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 |
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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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2025.11.01 Self-supervised Driver Distraction Detection for Imbalanced Datasets
IEEE 28th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2025)
Proposed a novel unsupervised adaptation strategy to address class imbalance and enhance generalization in computer vision tasks — directly applicable to clinical AI settings with limited or unlabelled data.
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2020.02.01 Effect of Size and Cascading of Receivers on the Performance of a Solar Collector System
Springer, Singapore
This study examines how cascading configurations in parabolic dish solar collectors improve collection efficiency by 3.2%–5.4%, highlighting the impact of receiver size and layout on thermal performance.
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/ |