CV

View or download my latest curriculum vitae, highlighting my academic background, research experience, technical skills, and professional achievements.

Basics

Name Suraj Bhardwaj
Label AI Researcher & Data Scientist
Email suraj.unisiegen@gmail.com
Url https://surajbhar.github.io
Summary AI and data science professional with expertise in deep learning, LLMs, and computer vision. Experienced in developing scalable, research-driven ML systems and deploying them using modern MLOps tools.

Work

  • 2023.11 - 2024.05
    Master Thesis Researcher – Improved Driver Distraction Detection using Self-Supervised Learning
    Fraunhofer IOSB
    Investigated cross-modality generalization using self-supervised vision transformers for driver distraction detection.
    • Innovated the Clustered Feature Weighting (CFW) algorithm using HDBSCAN for long-tailed distribution.
    • Achieved 7.17% performance improvement over supervised baselines using DINOv2-pretrained ViT-B/14.
    • Used tools like Ray, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, OpenCV, and Git for reproducible experimentation.
  • 2023.05 - 2025.01
    Research Assistant (KARLI and SALSA Projects)
    Fraunhofer IOSB
    Conducted AI research for human-machine interaction and autonomous driving projects (KARLI, SALSA).
    • Developed an LLM-based chatbot using RAG and RAPTOR for scalable retrieval in knowledge-intensive settings.
    • Designed the Clustered Feature Weighting (CFW) algorithm to mitigate class imbalance in multimodal datasets.
    • Contributed to VoxelNeXt deployment for LiDAR-based 3D object detection on the Pandaset dataset.
    • Led technical demos of a Level 3 Mercedes-Benz Occupant Monitoring System for stakeholders.
    • Worked with Python, PyTorch, Ray, FAISS, RAPTOR, LangChain, Docker, Streamlit, and AWS.

Volunteer

  • 2025.03 - 2025.07

    Remote

    Conference Reviewer
    IEEE ITSC 2025 (International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems)
    Served as a peer reviewer for the IEEE ITSC 2025 conference in the domains of machine learning and computer vision.
    • Reviewed submissions in unsupervised learning, segmentation, and safe motion generation.
    • Focused on evaluating methods in ML, CV, and intelligent systems for transportation and autonomous driving.

Education

  • 2019.10 - 2025.30

    Siegen, Germany

    M.Sc. Mechatronics
    University of Siegen
    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
    • Software Engineering
    • Unsupervised Deep Learning
    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Mechatronic Systems
  • 2014.08 - 2018.05

    Himachal Pradesh, India

    B.Tech. Mechanical Engineering
    National Institute of Technology Hamirpur
    Department of Mechanical Engineering
    • Engineering Mathematics
    • Numerical Methods
    • Data Structures

Publications

Projects

  • 2024.02 - 2024.09
    YOLO-Based Real-Time Object Detection in CARLA
    Developed and deployed a real-time object detection system using YOLOv8–YOLOv11 models in CARLA simulator on a Tesla Model 3 setup.
    • Simulated a sensor suite with 8 cameras, radar, and 12 ultrasonic sensors at 30 FPS.
    • Trained and evaluated 12 YOLO models on a custom dataset; YOLO8-m and YOLO11-m achieved best mAP@(50–95) scores.
    • Integrated the fine-tuned YOLO11-m model into the CARLA pipeline for live inference on cars, pedestrians, and traffic signs.
  • 2024.03 - 2024.05
    RAG Chatbot using NVIDIA NIM
    Implemented a Streamlit-based chatbot leveraging NVIDIA NIM and LangChain for querying research PDFs with contextual awareness.
    • Utilized RAPTOR, FAISS, and ChromaDB for retrieval-augmented generation.
    • Designed for scalable, domain-specific document understanding.
  • 2024.01 - 2024.03
    Codeninja: AI Code Assistant
    Developed an LLM-based code assistant using Ollama, Gradio, and LangChain to enhance developer productivity.
    • Integrated with a custom model served locally.
    • Provided contextual, real-time code generation and fixes.
  • 2022.12 - 2023.04
    Implicit 3D Model Generation
    Built an implicit 3D object generator using Neural Unsigned Distance Fields (NDF) and latent diffusion.
    • Trained on ShapeNet Cars using SLURM on OMNI cluster.
    • Implemented vector quantization and feature bottlenecks.
  • 2022.10 - 2022.11
    OOD Robustness with AugMix
    Evaluated OOD robustness of ConvNeXt and ResNet18 on CIFAR variants using AugMix augmentation.
    • Applied transfer learning and tuning with cosine LR scheduling.
    • Achieved superior robustness scores for ConvNeXt-tiny.
  • 2022.06 - 2022.08
    Real-Time Face Mask Detection
    Built a VGG16-based face mask detector with live webcam stream input using OpenCV and Haar cascades.
    • Achieved 93.5% accuracy in real-time prediction pipeline.
    • Applied transfer learning on VGG16 features.

Skills

Programming
Python
C++
SQL
MATLAB
Bash
Git
Linux
Machine Learning & Deep Learning
Self-Supervised Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs)
Transformers
Graph Neural Networks
Diffusion Models
Variational Autoencoders
SparseCNNs
LSTMs
Object Detection
Image Segmentation
Frameworks & Libraries
PyTorch
TensorFlow
Keras
HuggingFace
OpenCV
Ray
FAISS
LangChain
ChromaDB
Timm
Optuna
Scikit-learn
DevOps & Deployment
Docker
AWS
GitHub Actions
GitLab CI/CD
MLflow
FastAPI
Flask
Data Visualization
Matplotlib
Seaborn
Plotly
Pandas
NumPy
Tableau
Power BI
Open3D
Trimesh
NLP & LLMs
LangChain
Ollama
Transformers
SpaCy
NLTK
RAPTOR
SentenceTransformers

Languages

English
Proficient (IELTS C1)
German
Intermediate (B1 in progress)
Hindi
Native

Interests

AI Research & Machine Learning
Self-Supervised Learning
Large Language Models
Generative Models
Transformers
Deep Learning
Computer Vision & 3D Perception
Object Detection
NeRF & DIVeR
Voxel-based Models
LiDAR Systems
Point Cloud Processing
MLOps & Scalable Systems
Model Deployment
CI/CD
Docker
AWS
MLflow

Certificates

Modern Computer Vision™ PyTorch, Tensorflow2, Keras & OpenCV4
Udemy (Instructor: Rajeev D. Ratan) 2023-03-20
Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning
DeepLearning.AI & Stanford University (Coursera) 2023-03-18
Advanced Learning Algorithms
DeepLearning.AI & Stanford University (Coursera) 2022-08-27
Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification
DeepLearning.AI & Stanford University (Coursera) 2022-07-21
Machine Learning
Stanford University (Coursera, Instructor: Andrew Ng) 2020-08-12

Awards

  • 2018.11.01
    NSTEDB Research Grant
    National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), India
    Awarded for the research project 'Effect of Size and Cascading of Receivers on the Performance of a Solar Collector System'. Recognized for innovation in solar energy technology.
  • 2014.06.01
    SJVN Silver Jubilee Merit Scholarship
    SJVN Foundation
    Granted for securing 21st rank in Himachal Pradesh Board examinations.

References

David Lerch
Research Scientist, Perceptual User Interface Group, Fraunhofer IOSB, Karlsruhe, Germany. Email: david.lerch@iosb.fraunhofer.de
Prof. Michael Moeller
Head of Computer Vision Department, University of Siegen. Website: https://sites.google.com/site/michaelmoellermath/
Prof. Dr. Roman Obermaisser
Full Professor, Division for Embedded Systems, University of Siegen. Profile: https://blogs.uni-siegen.de/ms-cps/prof-dr-roman-obermaisser/