Rishikesh Ksheersagar

Rishikesh Ksheersagar

Masters in Data Science at University of Michigan
NLP Researcher at LIT Lab @ UMich
Previously - Data Science Manager at Mu Sigma Inc.

About

Hello! I’m Rishikesh Ajay Ksheersagar, a Data Scientist deeply interested in LLMs and passionate about unraveling data complexities. I recently completed my Master’s in Data Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (May 2025).

My journey in Data Science space began with a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from Savitribai Phule Pune University (May 2019).

Post my Bachelor’s, I spent four years at Mu Sigma Inc. (July 2019 - June 2023), as a Data Scientist and later as a Data Science Manager, honing technical skills in AI/ML, Statistical Analyses, and Business Intelligence, as well as leadership and mentorship qualities. Check out my Work Experience.

At UofM, my research at the Language and Information Technologies Lab, under Dr. Rada Mihalcea and Dr. Veronica Perez-Rosas, focused on NLP and GenAI, especially modeling fake news perception. Additionally, I contributed to the “Climate Change, Demographic Shifts, and Socio-Political Stability” project, analyzing data to identify causal relationships between climate change and social unrest. For more, visit my Research.

I also served as a Graduate Student Instructor for the QMSS 301 course at University of Michigan in the Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 semesters. For more details, visit my Teaching.

To explore what I’ve built hands-on, from Register-Augmented LLMs to GPTQ-Quantized+LoRA fine-tuning pipelines, head over to my Projects.

Most recently, I have been working on 2 research projects:

  • Building a large-scale evaluation framework using AutoGen to investigate scheming behavior in LLMs. This involves generating high-stakes, agentic software engineering scenarios and dynamically invoking thousands of real-world tools and APIs to test LLM safety and tool-use alignment under pressure.
  • Exploring new methods of QAT for LLMs which can be effectively coupled with Hardware for efficient Quantization Aware Training.

I believe in the power of continuous learning and am currently open to full-time opportunities in Machine Learning, AI / LLMs, and Data Science. Let’s connect and explore what we can build together!