Budding AI Developer
Artificial intelligence, Natural Language Processing Grad @ UCSC
From Data to Decisions to Discovery
As a grad student in NLP at UC Santa Cruz, I am passionate about building AI that is impactful. With a deep love for AI, LLMs, and machine learning, I have completed my Bachelors in technology, Computer Science Engineering with a specialization in Artificial intelligence and Machine learning, and worked as a Software Development Engineer at Signify Innovation Labs (Philips Lighting).
Beyond the code, I have led student clubs like Google Developers Student Club and Artificial Intelligence Club, organized tech events, and thrived in collaborative, high-energy environments.
Driven by curiosity and caffeine, I love solving complex problems and bringing creative ideas to life.
My professional journey so far
A selection of my recent work
Designed tag-driven output format and fine-tuned Gemma-2B to generate auditable function calls with reasoning traces and schema-based tool use.
Replaced linear layers in Llama-3.2 with W8A16 quantized modules for lower memory usage and faster inference with minimal accuracy loss.
Built experiment runner to test how LLMs respond to pushback across multi-turn chats. Uses judge models for scoring resilience and conversational integrity.
Applied LoRA to fine-tune Llama-3.2-1B for improved function calling and structured external tool interaction.
Built and fine-tuned GPT-2 from scratch on Shakespeare's works with custom tokenization, dataset binning, and character-level training.
Android app running LLMs locally with character-specific system prompts for dynamic, persona-based conversations.
Built multilingual classifiers for retrieving relevant fact-checks for social media posts across 14 languages using SemEval 2025 dataset.
I'd love to hear from you
ikulkar1@ucsc.edu
+1 (408) 581-2315
San Francisco Bay Area, CA