🔱 CS @ UC San Diego 🔱
Hey, I'm Amit Namburi
Researcher in Machine Learning & NLP
I'm Amit Namburi, a graduate student in Computer Science at UC San Diego, focusing on multimodal learning, large language models, and recommender systems. I work on applying deep learning to real-world problems in music intelligence, generative modeling, and scalable AI infrastructure.
📌 Currently building Conversational Recommender Systems in the music domain using LLMs, incorporating community-level platforms like Reddit to enhance model grounding and relevance.
🎓 I'm a Graduate TA for CSE 153: Machine Learning for Music, and an incoming SWE Intern at 🍎 Apple (CoreOS) in Summer 2025.
Experience
Apple Inc.
Software Engineer Intern (Incoming) - San Diego, CA | Summer 2025
CoreOS Team | Systems Engineering | Software Development
- Incoming SWE Intern at Apple on the CoreOS team for Summer 2025.
McAuley Lab
Multimodal AI Research Assistant - San Diego, CA | Jan 2024 – Present
Generative Models | Large Language Models | Representation Learning
- Created and fine-tuned a generative model for fine-grained, time-aware music understanding using LLMs and augmentation techniques.
- Optimized LoRa finetuning of the SALMONN-7B model on 2 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs.
- Evaluated models using BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE, and BERTScore metrics.
- Fine-tuning VTime LLM for video visual prompting tasks.
- Collaborating on a proactive recommendation system for Netflix.
UC San Diego, CSE Department
Graduate Teaching Assistant - San Diego, CA | Mar 2025 – Present
CSE 153 | Machine Learning for Music | Instruction
- Teaching Assistant for CSE 153: Machine Learning for Music (Spring 2025)
- Holding office hours and assisting with coding challenges and course material.
- Supporting Prof. Julian McAuley with assignment design and grading.
UC San Diego, CSE Department
Instructional Assistant | Tutor - San Diego, CA | Apr 2023 – Mar 2025
Advanced Data Structures | Tutoring
- Tutored upper division Advanced Data Structures (CSE 100) to 500+ students.
- Held 8 office hours weekly and managed ~350 student support tickets per quarter.
Fair Data Informatics (FDI) Lab
Student Software Engineer - San Diego, CA | Mar 2023 – Present
Angular.js | Pandas | NumPy | Scikit-learn
- Redesigned Foundry Dashboard architecture for scalable biomedical ETL systems.
- Developed resource ingestion protocols for EC2-hosted clients.
- Worked on reproducibility analysis with Scikit-learn and Python tools.
Orektic Solutions LLP
Software Engineer Intern - Remote | Jun 2023 – Sep 2023
TypeScript | Cucumber.js | Selenium | Cypress
- Built UI Testing framework using TypeScript, Cucumber.js, and Selenium.
- Improved automation coverage and cross-browser test reporting with Cypress and Jira integration.
IPMD, Inc.
Front-End Developer Intern - Berkeley, CA | Jul 2022 – Sep 2022
React.js | TypeScript | Node.js
- Developed frontend web apps for Project M using React and Node.js.
- Built responsive, cross-platform UI integrated with live API data.
📚 Publications
FUTGA-MIR – Fine-grained Music Understanding via Temporally-enhanced Generative Augmentation
CoLLAP – Contrastive Learning for Long-Form Audio-Text Alignment
FUTGA – Fine-grained Music Understanding via Temporally-enhanced Generative Augmentation
Projects
A website that tells your fortune based on your inner "SixthSense".
Skills: HTML | CSS | JavaScript | CI/CD Pipeline | Agile Principles | UI/UX | Leadership
A project that detects percentages of "Happy" and "Sad" emotions and creates a playlist of 10 songs on the Spotify app.
Skills: Computer Vision | Web Scraping | Auth0 | Training ML Models
A music recommendation and summarization system with features like music playlist generation, adding to queue based on the current song, and summarization.
Skills: Spotify API | Python | Flask | React