🎓 MS in AI @ USC | 💼 Data Scientist @ Lineslip Solutions | 🤖 Robotics Researcher @ USC ISI Lab
I'm an AI/ML engineer passionate about building intelligent systems that solve real-world problems. Currently working on production LLM systems, computer vision, and 3D robotics.
- 🎬 Real-time video style transfer with temporal consistency and distributed GPU training
- 🦾 3D reconstruction algorithms for robotic manipulation at USC's ISI Polymorphic Robotics Lab
- 🤖 Production LLM systems with RAG and fine-tuning (Llama models)
- 👁️ Computer vision systems with CNNs and Vision Transformers
- 📊 Full-stack ML applications with FastAPI and React
Languages: Python • C++ • CUDA • JavaScript/TypeScript • SQL
ML/AI: PyTorch • TensorFlow • Hugging Face • LangChain • OpenCV
GPU Computing: CUDA • Multi-GPU Training (DDP) • Mixed Precision (AMP)
Tools: FastAPI • Docker • Git • CI/CD • React • TensorBoard
Focus Areas: Computer Vision • LLMs • RAG • Robotics • Deep Learning
- 📝 Published first-author research at AHFE Hawaii 2024
- 🥇 55th Annual Senior Design Conference Session Winner
- 🎬 Trained neural style transfer model on 118K images with distributed multi-GPU training
- 🤖 Developed robotics algorithms with 96% tracking accuracy at USC ISI
- 👁️ Created computer vision system with 77% accuracy on 101 categories (75K+ images)
- ⚡ Built production ML systems serving 10K+ queries/day with sub-second latency
Check out my pinned repositories below for:
- 🎬 TemporalStyleNet: Production-scale video style transfer (AdaIN + RAFT Optical Flow) achieving 6.45 FPS and trained via DDP on 118K images.
- 🍔 FoodVision: Computer vision with Vision Transformers (75K images, 77% accuracy)
- 🌍 Cross-Cultural AI Coach: Fine-tuned Llama 3.2-1B with Q-LoRA (sub-200ms latency)
- 🎵 Text-to-Music Generation: Generative AI synthesizing audio from text using transformer models
- 📧 rjnickel@usc.edu
- 🌐 Los Angeles, CA | Open to Summer 2026 ML/AI internships
💡 Interested in ML engineering, computer vision, robotics, and production AI systems