Ritvik Kapila

Ritvik Kapila

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About Me

Most recently, data research @ Essential AI with Ashish Vaswani, where I built large-scale data pipelines and evaluations for pre-training large language models.

Before that, I was a software engineer on AWS's Cryptography team, working on client-side encryption libraries, where I built the AWS Encryption SDK in Rust.

During my Master's at UC San Diego, I built foundation models for scarce domains like time-series data, and worked on privacy-preserving machine learning and cryptography, co-advised by Prof. Rajesh Gupta, Prof. Jingbo Shang, and Prof. Farinaz Koushanfar.

Prior to that, I worked as a Quantitative Researcher at a high-frequency trading firm, building low latency trading systems and algorithmic trading strategies for futures and options.

I did my Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi, which also included an internship at Goldman Sachs. I spent one semester as an exchange student at INSA Lyon, France, splitting my time between research and backpacking across Europe.

Outside of work, you'll find me chasing waves while surfing, exploring new cities, or (almost :p) dunking on the basketball court.

Recent News

Apr'25
Recently left Essential AI to build something new.
Apr'25
Released Essential Web v1.0 - a 24T token dataset for pretraining large language models[huggingface]
Apr'25
My paper on practical efficiency of muon for pretraining got released [paper]
Apr'25
My paper on studying reflection capabilities in LLMs during pre-training got released [paper]
Mar'25
I joined Essential AI as a Research Engineer, where I work on advancing open science and developing frontier capabilities in LLMs.
Dec'24
My paper, in collaboration with MIT Media Lab, Camera Culture, titled Co-Dream: Collaborative dream synthesis over decentralized models, got accepted at AAAI 2025 [paper].
Dec'24
My paper on ZeroHAR: Sensor Context Augments Zero-Shot Wearable Action Recognition got accepted at AAAI 2025.
Nov'24
My first patent got published for Zero Knowledge Right of Ownership for Neural Networks (ZKROWNN) [paper] [patent]
May'24
My paper on First 100 days of pandemic; an interplay of pharmaceutical, behavioral and digital interventions -- A study using agent based modeling was awarded the Best Student Paper runners up at AAMAS'24 (The 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems).
Apr'24
Joined Amazon's AWS Cryptography team as a software engineer.
Jan'24
Presented my paper on First 100 days of pandemic; an interplay of pharmaceutical, behavioral and digital interventions -- A study using agent based modeling at CSE Open House, UCSD 2024.
Jan'24
My paper in collaboration with MIT Media Lab, Camera Culture on First 100 days of pandemic; an interplay of pharmaceutical, behavioral and digital interventions -- A study using agent based modeling was accepted as a full paper and Oral presentation at AAMAS'24 (The 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) being held at Auckland, New Zealand in May 2024.
Dec'23
Reviewer and Area Chair for the second time @ TinyPapers, ICLR 2024 [openreview] being held at Vienna, Austria
Sep'23 to Mar'24
Graduate Student Researcher working with Prof. Rajesh Gupta, Prof. Jingbo Shang, with the MESL Lab and Shang Data Lab
Jul'23
Attended the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2023 held in Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA
Jun'23 to Sep'23
Intern at AWS Cryptography as a Software Engineer
Jun'23
Awarded the UCSD Leadership and Excellence Scholarship of $1000 by the CSE Alumni Advisory Board
May'23
Volunteer at the International Conference on Learning Representations 2023 held in Kigali, Rwanda
Apr'23
Reviewer and Area Chair @ TinyPapers, ICLR 2023 [openreview]
Feb'23
Our work at ACES Lab "Zero Knowledge Right of Ownership for Neural Networks (ZKROWNN)" got accepted at Design Automation Conference (DAC 2023)
Jan'23
My first research paper on "Domain Generalization in Robust Invariant Representation" got accepted at PML4DC workshop at ICLR 2023
Oct'22-Mar'23
Joined the ACES Lab as a Graduate Student Researcher with Prof. Farnizaz Koushanfar
Sep'22
Joined my master's program in Computer Science at UC San Diego
Jun'22
Completed my Bachelor's program in Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi
Sep'19
Semester Exchange in the Computer Science department at INSA Lyon, France supervised by Prof. Frédéric Le Mouël

Contact

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