CV
General Information
Full Name | Manish Dhakal |
Languages | Nepali, English |
Position | Graduate Research Assistant, Georgia State University |
Summary | Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia State University with expertise in medical image analysis, vision-language models, and reproducible machine learning project methodologies. Strong skills in writing scientific manuscripts and communicating methodologies, results, and implications effectively. |
Experience
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2024 - 2029* Graduate Research Assistant
Georgia State University - Student researcher at Collaborative Human AI (CHAI) Center, funded by US Department of Defense (DoD).
- Deep learning projects on computer vision applications , collaborating with Army Research Lab (ARL).
- Resource-friendly transfer learning with Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) and Adapters.
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2022 - 2024 Research Assistant
Nepal Applied Mathematics and Informatics Institute for research (NAAMII)
Supervisor: Bishesh Khanal, Ph.D.- Developed skills for object detection and segmentation tasks on 2D medical images and explored their multi-modal approach ( esp. vision-language models ); also worked for segmentation with 3D mesh data.
- Demonstrated strong skills in writing scientific manuscripts, with multiple papers submitted for review, showcasing the ability to communicate methodologies, results, and implications effectively.
- Ensured reproducibility and modularity in ML projects by implementing robust methodologies and practices, allowing for the transparent and replicable programming of the projects.
Education
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2024 - 2029* Ph.D. in Computer Science
Georgia State University
Advisor: Yi Ding, Ph.D.- Research work in computer vision and natural language processing.
- Awarded with graduate research assistantship (GRA) from the computer science department.
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2017 - 2022 Bachelor in Computer Engineering
Pulchowk Campus, Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Subarna Shakya- Ranked 11th in the engineering entrance exam, competing with 15,000+ candidates, received full scholarship for undergraduate study.
- Gained knowledge about significant CS courses like AI, Image Processing, Data Structure & Algorithm, DBMS, Software Engineering, and so on.
- Thesis: Automatic speech recognition for low-resourced Nepali language which was later presented at an IEEE conference.
Teaching
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2023 - 2024 Trainer
Community Eye, ENT & Rehabilitation Center (CEERS) - Training a group of interns to develop medical imaging applications with the use of ML.
- Instructing and guiding them about ML through activities like paper reading sessions, lab and lecture sessions, and topic presentations.
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Spring 2023 Teaching Assistant
4th Annual Nepal AI School (ANAIS) - Guided participants through a series of labs related to neural networks, transformers, federated learning, graph neural networks, active learning, and so on.
- Mentored three groups during Hack-a-Dev, a 10-day machine learning hackathon.
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Summer 2021 Programming Instructor
Software Fellowship, Locus 2021 - Provided tutoring on software development life cycle and assisted participants with software documentation and library/framework installation.
- Taught participants about API development for web applications, emphasizing its concepts, best practices, and usage.
Projects
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2023 Lower Limb Segmentation
Medical Imaging
Supervisor: Taman Upadhaya, Ph.D.- Conducted training experiments of different deep learning models on the remote server to segment three bones – knee, pelvis, and ankle – from CT scans of the lower limbs of patients.
- Deployed a robust Python rest API on the remote server for the segmentation request from a client, with a pipeline including pre-processing, inference, and post-processing steps.
- Ensured interoperability, reproducibility, and understandability of the deployed application using Docker, and well-structured documentation and comments.
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2023 - 2024 Vision Language Segmentation Models (VLSMs) for Medical Images
Medical Imaging - Reported zero-shot and finetuned segmentation performance of 4 VLSMs on 11 medical datasets using 9 types of prompts derived from 14 attributes, prompts are given as text conditioning informations.
- Worked with encoder-decoder architecture to generate binary segmentation masks for VLSMs.
- Tested the compatibility of the VLSMs (such as CLIPSeg and CRIS) pre-trained for open-domain images with medical images.
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2022 - 2024 Object detection in 2D Orthopantomogram (OPG) Images
Dental Imaging - Critically analyzed the literature and state-of-the-art models for different segmentation and detection tasks on radiology images of dentistry and their inadequacy.
- Designed and developed the data annotation tool for object detection over 2D OPG images.
- Working on identification and localization of dental anatomical structures and abnormalities while benchmarking with existing methods like YOLO, RetinaNet, RCNN, and FastRCNN.
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Summer 2022 Segmentation in 3D Teeth Scan
MICCAI Challenge 2022 - Learned about the representation and preprocessing of 3D mesh and point cloud data.
- Benchmarked with different 3D point cloud segmentation models such as Pointnet/++ and DeltaConv.
Technical Skills
- Machine Learning: Unimodal and multimodal (esp. vision-language model) ML project structuring for detection and segmentation task while maintaining reproducibility and modularity; integrating open source models for benchmarking. Proficiency in using libraries and frameworks like NumPy, Pandas, PyTorch, and TensorFlow.
- Writing: Knowledge synthesis from the existing literature, writing scientific documents and manuscripts with LaTex, and communicating the results to the community with transparency.
- Web Development: Competence in creating well-documented backend applications with relational databases using frameworks like Django, FastAPI, and NodeJS. Adept at client-side programming with ReactJS.
- Remote Server: Able to work with remote Linux machines for coding and project deployment using SSH, shell script, tmux, Nginx, and Docker.
Open Source Projects
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2020 Nepali AutoComplete and LM
- Open source implementation of Nepali AutoComplete and Language Model using LSTM in PyTorch framework.
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2020 SahaYatri
- Hackathon project to promote toursim in Nepal developed using Django and ReactJS.
Honors and Awards
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2024 - LMIC Travel Grant by MICCAI.
- Presidential Fellowship within TCV initiative by GSU (Only 6% of the doctoral students).
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2017 - Undergraduate funded by Government of Nepal.
Academic Interests
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AI/ML
- Medical Imaging
- Vision Language Model
References
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Yi Ding, Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University
- [email protected]
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Bishesh Khanal, Ph.D.
- Research Director, Nepal Applied Mathematics and Informatics Institute for research (NAAMII)
- [email protected]
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Prof. Subarna Shakya
- Professor of Computer Engineering, Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Pulchowk Campus, Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University
- [email protected]
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Taman Upadhaya, Ph.D.
- Associate Researcher, University of California San Francisco || Adjunct Research Scientist, Nepal Applied Mathematics and Informatics Institute for research (NAAMII)
- [email protected]