CV
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Basics
| Name | Pavan Thodima |
| Label | MS Computer Science Student |
| pthodima@gmail.com | |
| Phone | (608)515-1098 |
| Url | https://pthodima.github.io |
| Summary | MS Computer Science student at UW-Madison with research interests in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Game Theory, and Computer Systems. Former Senior Software Engineer at BNY with 3 years of industry experience. |
Education
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2024.09 - Present Madison, Wisconsin
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2017.08 - 2021.06 Hyderabad, India
Work
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2025.09 - Present Graduate Researcher (Independent Study)
Wision Lab
- Engineered Motion-Metering, an efficient algorithm for high-fidelity image reconstruction from Quanta (single-photon) sensors, enabling effective extreme dynamic range viewing.
- Validated algorithm efficacy by benchmarking feature consistency in Vision Foundation Models (e.g., DiNOv2) fed with reconstructed Quanta outputs.
- Benchmarked robustness of classical and deep CV pipelines against photon-starved and high-motion sensor data.
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2023.07 - 2024.08 Senior Full Stack Software Development Engineer
Bank of New York Mellon
- Played the role of technical release manager and adhered to technology change management protocols for application packaging and deployment.
- Architected and created multiple data management and approval systems for a data intensive regulatory reporting application, serving as the bank's will incase of financial crisis.
- Spearheaded the design and execution of a customized GIT branching strategy, tailored specifically to the needs of a team transitioning from waterfall approach to agile methodologies.
- Served on the technical interview panel to assess candidates for both full time roles and internships.
- Provided software solutions and developed reusable frameworks that are employed across multiple lines of business as a member of the Java Guild.
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2021.07 - 2023.07 Software Development Engineer
Bank of New York Mellon
- Designed and developed POCs to enhance and mordernize the navigation systems, boosting a critical business application's responsiveness and user experience.
- Built an ensemble learning model combining Random Forest, Logistic Regression and Decision trees to detect fradulent transactions, with an ROC/AUC of over 96%.
- Created a data pipeline that onboards consolidated critical business data into a centralized database consumed by regulatory and resiliency applications.
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2021.01 - 2021.06 Data Science Intern
Piramal Group
- Implemented a machine learning model to perform customer data segmentation and anomaly detection to identify untapped market segments.
- Developed a data migration pipeline to unify multiple postgres databases into a central snowflake warehouse entity
- Handled data-preprocessing and feature selection using techniques like encoding, binning, Gower's distance metric, and FAMD(Feature Analysis of Mixed Data)
- Utilized several machine learning models like DBSCAN, OPTICS, Isolation Forest, and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering to analyze the customer data.
- Visualized the organization's attrition data using a Power BI dashboard.
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2020.05 - 2020.07 Software Development Intern
Bank of New York Mellon
- Developed a chatbot to answer compliance and process queries and assist employees in updating personal information.
- Utilized RASA and Facebook's Ducking for Natural Language Processing and deployed it as an Angular application using Docker and Kubernetes.
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2019.05 - 2019.07 Software Development Intern
JSW Steel
- Developed a Production Parameter and Control monitoring application to analyze and share multiple KPIs of plants in the factory.
Skills
| Deep Learning & GenAI | |
| PyTorch | |
| Diffusion Models | |
| VAEs | |
| Object Detection | |
| Transformers | |
| HuggingFace | |
| LangChain | |
| vLLM | |
| RAG | |
| Stable Diffusion |
| MLOps & Cloud | |
| AWS | |
| Docker | |
| Kubernetes | |
| MLflow | |
| Ray | |
| Git | |
| CI/CD | |
| Linux |
| Languages & Data | |
| Python | |
| C++ | |
| CUDA | |
| Java | |
| Javascript | |
| TypeScript | |
| SQL | |
| Spark | |
| Kafka | |
| Redis | |
| MongoDB |
| Development Frameworks | |
| Angular | |
| Springboot | |
| Flask | |
| Django | |
| FastAPI | |
| Flutter | |
| Firebase | |
| Android Studio |
Publications
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2025.01.01 Sparks of Cooperative Reasoning: LLMs as Strategic Hanabi Agents
Under Review at ICLR 2026
Accepted to NeurIPS 2025 LAW Workshop & ICML 2025 MAS Workshop
Projects
- 2025.01 - 2025.05
Deep Learning Framework in C++ & CUDA
- Architected a lightweight, device-agnostic deep learning framework in C++ mimicking PyTorch’s nn.Module API, supporting dynamic graph construction.
- Implemented custom CUDA kernels for linear layers and activations, achieving a 13x speedup with OpenMP multi-threading and significant GPU acceleration.
- Engineered a memory-efficient training pipeline with manual host-device memory management, successfully training a neural network on MNIST.
- 2024.11 - 2024.12
Conditional Diffusion Image Generation
- Developed a conditional DDPM in PyTorch with sinusoidal time & label embeddings plus SpatialTransformer modules; trained on MNIST to reach SSIM 0.98 in 1,000 denoising steps.
- Extended to latent diffusion on the AFHQ-cat subset by integrating VAE decoding; generated 50K samples achieving FID 13.2 (−2.4 vs. baseline).
- 2024.10 - 2024.11
Anchor-Free Object Detection (FCOS)
- Implemented an end-to-end FCOS one-stage object detector with ResNet–FPN backbone, focal & GIoU losses, and centerness head in PyTorch, training on ≈16K Pascal VOC 2007 + 2012 images; achieved 37.9% mAP (+2.4% vs. baseline) with multi-scale augmentation.
- Engineered a high-throughput inference pipeline (vectorized box decoding, confidence thresholding, batched NMS) to serve at 45 fps on A100 GPUs; built visualization tools for real-time training diagnostics.
- 2025.11 - Present
Evolution of Semantics in Diffusion Models
- Analyzing the evolution of semantic features during the diffusion denoising process
- 2020.10 - 2020.12
Hand Sign Recognition
- Developed a hand sign recognition system using Convex Hull generation and defect detection.
- Used Open CV for image processing and convex hull and defect calculation.
- Experimented with Neural Networks for classification of multiple hand signs.
Volunteer
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2023.08 - 2023.10 Mentor
Bank of New York Mellon
Mentoring a Recent College Graduate
- Facilitated the transition of a recent college graduate from academics to the corporate.
- Guided and supported the mentee in becoming acquainted with contemporary industry coding standards and practices like code review and Agile methodologies.
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2023.03 - 2023.04 Trainer
Placement Training
SR University, Warangal (collaboration with Ez Trainings and Technologies)
- Trained over 200 college seniors in Data Structures and Algorithms and Object Oriented Programming.
- Advised students with career decisions, interview preparation and helped them overcome their job search anxiety.
Interests
| Research Interests | |
| Artificial Intelligence | |
| Machine Learning | |
| Computer Vision | |
| Game Theory | |
| Computer Systems |