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Resume

Work Experience

April 2026 - Present

Senior AI Applied Scientist

• Foundation Models Team

SAP Labs, Newport Beach, California

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July 2025 - March 2026

AI Applied Scientist

• Foundation Models Team

• Further Details Available Upon Request

SAP Labs, Newport Beach, California

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October 2023 - May 2025

Machine Learning Intern

Numerade Labs, Remote

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• Trained a neural embedding model to classify duplicate user-generated content. Reduced storage costs by 15%

• Optimized code-gen prompting via exemplar selection for image generation; 92% user preference over SOTA baselines

• Developed enterprise-grade API using FastAPI & asyncio to scale to 8 million+ active monthly users

• Created unit & property test suites for LLM outputs, reducing QA time by 90% by automating 100% of model validation

June 2023 - September 2023

AI Research Intern

NASA Glenn Research Center, Remote

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• Published first-author paper at AAAI-MAKE 2024; delivered oral presentation at Stanford University to 90-person audience

• Integrated RAG with vector search to provide research papers as context to GPT-4, reducing hallucinations by 71%

• Researched the adaptation of LLMs to assist engineers in biomimicry, & developed the first fully autonomous research assistant agent that generates novel ideas for aerospace system design which has amassed 400+ stars on GitHub

June 2022 - August 2022

Software Engineer Intern

Capital One, San Francisco, California

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• Built blockchain tamper-detection & verification tools for transaction integrity, enabling real-time validation at 0.6ms/transaction

• Integrated HMAC-SHA512 algorithm to secure customer financial data, gaining 2x hashing throughput in a microservice platform

• Developed a verification algorithm in Scala for confirming transaction history in full account scanning

• Created unit tests and property tests

June 2020 - March 2022

NLP Software Engineer Intern

SapientX, Santa Cruz, California

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• Trained language classifiers using a bidirectional LSTM; supports 6 languages with f1 > 0.96

• Developed rule-based (ChatScript) and AI-based (TensorFlow) conversation flows for a digital voice assistant tasked with summarization and question answering (presented at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show and the 2020 Bots and Assistants Conference)

 Implemented a wake word engine using ChatScript to detect when a user is speaking; reduced misfire rate by 20%

Education

September 2023 - June 2025

Computer Science M.S.

University of California, Irvine

Irvine, California

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• Full-Funding with Stipend
 

 Graduate Student Researcher @ UCI NLP
 

 Advisor: Sameer Singh 
 

 Emphasis: Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
 

 Emphasis GPA: 4.00
 

 Overall GPA: 3.90

September 2019 - June 2023

Computer Science B.S.

University of California, Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California

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 GPA: 3.94
 

 Highest Honors in Computer Science
 

 Cum Laude in Baskin School of Engineering
 

 Dean's Honor List (x 11)

 Thesis: Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer for Prompting Large Language Models in Low-Resource Languages

Advisor: Jeffrey Flanigan

Committee: Ian Lane, Amita Misra

https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06018

 Computer Science Major, Statistics Minor

September 2015 - June 2019

High School Diploma

Arnold O. Beckman High School

Irvine, California

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• GPA: 4.57

• SAT: 1500 (99.3% percentile)

• Qualifier at the 2019 Berkeley Math  Tournament

• Qualifier at the 2018 Caltech-Harvey Mudd Math Competition

Academic Research

April 2024 - June 2025

Graduate Student Researcher

UC Irvine NLP Group

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• Adapted PPO for multi-turn reasoning in LLM agents for code generation. Achieved 4x pass@1 improvement on SWE-Bench Lite

 Created novel Monte-Carlo Tree Search algorithm with LLM-as-a-judge in program synthesis, cutting inference cost by 90%

 Advised by Professor Sameer Singh

April 2022 - June 2023

NLP & Deep Learning Researcher

JLab @ UC Santa Cruz

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• Fine-tuned LLaMa, GPT-2, Phi-2, Mistral, & MPT for zero-shot domain adaptation & few-shot cross-lingual transfer (ACL)

• Used training mechanisms such as Accelerate, DeepSpeed (ZeRO), Quantization, Flash-Attention, LoRA, FSDP & DDP

 Investigated adaptation of monolingual LLMs to unseen low-resource languages with in-context learning and instruction tuning

 Pre-trained 48 7-billion parameter LLMs totaling over 4.1K hours of multi-device distributed training on a GPU cluster

 Advised by Professor Jeffrey Flanigan

March 2020 - January 2023

President and Co-Founder

NeuroTechSC

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• Project Lead for the subvocalization project that earned 1st place in the United States in the NeuroTechX Competition in November 2020

Click here to see the 'Boolepathy' project

 Wrote and awarded grant proposals from OpenBCI, UCSC Academic Research Project Fund, and UCSC Student Fee Advisory Committee totaling over $4,000 to fund club research projects

 Created and presented a curriculum to the general body of 40 attending members

 Researching and developing a brain-computer interface for sub-vocal phonemic recognition to assist mute individuals

 Advised by Professor Jason Samaha

 NeuroTechSC is a chapter of the worldwide NeuroTechX Student Club Organization

August 2021 - August 2022

Machine Learning Researcher

Tech4Good Lab @ UC Santa Cruz

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 Implemented Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003) from paper / concept design to functional code in a development environment

 Collaborated in the development of a stratified Expectation-Maximization algorithm to alleviate poor quality and low resource crowdsourcing tasks

 Combined statistical methods and mathematical algorithms to reduce the dimensionality of word embeddings.

 Advised by Professor David Lee

Skills

Programming Languages

Python

C++

C

Scala

R

SQL

HIP

CUDA

JavaScript

HTML

CSS

MIPS Assembly 

MATLAB

Haskell

Packages

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Keras

NLTK

spaCy

sklearn

pandas

numpy

matplotlib

transformers

© 2025 by Chris Toukmaji

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