Aayam Raj Shakya
I am a Master's student in Artificial Intelligence (ML concentration) at Northeastern University, currently focused on Natural Language Processing.
I earned my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science (AI concentration) from Mississippi State University in December 2025. Over two years there, I built a strong research foundation, exploring and applying machine learning to solve complex problems across interdisciplinary fields.
Experience
NLP Research Assistant
Project: Advancing Speech Detection: A Hybrid Approach Using Large Language Models and Graph Neural Networks (NSF #2431176)
Designed a structure-aware optimal transport framework combining XLM-RoBERTa and TransE graph embeddings, achieving 86.4% zero-shot cross-lingual Spanish hate speech detection (+26.7% over text-only baseline).
Wireless ML Research Assistant
Projects: National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA #28-60-IF012) & Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless (AERPAW, NSF #1939334)
Applied AI/ML to security and resource management in O-RAN and 5G networks; validated deployments on physical over-the-air testbeds.
Machine Learning Intern
Engineered a feature-fusion CNN ensemble (DenseNet121, EfficientNetV2-B2, and MobileNetV2) for real-time drowsiness detection, achieving 87.7% cross-dataset accuracy; deployed the inference pipeline using OpenCV.
Undergraduate Researcher
Utilized U-Net architecture with self-supervised pretraining for land cover classification of aerial imagery.
Education
MS in Artificial Intelligence (ML concentration)
BS in Computer Science (AI concentration)
Publications
Structure-Aware Optimal Transport Framework for Cross-Lingual Speech Detection via Knowledge Graph Alignment
Tamanna Rashme, Aayam Raj Shakya, Taoran Ji, Megan Stubbs-Richardson, Zhiqian Chen
Conference on Language Modeling, 2026
O-RAN Security: From Standardization and Threat Modeling to Practical Security Testing
Joshua Moore, Aly S. Abdalla, Felix Klement, Aayam Raj Shakya, Prateek Shantharama, Vuk Marojevic
IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, 2026