Dheeraj Dhillon

TL;DR I am Dheeraj, currently pursuing an MS in Computer Science at UW-Madison, where I will be graduating in May 2027. I have 2 years of industry experience as a data scientist at Gartner and HiLabs, a healthcare data interoperability startup. I completed my undergrad in ECE at IIT Roorkee. The resume detailing my experiences is available here.

I am looking for opportunities that will challenge me to solve meaningful problems by leveraging methodologies in my domain of study, spanning Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Reinforcement Learning. Some of the applications or use cases that fascinate me the most are locomotion, robotics, language models, and recommendation systems. I am always excited to be part of teams that will require me to punch above my weight. Consequently, naturally, I am even more excited to be part of and contribute to a startup.

Project work

My projects page expands on several of the projects I have worked on implementing RL and NLP methods.

Research work

During my undergraduate studies, I worked on a research project focused on real-time elephant detection using thermal imaging to mitigate human-elephant conflict. We collected and annotated a dataset of 50,694 thermal frames which included instances of humans, elephants, and other animals. I devised an ensemble approach using four preprocessed variants with a lightweight pretrained model, increasing elephant recall on the dataset from 0.35 to 0.62, striking a balance between improved recall and fast inference latency crucial for real-time deployment.

Paper: InfraNet: An Ensemble Approach for Real-time Wildlife Detection using Infrared Thermal Imaging, IEEE AVSS August 2025. See more here,read the paper here, and find the IEEE eXplore here. The source code is available at the infrared repo on the pipeline branch. I am grateful to have been supervised by Prof. Vinod Pankajakshan on this work, and more, at the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, IIT Roorkee.

Industry experience

At Gartner, I was an Associate Data Scientist in the Client Retention Analytics team from March 2024 to August 2025, and before that, I worked at HiLabs, in Bangalore, as a Data Scientist in the Roster Automation team from July 2023 to March 2024.

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison, August 2025 - Present
Masters of Science, Computer Science

Graduate coursework:
Non-linear Optimization, Natural Language Processing (Planned for Fall 2026)
Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning (Spring 2026)
Game Theory, Operating Systems (Fall 2025)

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, July 2019 - May 2023
Bachelor of Technology, Electronics and Communication Engineering

Emails and Socials

dhillondheeraj84@gmail.com
ddhillon@wisc.edu
dheeraj_d@ec.iitr.ac.in

g scholar, ORCID , IEEE Xplore

I am also social with creative licenses over here in my blogs and the tweeter!