Undergraduate Machine Learning Researcher and Software Engineer
I'm a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I've minored in Statistics and Astronomy, and I currently am a part of Professor Tom Goldstein's research lab, where I work on DynaGuard 2, a dyanmic guardrails model for policy adherence in LLMs. I am also an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for CMSC420: Advanced Data Structures, where I assist students in learning complex data structures, their use cases and efficiences, and their implementations.
I'm currently working on developing an image library that users can upload images to, which are categorized using an object recognition model. I plan on using AWS Rekognition for object recognition, Lambda for running the model when an image is uploaded, S3 for storage, and DynamoDB for metadata storage.
An Image Quantizer that relies on the K-Means++ algorithm.
Tech Stack: Python, Flask, Tailwind CSS, HTML
My personal portfolio website, hosted through AWS S3.
Tech Stack: HTML/CSS/JavaScript, AWS S3
I'm working under Professor Tom Goldstein and PhD candidate Monte Hoover on DynaGuard 2, a dynamic guardrails model for policy adherence in LLMs. I've derisked future project phases by looking into existing red-teaming frameworks such as NVIDIA's garak and Microsoft's PyRIT, resulting in informed decisions on project direction. I've collected over 220K+ AI safety and LLM interaction samples by analyzing major safety datasets such as CWEval, MT-SEC, ProSec, and RedCode, resulting in a comprehensive dataset for model training and evaluation.
Over two semesters, I've assisted over 500 students in mastering complex data structures such as B-Trees, KD-Trees, and Blockchains. I've held weekly office hours to help students programatically develop structures such as Scapegoat Trees and Compressed Tries from the ground up. I've proctored and graded 7 exams, maintaining communication with both students and the professor.
I worked on the Engineering team for a 501(c)(3) non-profit that builds software for other non-profits. As a member of the Operations team, I designed the backend database schemas and tables, clarified relations between tables, and implemented these designs through REST and GraphQL APIs using TypeScript. I wrote comprehensive tests to make sure all API functions worked as intended, ensuring 80%+ test coverage across the codebase.
Interested in collaborating? Email me directly at desai.harsh.747@gmail.com.