Nisha M. Pillai

Assistant Research Professor | Machine Learning, Computer Vision, NLP

Mississippi State University · Bagley College of Engineering

Current & Recent Courses

Computational Biology
Mississippi State University, Spring 2026
Introduction to Machine Learning (NSF ExLENT Initiative)
Mississippi State University, Spring 2026
Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning
Mississippi State University, Fall 2025
Introduction to Software Engineering
Mississippi State University, Fall 2025
Human-Robot Interaction
Mississippi State University, Spring 2025

Previous Teaching Appointments

Teaching Assistant — Advanced Robotics & Human-Robot Interaction
UMBC, 2015–2016
Teaching Assistant — Data Structures
UMBC, 2014–2015

Student Mentorship

Currently mentoring 9 graduate and undergraduate students on projects in UAV-based animal health monitoring, disease spread modeling, dementia detection, and NLP for cybersecurity. Student work has resulted in 5+ peer-reviewed publications and 3 invited conference talks. Serving on 4 Ph.D. committees.

Tutorials & Invited Talks

  • Tutorial: BioMedical Learning through Graph Neural Networks: A Hands-on Approach — ACM-BCB (2022)
  • Talk: From Thermal Fields to Physiological Indicators: Transformer-Based Cow Temperature Prediction — PAG 33 (2026)
  • Talk: Towards Scalable Aerial Detection: Augmenting Datasets for Real-Time Animal Health Monitoring — PAG 32 (2025)
  • Talk: Explainable Chickenomics: Advancing Poultry AI with Interpretability — PAG (2024)
  • Talk: Embracing Deep Learning in Poultry Research: Challenges and Opportunities — PAG 30 (2023)
  • Talk: Graph-Based Neural Networks for Microbiome Signatures in Pastured Poultry — PAG 30, Genomics of Animal Health Workshop (2023)