Animesh Nighojkar

ANIMESH NIGHOJKAR

AI Research Engineer & CTO

Tampa, FL, USA(646) 371-5208a@nighojkar.com
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About

Founding Engineer (CTO) at Actualization.AI with a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing. I seek challenging roles where I can apply my expertise in advanced language modeling, prompt engineering, and transformer-based language models.

With 2 impactful internships at Dropbox, 5 years of research at University of South Florida, and a win in an international legal reasoning competition, I have a proven track record developing innovative ML solutions.

Principal Investigator on a $275K NSF SBIR grant.

Experience

Founding Engineer and CTO

Actualization.AI

Tampa, FL, USA

September 2024 - Present
  • • Principal Investigator (PI) on a $275K NSF SBIR Phase-I grant.
  • • Made the product 2x faster and 10x cheaper without compromising performance.
  • • Working with Tampa International Airport (TPA) and other companies on separate pilot programs.
  • • Creating various LLM jailbreaks and prompt engineering techniques to test the robustness of AI systems.
  • • Led a team of four engineers with various skill levels and backgrounds to deliver an MVP in just 10 days.

Machine Learning Intern

Dropbox

Remote, USA

May 2023 – August 2023
  • • Implemented end-to-end object removal from videos. The user can pause a video at any frame, and click on any object, and that object is tracked through the rest of the video and removed.
  • • Cross-collaborated with the front-end teams to get the feature shipped.
  • • Feature showcased in Dropbox hack week 2023. Won third place in the hack week competition.

Machine Learning Intern

Dropbox

Remote, USA

May 2022 – August 2022
  • • Trained summarization models and deployed a document and transcript summarization service which can summarize theoretically infinite length of text.
  • • Prototyped the UI of the feature for demonstration to the VP.

Graduate Research Assistant

University of South Florida

Tampa, FL, USA

September 2019 – August 2024
  • • Prompt engineering for GPT-4 to create a dataset with specific psychological and psychometric properties.
  • • Modeled semantic fluency tasks using transformers to understand human cognition and memory retrieval.
  • • Pre-trained BERT from scratch to explore how LLMs learn and understand human language.
  • • Led a team of 8 researchers to win the COLIEE-2024 legal reasoning competition.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering

University of South Florida, USA

August 2024

Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering

University of South Florida, USA

December 2021

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering

Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, India

May 2019

Skills

Programming Languages

PythonC++JavaRustJavaScriptSQLScalaRBash/ShellLaTeX

Frameworks & Tools

PyTorchTensorFlowKerasPandasNumPyScikit-learnMatplotlibSeabornPlotlyGitGitHubLinuxOpenCVDjangoFlaskDockerAWSGoogle CloudKubernetes

AI & NLP

HuggingFaceSpaCyNLTKGensimStanfordNLPFastTextPrompt EngineeringAI SafetyLLM Jailbreaks

Selected Publications

Giving AI Personalities Leads to More Human-Like Reasoning

arXiv (2025)

A. Nighojkar, B. Moydinboyev, M. Duong, J. Licato

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An Inference-Centric Approach to Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Modeling

Ph.D. Dissertation (2025)

A. Nighojkar

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AMHR COLIEE 2024 Entry: Legal Entailment and Retrieval

New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2024)

A. Nighojkar, K. Jiang, L. Fields, O. Bilgin, S. Steinle, Y. Sadybekov, Z. Marji, J. Licato

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Exploring Prompting Approaches in Legal Textual Entailment

The Review of Socionetwork Strategies (2024)

O. Bilgin, L. Fields, A. Laverghetta Jr, Z. Marji, A. Nighojkar, S. Steinle, J. Licato

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No Strong Feelings One Way or Another: Re-operationalizing Neutrality in Natural Language Inference

The 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (2023)

A. Nighojkar, A. Laverghetta Jr, J. Licato

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Cognitive Modeling of Semantic Fluency Using Transformers

The 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive Aspects of Knowledge Representation (2022)

A. Nighojkar, A. Khlyzova, J. Licato

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Improving Paraphrase Detection with the Adversarial Paraphrasing Task

The 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2021)

A. Nighojkar, J. Licato

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Mutual Implication as a Measure of Textual Equivalence

The International FLAIRS Conference (2021)

A. Nighojkar, J. Licato

View Publication