Nikash Walia

I am a Senior AI Scientist at Intuit, building agentic workflows for Intuit Assist and driving search and personalization across TurboTax, Credit Karma, and QuickBooks. My work spans applied ML systems, LLM-based agents, and production-grade ranking and retrieval.

CV | E-Mail | Github | LinkedIn

Experience
Aug 2023 - Present Senior AI Scientist, Intuit — Unified generative AI platform for Intuit Assist; CUDA-accelerated vision pipelines for smart segment selection (Mailchimp).
May 2022 - Aug 2022 Data Science Intern, Intuit — Tax document parsing on AWS (S3, SageMaker); improved extraction of challenging fields; patent filed for non-text feature classification (TTExpress).
May 2021 - Aug 2021 Product Development Intern, VMware — Graph algorithms (DGL, PyTorch) for risk detection; security group recommendations; integrated models (95%+ val. acc.); patent #11765179.
Jun 2020 - Aug 2020 Data Science Intern, Walmart Labs — TensorFlow + OpenCV for category-agnostic attention and image-based search.
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019 Data Science Research Intern, NASA Ames — Exoplanet detection with TensorFlow (AstroNet adaptations); accuracy gains; ApJ 2021.

Publications and Projects

ExoMiner: A Highly Accurate and Explainable Deep Learning Classifier to Mine Exoplanets
NEW ExoMiner: A Highly Accurate and Explainable Deep Learning Classifier to Mine Exoplanets
Contributors- Hamed Valizadegan, Miguel Martinho, Laurent S. Wilkens, Jon M. Jenkins, Jeffrey Smith, Douglas A. Caldwell, Joseph D. Twicken, Pedro C. Gerum, Nikash Walia, Kaylie Hausknecht, Noa Y. Lubin, Stephen T. Bryson, Nikunj C. Oza
ApJ 2021
 paper | project
Caterpillar IoT ML Challenge
Caterpillar IoT Machine Learning Analytics Challenge
Contributors- Nikash Walia, Samraj Moorjani, Aishani Dutta
Winners- HackIllinois 2020
 project and code
MechMania 27
Mechmania 27 Engine
Contributors- Shaw Kagawa*, Nikash Walia*, Boyou Han, Sahil Patel, Nathaniel Cohen
Part of the annual Reflections|Projections student conference
 website | project | code
Piano Man
Piano Player Simulator
Contributors- Nikash Walia*, Ben Schneider
project video | code
Schedule Generator
UIUC Schedule Generator
Contributors- Nikash Walia*, Samraj Moorjani*, Elena Zheng, Shresta Bangaru
project video | code
Film Festival Visualization
Film Festival Visualization
Contributors- Nikash Walia, Janani Radhurai, Pranav Burugula
project and code
Skills
Languages Python, C/C++, CUDA, Bash/Shell, Java
ML PyTorch, TensorFlow, HuggingFace, scikit-learn, OpenCV, PyTorch Geometric, LangChain, cuDF, NumPy
Other Linux, Git, Docker, AWS (SageMaker, S3, RDS), Neo4j, MySQL
Affiliations
                   
NASA Ames Research Center
June-August 2019		 Walmart Labs
June-August 2020		 VMware
May-August 2021		 UIUC
2019-2023		 Intuit
2023-present
News
Aug 2023 Joined Intuit as Senior AI Scientist.
May 2023 Completed M.S. in Computer Science at UIUC (GPA 4.0).
May 2022 Completed B.S. in Computer Science at UIUC with University Honors (GPA 4.0).
May 2022 Summer at Intuit TurboTax Express, Mountain View.
Nov 2021 Paper on Exoplanet Detection accepted in ApJ 2021.
Oct 2021 Accepted UIUC CS accelerated B.S.-M.S. offer. Begins August 2022.
May 2020 Summer at VMware NSX Intelligence, Palo Alto.
Feb 2021 Joined Professor Svetlana Lazebnik's research team as an undergraduate researcher.
Aug 2020 Joined the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Resarch as an undergraduate researcher.
Jun 2020 Summer at Walmart Labs, Sunnyvale.
Jun 2019 Summer #2 at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View.
Jun 2018 Summer at NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View.
Template credits: Shivansh