Chris Toukmaji

I'm a graduate Computer Science student at UC Irvine working within the intersection of Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing. I completed my B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Statistics with Highest Honors from UC Santa Cruz, where I completed my thesis on transfer learning for unseen low-resource language adaptation in monolingual LLMs, and was fortunate to be advised by Dr. Jeffrey Flanigan. 

​

My research interests include: (1) Interpretability, Explainability, and Robustness of large transformer-based language models, (2) Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning, and (3) Efficient NLP. 

​

In addition to both school and research, I am a Machine Learning Intern at Numerade Labs where I am working on program synthesis in multimodal LLMs.

​

I've previously worked on: 

• Retrieval Augmentation and LLM Agents at  NASA

• Fraud Detection at  Capital One                          

• Language Classification and Conversational AI at  SapientX 

 

In my free time, I enjoy working out and watching sports; I occasionally dabble in sports analytics research.

​

News:

• 2024-02-06: Paper accepted at AAAI-MAKE 2024: AAAI Spring Symposium Series at Stanford!

• 2023-10-19: First day as an ML Intern at Numerade Labs!

• 2023-09-28: Started as a graduate student at UC Irvine! 

• 2023-06-20: First day as an AI Research Intern at NASA!

• 2023-06-17: Graduated Cum Laude and Highest Honors with a B.S. in Computer Science and a Minor in Statistics from UC Santa Cruz!

• 2022-10-29: Best Paper @ CMSAC '22 in the Student Methodology track! 

• 2022-10-04: One paper accepted at CMSAC '22. See you soon CMU!

• 2022-06-13: First day at Capital One! Excited to work on interesting problems and explore San Francisco