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Akul Datta

Engineer & Researcher

📧 akuldatta@gmail.com 📞 (650) 460-0441 💼 linkedin.com/in/akuldatta ✍️ akul.ai (Newsletter)

Professional Experience

Applied AI Engineer

Mercor — San Francisco, CA

Aug 2025 – Present
  • Published Mercor’s core AI benchmarks including APEX-SWE, APEX-v1, ACE, and APEX-Agents, testing complex agentic systems on viable economic workflows.
  • Led design and development of robust Reinforcement Learning (RL) sandbox environments optimized for code generation, safety layers, BUA/CUA compliance, and professional business domains.
  • Ran large-scale internal model post-training experiments on alignment datasets and spearheaded research on advanced LLM searching/planning structures.
  • Successfully scaled four critical data pipelines from scratch to generate multi-million dollar monthly revenue streams.

Core Contributor

ARC Prize — San Francisco, CA

Jun 2025 – Jul 2025
  • Engineered the foundational developer repository featuring training templates for the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark.
  • Collaborated with engineering teams from HuggingFace, Anthropic, and LangChain to integrate robust agent workflows.
  • Authored extensive developer documentation for the official global AI competition.

AI Engineering Intern

Endor Labs — Palo Alto, CA

May 2024 – Aug 2024
  • Architected an advanced human-in-the-loop LLM Security Agent to autonomously audit, optimize, and organize enterprise AppSec workflows.
  • Built an automated vulnerability classifier providing precise pull request SAST static analysis feedback.

AI Researcher

University of Texas at Austin

May 2023 – Dec 2023
  • Synthesized high-fidelity 3D datasets using the MuJoCo physics environment to significantly enhance out-of-distribution (OOD) computer vision bounding box detection.
  • Fine-tuned generative Stable Diffusion architectures, capturing state-of-the-art accuracy benchmarks on visual OOD validation tests.
  • Optimized large-scale distributed GPU cluster workflows for efficient multi-node model pre-training.

Undergraduate Researcher

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

May 2023 – Dec 2023
  • Designed and implemented a novel State-of-the-Art (SoTA) Priority-Aware Load Balancer and Adaptive Concurrency Filter.
  • Greatly minimized high-traffic bottlenecks by separating network payloads into discrete priority paths using a custom queue filter.

Software Engineering Intern

Axiamatic — San Francisco, CA

May 2022 – Aug 2022
  • Developed a scalable, fault-tolerant enterprise distributed audit logger resolving 1,000+ events/sec at 99.99% system uptime.

Education

M.S. in Computer Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Aug 2024 – May 2025
  • Focus: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Drone Robotics, Control Algorithms.
  • Research Thesis: Neural networks optimized for occlusion-aware object tracking in autonomous drones.
  • Advisor: Prof. Sayan Mitra | Leadership: Team Lead - UIUC Drone Racing Team.

B.S. in Computer Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Aug 2021 – May 2024
  • Focus Area: Artificial Intelligence & Systems Programming.
  • Selected Coursework: Reinforcement Learning, Distributed Systems, Deep Learning, System Programming, Applied Machine Learning, Algorithm Design.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Can a Single Model Master Both Multi-turn Conversations and Tool Use? CoALM: A Unified Conversational Agentic Language Model

Acikgoz, E. C., Datta, A., et al.

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025 Main)

📄 Read Paper (OpenReview) →

From Turns to Dialogues: Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Evaluation by Combining Turn-Level Precision with Dialogue-Level Comparisons

Datta, A., et al.

Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2025)

📄 Read Paper (OpenReview) →

Co-Design of Communication and Machine Inference for Cloud Robotics

Nakanoya, M., Datta, A., et al.

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2021)

📄 Read Paper (Proceedings) →

Technical Expertise

Languages & Cores

Python C++ Java CUDA SQL

AI / ML Frameworks

PyTorch TensorFlow Stable Diffusion OpenCV

Agentic Frameworks

LangGraph Anthropic MCP LangChain HuggingFace

Cloud & Robotics

AWS Azure GCP MuJoCo Docker

Awards & Recognition

🏆
3rd Place, AGI House AI Hackathon (June 2023) for developing a custom healthcare agent.
📜
California State Senate Commendation (2021) for leadership on public health advocacy.
💻
2nd Place, SIGPwny CTF CSAW'21 cybersecurity capture-the-flag tournament.
👑
Dean's List Award, UIUC College of Engineering (All semesters 2021 - 2023).
✨
3rd Place, PalyHacks Hackathon for custom generative ambient audio filter model.
📡
Founder of akul.ai, a high-growth AI newsletter followed by VCs, researchers, and engineers.
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