Darpan Jain

Crunchyroll (Sony Pictures)

Lead Machine Learning Engineer

• As the first Machine Learning Engineer, my role at Crunchyroll leads to involvement in several AI initiatives across the organization, leveraging proprietary data and covering a wide range of teams and business verticals.
• Recommendations & Personalization Platform: Leading the development of the content discovery platform, serving unique engagement experiences for over 13 million anime fans
• AI Platform: Architected a centralized AI platform for enabling applications including multilingual synopsis generation, translation for content globalization, and internal knowledge discovery through agentic RAGs.
• Building services within the AI platform for fine-tuning, hosting LLMs and multimodal models, ingesting and maintaining vector stores, incorporating human feedback, and serving inference for production-scale traffic.

Jan 2024 - Present

Pixstory

Lead Machine Learning Engineer

• Spearheaded Pixstory’s RAG-based Conversational Search, providing precise user query responses grounded in verified knowledge bases. Deployed in production within 5 months, serving queries for over 72K monthly users.
• Implemented systems to mitigate hallucination and misinformation from self-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) generations through rigorous evaluations and re-ranking trusted sources for reliable information retrieval.

March 2023 - Feb 2024

Information Sciences Institue (USC-ISI)

Applied Research Engineer

• Led development of conflict resolution dialogue agents for DARPA’s Civil Sanctuary Program, as an Applied Researcher with the Natural Language group (CUTE LAB NAME) at USC-ISI.
• Designed and deployed a scalable chatbot for mitigating toxic behavior on social media through non-violent communication strategies, using a system of pre-trained and fine-tuned LLMs generation capabilities; also including prompting GPT-3’s advanced transformer-based (the model that drives ChatGPT!) generations.
• Moderated over 15k multilingual Reddit posts with 85% true positive rate in French and German on popular subreddits.
• You can find the published research paper here, which will presented at NAACL 2024, Main Conference later this year.

January 2022 - July 2023

Warner Bros Discovery

Software Development Engineer - Machine Learning

• Boosted user engagement on Discovery Plus (D+) as part of the ”Personalization and Recommendations” team.
• Employed Apache Spark and Airflow to build efficient ETL pipelines in a distributed environment, and executed A/B tests to validate and refine new recommendation features for the D+ platform.
• Led the development of server-side ad-insertion SDKs for Android and Web, driving increased ad revenue for D+ sports content in Europe.

September 2020 - August 2021

AdSparx Inc

(now Warner Bros. Discovery)

Machine Learning Engineer

• Spearheaded the research, design, and development of MiDAS, a micro-service-based system serving personalized ads to millions of users on OTT platforms.
• Designed and trained Computer Vision models with TensorFlow, deployed on Kubernetes to enable dynamic server-side ad-insertion for 40+ channels, boosting revenue for U.S. publishers.
• Developed a tool to automate the dataset annotation process, by leveraging SCTE-35 markers in HLS and DASH streams.
• Leveraged multi-step recurrent networks on time series data for ad break forecasting. This resulted in a 30% reduction in resource consumption and network calls to the SSAI backend.
• Member of the senior development team at AdSparx that was acquired by Warner Bros Discovery in September 2020.

March 2019 - September 2020

IoTIoT

Machine Learning Engineer

• Led and mentored a team of 30 for catering Machine Learning applications with on-Edge capabilities, for Embedded Linux platforms.
• Developed a crowd flow analysis product using face and voice recognition for event registration, optimized for on-chip GPUs to showcase AI-on-Edge computing capabilities.
• Worked on Pose estimation for detection and tracking of human body pose to create an immersive experience for users for a video gaming platform.

(May 2018 - January 2019)

USC Dornsife

Lead Research Engineer

• Leading the development of an end-to-end system for evaluating teacher fidelity in the Pathways-to-Success program at USC Mind and Society Center, applying Identity-Based Motivation principles in classrooms across the United States.
• Constructed a pipeline using self-hosted inference models for audio extraction and transcription, and LLM-based fidelity evaluation models to score instructors based on custom metrics.
• Ran experiments and evaluations of the system's performance on 100+ hours of teacher sessions, with final results within 5% of human evals.

Jan 2024 - Present

Defeat COVID-19

Machine Learning Lead

• In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, co-founded DefeatCovid, a not-for-profit organization, which leveraged technology to increase public awareness and aid in curbing the spread of the disease.
• Led a team to build a tool to provide early stage diagnosis of the symptoms and risk assesment for Covid-19, using crowdsourced data and Deep Learning techniques.
• The tool included a Question-Answer Chatbot based on BERT to help navigate users through the website, provide information from government verified sources and address misinformation about Covid-19.
• It also included a real-time dashboard and interactive heatmap interface to identify at-risk localities.

March 2020 - May 2020

Prasaurus Sports Analytics

Artificial Intelligence Consultant

• Led a team to design a framework for real-time action recognition and perform statistical analysis, providing deep insights for player performance tracking and improvement, for an academy training national badminton players.
• The models captured Spatio-temporal features across frames based on two-stream networks and ActionVLAD for Action Recognition, and shuttle and player tracking using a custom trained MobileNet, to provide metrics such as 'Dominant areas'.

June 2019 - September 2019

InProspect Technologies

Machine Learing and Strategic Consultant

• Managed a team of engineers to design and develop a product to propel undergraduates towards career goals by providing curated career guidance. The platform provided analytics for educational institutions via the 'Enterprise Resource Planning' system.
• Created a personalization system for recommendations to help achieve user-specified goals by aiding in coursework selection and extra-curricular activities. This ensured high success rates in the individuals' field of interest.
• Was part of the strategic planning for incorporating product changes to drive user engagement.

March 2019 - May 2019

Ubuntoo LLC

Emerging Technology Consultant

• A global environmental solutions platform promoting sustainable economic growth.
• Researched and created technical reports on companies and organizations innovating in the use of Machine Learning and Computer Vision.
• The solutions included high accuracy waste sorting systems and autonomous waste collection bots; centered around using technology to tackle environmental issues and promote sustainable development.

September 2019 - December 2019

Occipital Tech

(now AgroGrade)

Computer Vision Engineer

• A startup offering products in Agrotech to classify and grade agricultural produce using Computer Vision, resulting in reduced wastage and maximizing profits.
• Worked on the pipeline for preprocessing of real-time image data by Background Segmentation using methods like Gaussian Mixture Models and Watershed Algorithm to tackle camera jitter and dynamic lighting conditions.
• The effort led to an ~20% reduction in preprocessing time, along with enhancing image noise reduction by 14-15%.

February 2019 - March 2019