Aakanksha Peeru
Experience
Undergraduate Researcher · USC Interaction Lab (Socially Assistive Robotics)
2024 — Present
- Prototype VLM pipelines for Human Activity Recognition and engagement signals
- Curate/annotate 100+ short clips; train/fine-tune and evaluate (accuracy, F1)
- Collaborate with PhD mentor + engineers; present weekly updates
Software Engineering Intern · InspireEdge
2024
- Build Python microservices with RESTful APIs and CI lint/test
- Instrument analytics and basic A/B tests across digital channels
- Document operations runbooks; ship UI fixes end-to-end
Founder & Lead Developer · BestowBooks
2023 — Present
- Architect donation + curriculum generation workflows (Mistral-based)
- Design for interpretability/fairness; organize monthly reading events
- Coordinate volunteers and partnerships with shelters
Projects
BestowBooks
Django + AI platform donating books and generating reading curricula for Indian shelter homes; adds ML recs and literacy tracking.
PythonDjangoFastAPIMLflowHydra
BookSense (one-week)
Adaptive reading recommender: scikit-learn & PyTorch models served via FastAPI, Streamlit front-end, feedback logging.
PyTorchscikit-learnFastAPIStreamlit
Interaction Lab — VLM HAR
Vision-Language pipelines (CLIP/VideoMAE/SmolVLM) for child-robot engagement analysis; dataset curation & evaluation.
VLMPyTorchOpenCVVideo
Skills
Languages
PythonTypeScriptJavaSQL
Machine Learning
PyTorchscikit-learnTransformersMLflow
Web / Backend
Next.jsReactFastAPIDjango
Tools
Git/GitHubCondaDockerVercel
Education
University of Southern California (USC)
B.S. Computer Science, AI minor · Los Angeles, CA