Nishant Shukla

Programmer, Researcher, Author

I am Sr. Director of AI at QA Wolf. Before that, I was VP Engineering at Duffl, Wellth and dm.ai.


I received my PhD in Computer Science from UCLA under Professor Song-Chun Zhu. During that time, I published a textbook titled Machine Learning with TensorFlow. Previously, at the University of Virginia, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science, and a B.A. in Mathematics. There, I was a founding member of HackUVA (now HooHacks), our University's first hackathon.


SELECT PAPERS

Utility Learning, Non-Markovian Planning, and Task-Oriented Programming Language
Shukla, N. (2019, May). UCLA read dissertation

Learning human utility from video demonstrations for deductive planning in robotics.
Shukla, N., He, Y., Chen, F., & Zhu, S. C. (2017, October). In Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) (pp. 448-457). download PDF

A unified framework for human-robot knowledge transfer.
Shukla, N., Xiong, C., & Zhu, S. C. (2015, September). In 2015 AAAI Fall Symposium Series. download PDF

Robot learning with a spatial, temporal, and causal and-or graph.
Xiong, C., Shukla, N., Xiong, W., & Zhu, S. C. (2016, May). In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp. 2144-2151). IEEE. download PDF

Task learning through visual demonstration and situated dialogue.
Liu, C., Chai, J. Y., Shukla, N., & Zhu, S. C. (2016, March). In Workshops at the Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. download PDF

Jointly learning grounded task structures from language instruction and visual demonstration.
Liu, C., Yang, S., Saba-Sadiya, S., Shukla, N., He, Y., Zhu, S. C., & Chai, J. (2016, November). In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 1482-1492). download PDF

Objective method for presumptive field-testing of illicit drug possession using centrifugal microdevices and smartphone analysis.
Krauss, S. T., Remcho, T. P., Lipes, S. M., Aranda IV, R., Maynard III, H. P., Shukla, N., ... & Landers, J. P. (2016). Analytical chemistry, 88(17), 8689-8697. read paper

PATENTS

System and method for speech understanding via integrated audio and visual based speech recognition (2019, September) read patent

System and method for personalized and adaptive application management (2019, July) read patent

Systems, devices and methods for analyzing and identifying substances (2017, April) read application

System and method for adaptive detection of spoken language via multiple speech models (2019, December) read application

System and method for inferring scenes based on visual context-free grammar model (2019, August) read application

System and method for identifying a point of interest based on intersecting visual trajectories (2019, August) read application

System and method for disambiguating a source of sound based on detected lip movement (2019, August) read application

System and method for reconstructing unoccupied 3d space (2019, August) read application

System and method for Artificial Intelligence driven automated companion (2019, July) read application

System and method for detecting physical proximity between devices (2019, July) read application

System and method for selective animatronic peripheral response for human machine dialogue (2019, July) read application

PRESS

Wrote article on authoring conversational interfaces (2020, May)
"A chatbot expedition" read article

Wrote article about programming languages (2019, December)
"An Introduction to Task-Oriented Programming" read article

Interviewed by the freeCodeCamp podcast (2018, March)
"Ep. 20 - Basics of Machine Learning - interview with Nishant Shukla" listen

Invited to present at the Information Initiative at Duke (2017, September)
"Data Dialogue: Machine Learning in 10 Epochs" see event details

Mentioned in Norwegian press for leading a Machine Learning workshop (2017, June)
"På disse fagområdene har unge best forutsetning for å lykkes" read article

Featured in Daily Bruin for robotics research (2016, May)
"Give a Robot a Fish" read article

Wrote article in AI Weekly (2015, May)
"An Underappreciated Perspective for AI" read article

Interviewed by Crypto Coins News (2014, April)
"hack.uva: University of Virginia To Host The First Hackathon Sponsored By Dogecoin" read article

Mentioned in The Atlantic (2014, February)
"Imagine Getting 30 Job Offers a Month (It Isn't as Awesome as You Might Think)" read article

Featured in UVA Today (2013, December)
"From programming languages to auto mechancis, engineering students give teaching a try" read article