Nikhil Karthik S
Engineering intelligent solutions across AI, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Cybersecurity, and Software Engineering.
About
I'm a 4th-year M.Tech (Integrated) CSE student at SSN College of Engineering. I work across the full stack — from systems-level networking tools and IoT hardware to fine-tuned language models and deep learning pipelines.
My research has been recognised at MediaEval 2025 (3rd place, GI Imaging VQA). I'm currently interning as an AI engineer while preparing further publications.
I'm drawn to hard problems — routing anomalies, pixel-level change detection, language in low-resource settings. I care about getting the details right.
Education
M.Tech (Integrated) Computer Science & Engineering
Scale 8.0 – 9.0+ · S6 is personal best
Foundation Course on Programming & Data Science
Srivi Lions Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Srivilliputtur
† School-level assessment only — AY 2020–21 Class X students were declared all-pass; no government board exam was conducted.
Experience
AI Software Engineer — Trainee
Contributing across two parallel tracks at an early-stage data intelligence startup.
Research & Publications
BLIP-2 VQA with Multimodal Explanations for Gastrointestinal Imaging
Applied BLIP-2 to the Kvasir-VQA-x1 dataset for visual question answering on endoscopy images, generating answers paired with natural-language explanations, attention maps, and confidence scores. Ranked 3rd internationally out of all competing teams.
Achievements & Certifications
Reliance Foundation Undergraduate Scholarship
Awarded the Reliance Foundation Undergraduate Scholarship — a highly competitive, merit-based national scholarship recognising academic excellence and future potential across India.
GI Imaging Visual Question Answering
Ranked 3rd internationally in Subtask 2 of MediaEval 2025 using BLIP-2 on the Kvasir-VQA-x1 medical imaging dataset. Paper available; pending publication in CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
QR Guard — Malicious QR Code Detection
QR Guard was shortlisted at a national-level hackathon for its multi-layered ML-based approach to detecting and classifying malicious QR codes.
Practical Cyber Security for Cyber Security Practitioners
Affective Computing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Management
Projects
Legal Assistant: Police Station Management
Full-stack legal platform with a Mistral chatbot fine-tuned on Indian law data. Graph-native Neo4j backend for relationship-aware queries. Django REST API + Next.js frontend.
- Fine-tuned Mistral on Indian Penal Code & CrPC datasets
- Neo4j graph backend for entity-relationship legal queries
- Role-based access control for officers, lawyers & admins
Engineering Seat Allocator
Automated college seat allocation portal with student preference handling, matrix-based allocation logic, and multi-round waitlist processing. Deployed on PythonAnywhere (now decommissioned).
- Matrix-driven allocation respecting category & preference order
- Multi-round waitlist with automatic seat re-distribution
- PostgreSQL locally, SQLite3 in production; hosted on PythonAnywhere
QR Guard — Malicious QR Detection
End-to-end QR threat scanner that traces redirect chains and classifies URLs as safe, suspicious, or malicious using heuristic rules and a trained ML classifier.
- Multi-hop redirect tracing with domain reputation checks
- Heuristic rule engine + ML classifier for three-tier labelling
- Hackathon finalist — real-time scanning with confidence scores
Hull Tactical Market Prediction
Kaggle competition entry predicting market returns for Hull Tactical Asset Management. Rigorous time-series discipline throughout feature engineering and validation.
- ElasticNet regression with EWM imputation & feature engineering
- 10-fold purged cross-validation, Sharpe ratio optimisation
- Final competition score ~3.99 on held-out market data
TelmedApp — Real-Time PPG Telemedicine Monitor
Mobile-first app that measures heart rate and SpO2 in real time using the phone's rear camera and torch via Photoplethysmography — no external hardware required.
- FFT peak detection on red channel for heart rate (42–210 BPM range)
- Ratio-of-Ratios on red/green channels for SpO2; live signal quality scoring
- Real-time finger placement guidance over FastAPI WebSocket stream
MilkyWayOS — Custom Linux Distribution
A Linux distribution built from scratch on Debian 12 — with a fully custom display server, desktop environment, terminal emulator, and app store, all written in C.
- Starlight: custom display server using DRM/KMS and evdev input handling
- Nebula DE + Pulsar terminal emulator built from scratch in C
- Orbit app store; dark deep-space aesthetic throughout
CyberShield — Real-Time Attack Detection
Kappa-style streaming pipeline that ingests ~10,000 network events/second via Kafka, classifies 22 attack types across 4 categories with an ensemble ML model, and surfaces live insights on a Flask dashboard — all under 2 s end-to-end latency.
- Spark Structured Streaming with 41 → 122 feature engineering & sliding windows
- Random Forest + GBT ensemble; results persisted in Cassandra with TTL lifecycle
- 7-service Docker Compose deployment on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
plagcheck — PDF Plagiarism Detector
Multi-modal CLI tool comparing PDF assignments across text, code (AST), visuals (perceptual hashing), and structure — fully offline, no external API calls.
Real-Time Accident Detection and Alerting System
IoT crash-detection using Raspberry Pi, sensors, GPS, and GSM. Dispatches emergency alerts on collision with SOS button and environmental monitoring. IFSP collaboration.
Lost & Found Website
Platform for reporting and reclaiming lost items with auth, image-based posting, and a claim workflow. Vue.js frontend with Spring Boot REST API and MongoDB.
Silent Loop Detector
Detects routing loops via TTL variation and packet timing analysis. Real-time Flask dashboard with configurable alerts and anomaly visualisation.
Change Detection using U-Net
Segmentation model on the Inria aerial dataset with CLAHE preprocessing. Generates pixel-level change detection maps from before/after imagery.
Optimisation Algorithm Evaluation
Compared SGD, Momentum, Adam, RMSProp, Adagrad, Adadelta, LBFGS, and Photon on Rosenbrock, Rastrigin, Ackley, and Himmelblau benchmarks.
CSE Department Website
Static website for the Computer Science & Engineering department. Built with clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
CP Exam Platform
Offline competitive programming exam platform with Python & Java code execution, public/private/custom test cases, automatic time & space complexity analysis, and a professor admin panel.
Exam Platform — M.Tech LAN Deployment
Production deployment of the CP exam platform for M.Tech lab exams — runs as a systemd service on 10.6.6.1, serves 40 students over LAN with internet blocked via UFW, no external internet required.
LabCtrl — Lab Management System
Centralized controller for 40 Ubuntu lab machines — toggle internet per machine via UFW over SSH, manage users, distribute files, and monitor CPU/RAM/USB status from a single dashboard.
ServicePilot — GTK4 systemd Manager
Native GTK4 + libadwaita systemd service manager for GNOME/Ubuntu. Filter, search, start/stop/restart services, view live journalctl logs — all in a non-blocking threaded UI that appears in GNOME Activities.
Intelligent Campus Surveillance & Threat Analysis
ESP32-based smart security system combining motion, sound, light, and ultrasonic sensors with MQTT streaming to a cloud backend. Calculates threat scores, detects anomalies, and visualises intrusion heatmaps on a live dashboard.
Skills
Languages
ML / Data Science
Frontend
Backend
Databases
Big Data & Tools
Contact
connect.
Open for research collaborations, ML conversations, or just a good chat about systems and language models. Currently interning as an AI Software Engineer at DriveThruData LLP — I still respond to meaningful outreach. Best reached by email.