Nikhil Prakash
22nd floor, 177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
I’m a third year Ph.D. student at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. David Bau. I completed my Bachelor of Engineering from RV College of Engineering, Bangalore, India in fall 2020, with a focus on electrical and computer science.
I interned at Practical AI Alignment and Interpretability Research Group with Dr. Atticus Geiger this summer. Previously, I have participated in the SERI-MATS (first phrase) with Neel Nanda. Additionally, I have worked as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, a research intern at both the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, and as a student trainee at Samsung Research Bangalore.
Broadly, my interest lies in understanding the internal mechanisms of deep neural networks to enhance human-AI collaboration and prevent misalignment. Currently, I’m investigating cognitive abilities such as reasoning and theory of mind in large language models.
I have received invaluable support from many people throughout my career, and as a result, I’m always happy to assist others and share insights from my experiences. Please feel free to reach out.
news
Nov, 2024 | Received a complimentary NeurIPS 2024 registration for my service as a reviewer. |
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Aug, 2024 | Reviewing for ICLR 2025. |
Jul, 2024 | Our paper NNsight and NDIF: Democratizing Access to Foundation Model Internals is on ArXiv! |
Jul, 2024 | Interning at Practical AI Alignment and Interpretability Research Group with Dr. Atticus Geiger. |
Jun, 2024 | Reviewing for NeurIPS 2024 (main conference and workshop proposals). |
May, 2024 | Invited talk at Practical AI Alignment and Interpretability Research Group. |
May, 2024 | Invited talk at Computational Linguistics and Complex Social Networks in Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. |
May, 2024 | Attending ICLR 2024 at Vienna in-person ! |
Apr, 2024 | Invited talk at New England NLP 2024. |
Apr, 2024 | Co-organizing Mechanistic Interpretability Social at ICLR 2024 with Gabriele Sarti. |
Apr, 2024 | Awarded Google's Gemma Academic Program . |
Jan, 2024 | Our paper “Fine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking” got accepted at ICLR 2024! |
Oct, 2023 | Served as a reviewer for ATTRIB 2023 workshop @ NeurIPS. |
Jul, 2023 | Our short paper got accepted at Challenges of Deploying Generative AI workshop at ICML 2023! |
Jul, 2023 | Participated in Stanford Existential Risks Initiative ML Alignment Theory Scholars (SERI-MATS) 2023. |
Jun, 2023 | Participated in Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator (ARENA) 2023. |
Feb, 2023 | Our paper got acceptetd at IUI 23! |
Sep, 2022 | Started my Ph.D. at Northeastern with Prof. David Bau! |