenWRT, but designed to work also on other systems.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 13 PRs, 17 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Shashwat primarily contributed to the backend of the OpenWISP controller project by implementing features related to user permissions, VPN client configuration, and organization settings. They fixed bugs related to auto-generated certificates for VPNs and added unique constraints to database models for data integrity. The commits involved Django migrations, model adjustments, and test updates to ensure proper functionality and prevent potential issues within the network controller system.
pythoncontrollerpushdjangossh
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