experience
here I have highlighted some of my relevant experience.
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Researcher
March 2025 - Present
Madrid, Spain - onsite
- Working under the supervision of Dr. Luis Fernando D'Haro, within the ASTOUND project
- Developing an end-to-end agentic framework for museum-based conversational AI systems, with focus on mitigating toxicity and bias in LLMs when discussing artworks and cultural heritage
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Visiting Graduate Researcher
July 2024 - Present
Singapore - remote
- Collaborating with Dr. Eng Siong Chng and team on advanced speech deepfake detection methods
- Developed and implemented multiple novel approaches for synthetic speech detection: Internal Ensemble Learning, Progressive Enhancement Learning, Group Propagation, and Domain Discriminator
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Research Assistant
August 2024 - February 2025
Kathmandu, Nepal - onsite
- Conducted research under Dr. Bishesh Khanal on developing comprehensive parallel corpora for Nepali language NLP applications
- Served as Teaching Assistant for the prestigious Annual Nepal AI School, supporting courses on Geometric Deep Learning led by Dr. Michael Bronstein and LLMs and Mixture of Experts led by Dr. Chetan Arora
- Led the "nepSWOR" project in collaboration with NAAMII's startup Diyo, building models, datasets, and evaluation frameworks for Nepali ASR and TTS systems across 9 regional dialects and accents
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Research Intern - SIPGA Awardee
Jan 2024 - July 2024
Singapore - onsite
- Created and curated a diverse synthetic audio dataset using various voice cloning technologies for training and evaluation of deepfake detection systems
- Fine-tuned WavLM with LoRA for Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) and implemented self-supervised learning models (WavLM, Wav2vec2) with RawBoost augmentation for robust spoofing detection
- Achieved Rank 3 in the SVDD 2024 Challenge by developing an ensemble system using speech foundation models with a novel Squeeze-and-Excitation Aggregation (SEA) method, achieving state-of-the-art 1.93% equal error rate for singing voice deepfake detection GitHub
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Software Engineering Intern
May 2023 - June 2023
Kathmandu, Nepal - onsite
- Developed a network monitoring system using Python's Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Docker for enterprise-level device management
- Integrated DevOps tools (Zabbix, Nornir) with custom Django UI to restructure internal ticketing system, reducing manual email-based workflows by one-third and improving operational efficiency
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Student Researcher
April 2021 - June 2021
Kathmandu, Nepal - onsite
- Conducted research in Mathematics and Cryptography, developing curriculum for the 'Cryptography for Everyone' course
- Successfully launched and taught the course with 70+ student enrollments, covering asymmetric/symmetric key cryptography, hashing, key exchange, and network vulnerabilities