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ML Engineer Computer Vision Researcher GenAI Builder ML Engineer

Senior MLE at Cogniac. Columbia MS. Four years shipping production computer-vision and GenAI systems to the edge and the cloud.

0 Live Baccarat tables
0 Provisional patents
0 Defect detection lift
0 Annotation time cut
0 Inference speedup (INT8)

Four years of production ML.

  1. Feb 2022 — Present San Jose, CA

    Senior Machine Learning Engineer

    Cogniac Corporation

    Casino Gaming

    • Shipped a vision-powered, AI-automated player rating system at the edge across 100+ live Baccarat tables in Asia.
    • Engineered an end-to-end smart blackjack table: segmentation card detection, ViT suit/rank classification, YOLO point-count chip detection, K-Means player–card association, customizable game-state logic, dynamic side bets, calibration workflows. Work contributed to 3 provisional patents.
    • Optimized inference to run 3+ tables per Cogniac Edgeflow device — doubling revenue from this client.
    • Built an LLM-powered post-game analytics dashboard — enabling pit bosses to place top-performing dealers on high-stakes tables, cutting fraud-related losses.

    Manufacturing & Railway

    • Architected a new segmentation pipeline into the Cogniac platform and fine-tuned RF-DETR-Seg, SegFormer, ViT, SAM, DINO on manufacturing inspection workflows — 70%+ defect-detection lift on targeted use cases.
    • Fine-tuned YOLACT for real-time crack detection on railways — helping a client achieve their best safety record in 2023.
    • Built a multi-agent, human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline — 80% reduction in annotation time and 30% label-quality improvement on two tested workflows.
    • Architected platform-wide post-training quantization (FP32 / FP16 → INT8) — 2× lower inference latency with no meaningful accuracy loss.
  2. 2021 San Francisco, CA

    Data Scientist

    UCSF — Dr. Ed Amorim Laboratory

    • Built a U-Net with a MobileNet encoder measuring iris and pupil diameter as quantitative biomarkers for dementia staging.
    • Applied PSPNet for multi-resolution feature extraction; developed multi-task models detecting multiple clinical biomarkers simultaneously.
  3. 2019 — 2020 New York, NY

    Computer Vision Intern

    IntelinAir

    • Built large-scale pineapple flower counting from aerial imagery via deep density estimation on a U-Net backbone — deployed on AWS. Published in Frontiers in Plant Science.
    • Applied weakly supervised learning via relative ranking of density maps to leverage unlabeled data.
    • Detected cancerous cells in gigapixel pathology images — preprocessed at two zoom levels, encoded via Inception V3, decoded via Conv2D-Transpose. 94.71% accuracy.
  4. Dec 2020 New York, NY

    MS Electrical Engineering

    Columbia University

    • Concentration: Data-Driven Analysis and Computation.
    • Leadership Fellowship · Teaching Assistant · Research Assistant — Applied Deep Learning.

A few things I've built & shipped.

Sb

Smart Blackjack Table

End-to-end vision system · 3 provisional patents

Segmentation-based card detection, ViT suit/rank classification, YOLO point-count chip detection, K-Means player–card association. Game-state logic, dynamic side bets, and calibration workflows on the Cogniac Edgeflow.

SegmentationViTYOLOK-MeansEdge
Bc

AI-Automated Player Rating

100+ live Baccarat tables · Asia

Vision-powered player rating at the edge. Optimized to run 3+ tables per Edgeflow device — doubling revenue from the client. LLM-powered post-game analytics dashboard cut fraud-related losses.

Real-time CVEdgeLLM AgentsProduction
Mf

Manufacturing & Railway Segmentation

Platform pipeline · 70%+ defect detection

Architected a new segmentation pipeline into the Cogniac platform — fine-tuned RF-DETR-Seg, SegFormer, ViT, SAM, DINO. YOLACT for real-time rail crack detection — best safety record, 2023.

RF-DETR-SegSegFormerSAMDINOYOLACT
Hl

Multi-Agent HITL Annotation

Proof-of-concept · 2 tested workflows

Multi-agent, human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline that offloads routine labeling from annotators. 80% reduction in annotation time and 30% label-quality improvement.

LLM AgentsHITLAnnotation
Pc

Gigapixel Pathology Detection

IntelinAir · 94.71% accuracy

Preprocessed gigapixel pathology images at two zoom levels, encoded through Inception V3 to extract 2048-d activations. Decoder trained via Conv2D-Transpose to produce the true mask.

Inception V3Conv2D-TGigapixel
Pd

Pineapple Density Estimation

Frontiers in Plant Science, 2020

Large-scale pineapple flower counting from aerial imagery using deep density estimation on a U-Net backbone. Deployed on AWS. Weakly supervised learning via relative ranking of density maps.

U-NetWeakly-SupervisedAWS
Read paper ↗

Tools of the trade.

Programming

PythonC++MATLAB

ML / DL Frameworks

PyTorchTensorFlowCoreMLONNXTensorRT

Computer Vision

OpenCVYOLOYOLACTViTU-NetPSPNetRF-DETR-SegSegFormerSAMDINO

LLMs & Agents

LLMsMulti-Agent SystemsGoogle Agent Development KitHITL Workflows

Data & Cloud

AWSGCPApache SparkHadoopGitEdge Inference

Techniques

PTQ (FP32/FP16 → INT8)Active LearningWeakly SupervisedBayesian MethodsSiamese Networks

Embedded / Sim

ProteusKeil uVisionAVR StudioScilab LaTeXSUMO

On the record.

2019
Best Paper Award

Real-Time Traffic Management using RF Communication

Springer

2018

QoS Routing and Scheduling Algorithms in Multihop Wireless Networks

Springer · novel OSPF adaptation for real / non-real-time flows

Dear Adobe,

We are using Generative AI and Machine Learning techniques to help Adobe better understand, lead, and optimize the experience of Adobe's Digital Experience customers. Partnering with Adobe Research and other business units, we are a diverse, lively group of engineers and scientists long established in the ML space. We are building products that transform the way companies approach audience creation, journey optimization, and personalization at scale. The work is dynamic, fast-paced, creative, collaborative, and data-driven.

Reading that felt like reading my own job description, just at a different scale. For the last four years at Cogniac, I've been shipping computer vision and deep learning systems into live casinos, manufacturing floors, railways, and clinical labs — places where a model has to actually work, day after day, under real latency and real data. Swap "cards on a table" for "moments in a customer journey" and the core skill is the same: teach a model to find structure in messy input, train it until it generalizes, and serve it at scale.

Every technique I've reached for maps directly onto your mission. Segmentation at scale — RF-DETR-Seg, SegFormer, ViT, SAM, DINO, YOLACT, U-Net, PSPNet — is the engine of audience creation: finding the right signal inside a sea of pixels and events. ViT classification and density estimation are how you do personalization at scale without losing nuance. A multi-agent, human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline I built cut labeling time 80% and lifted label quality 30% — the exact compression that makes journey optimization feasible. Platform-wide post-training quantization (FP32 / FP16 → INT8) gave us 2× lower inference latency with no accuracy loss — what turns a research model into something you can actually serve to a billion-user customer base. And the LLM-powered analytics dashboard I shipped for pit bosses is the substrate pattern that makes Generative AI usable inside a product rather than beside it.

The other half of the description is where I feel most at home — "diverse, lively group of engineers and scientists," "partnering with Adobe Research and other business units." The best ML work I've done has always been cross-disciplinary and creative. At UCSF I built biomarker models inside Dr. Amorim's neurology lab. At IntelinAir I shipped density-estimation models on AWS next to agronomists and published the work in Frontiers in Plant Science. At Columbia I was a TA for Applied Deep Learning. Three provisional patents, a Best Paper Award, and a peer-reviewed publication came out of exactly the kind of environment you describe: tight iteration, data-driven decisions, bias toward shipping.

Dynamic, fast-paced, creative, collaborative, data-driven. That isn't a list I aspire to — it's how I already work. I'd love to bring it to your team.

Let's Adobe together.

— Prajwal

Together.