Nisha M. Pillai

Assistant Research Professor — NLP, Cyber Security, Computer Vision, Bioinformatics, ML

Mississippi State University  ·  April 2024 – Present

• Guiding collaborative investigation into neuroimaging and language processing biomarkers for brain aging.
• Designing computer vision architectures for animal monitoring in resource-constrained environments.
• Collaborating with Civil Engineering on ML methods for identifying job satisfaction factors.
• PI on research proposals to USDA and NSF across agriculture, NLP, wireless systems, and security.
• Mentoring graduate and undergraduate students across security, software engineering, CV, and NLP.

Research Scientist I — Deep Learning, Machine Learning

Mississippi State University  ·  Feb 2023 – April 2024

• Developed data-driven frameworks for identifying microbiome signatures predictive of reduced multidrug resistance.
• Built open-source end-to-end ML pipeline for non-programmers to analyze complex biological data.

Post-doctoral Associate — Graph Neural Networks, Deep Learning

Mississippi State University  ·  Sep 2021 – Jan 2023

• Developed GNN-based systems to analyze factors affecting infection rates in pasture-raised poultry.
• Designed ensemble framework to predict physicochemical soil/fecal parameters influencing pathogen prevalence.
• Collaborated on Cyber-Physical security surveillance framework using digital twin anomaly detection.

Research Assistant — ML, NLP, Robotics

UMBC  ·  May 2016 – Aug 2021

• Designed language learning systems jointly learning linguistic concepts and visual percepts via probabilistic algorithms.
• Proposed unsupervised GMM-based active learning approach reducing annotation data by 5% across complex settings.
• Developed category-free unsupervised deep generative VAE with minimum grounding score of 0.45 (baseline <0.1).