About me

I am an incoming CS PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, with research interests in multimodal learning for NLP. I focus on developing robust language systems that combine speech, text, and video to improve natural language understanding in real-world settings.

Most recently, I was at SpeechAce, where I led the development of the company’s AI-powered Writing Assessment Platform. My work spanned ML engineering and data engineering, including designing NLP pipelines for text analysis and building models that perform reliably in resource-constrained, production environments. The platform is deployed across 20+ countries, serving clients like Pearson.

My broader research interest lies in long-context multimodal LLM reasoning, developing methods that allow large language models to effectively integrate and reason across speech, text, and video over extended contexts, with an emphasis on robustness, interpretability, and efficiency.

Before SpeechAce, I was a Research Assistant at Northwestern University, where I developed a multimodal model for speech disfluency detection at the Ideas Lab, focusing on robustness to missing modalities. I also contributed to video super-resolution research at the Image and Video Processing Lab (IVPL). I hold a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Northwestern.

📧 shamikalikhite2024 [at] u [dot] northwestern [dot] edu

Here is my work at Speechace that focuses on Writing Assessment

To learn more, please take a look at my CV

🗞️ News

• April 2026: I am joining the University of Pittsburgh as a CS PhD student in Fall 2026.
• Nov 2025: Published a new paper on Physics-Informed Image Restoration via Progressive PDE Integration for image restoration.
• Sept 2025: I am currently looking for a new role in the industry.
• Sept 2024: Started working at Speechace.
• Aug 2024: Released a new Pypi package Video Audio recorder for Multimodal dataset creation on edge devices.
• June 2024: Our paper Missingness-resilient video-enhanced multimodal disfluency detection is accepted at Interspeech 2024.

🎓 Education

• PhD. in Computer Science, The University of Pittsburgh (Aug 2026 – June 2030)
• M.S. in Computer Engineering, Northwestern University (Sep 2022 – Dec 2023)
• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (July 2018 – May 2022)

👨🏻‍💻 Work Experience

• Software Engineer, Machine Learning, Speechace LLC (Sept 2024 – Present)
• Research Engineer, Northwestern University (Jun 2023 – Sept 2024)
• Machine Learning Engineer Intern, Merkle Inc (May 2021 – Aug 2021)