About

Parth K. Thaker · AI Research Engineer

I'm an AI Research Engineer at Intuitive Surgical, where I build secure, privacy-preserving LLM systems — assistants over internal documents and images, guardrails and security analysis for LLM applications, and tooling that brings LLMs into CI/CD workflows.

Before industry, I did a Ph.D. at Arizona State University with Prof. Gautam Dasarathy, working at the intersection of nonconvex optimization, graph theory, and multi-armed bandits — from sample-complexity and landscape analysis for quadratic feasibility to graph-informed pure exploration (GRUB, NeurIPS 2022). I care about results that are both provable and usable, and I try to carry that discipline into the systems I ship today.

Focus

Research
Nonconvex optimizationMulti-armed banditsGraph theoryReinforcement learningStatistical learning
Applied & engineering
LLMs & RAGSecure LLM deploymentPythonCloud platformsCI/CD tooling

Experience

  1. AI Research Engineer

    Jul 2024 — Present
    Intuitive Surgical
    Sunnyvale, CA

    Secure, privacy-safe LLM workflows — document and image assistants, guardrail and security analysis for LLM applications, and LLM + CI/CD tooling — alongside platform and infrastructure work: pipeline performance, cross-region Kubernetes, and operational monitoring.

  2. Ph.D. Researcher — Optimization & Bandits

    Aug 2017 — Jun 2024
    Arizona State University
    Tempe, AZ

    Nonconvex optimization, multi-armed bandits, and graph theory with Prof. Gautam Dasarathy — from sample-complexity and landscape analysis for quadratic feasibility to graph-informed pure exploration (GRUB, NeurIPS 2022).

  3. Research Intern

    May — Aug 2023
    Intuitive Surgical
    San Francisco Bay Area

    Improved a DINO-based self-supervised video-search system with fine-grained training objectives, raising retrieval quality under limited-label constraints.

  4. Research Intern — Algorithms

    May — Aug 2022
    Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL)
    Cambridge, MA

    Intersection of robotics and bandits for multi-agent resource monitoring under noisy sensing.

  5. Systems Engineer

    Sep 2016 — May 2017
    NetraDyne
    Bengaluru, India

    Driver-safety features from mobile sensor and IMU data to analyze driving behavior.

  6. Summer Research Intern

    May — Aug 2015
    Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
    Bangalore, India

    Linear bandit algorithms under perturbation (validity of OFUL); a learning algorithm for multi-user bandwidth sharing, analyzed and proven to converge.

  7. Summer Intern

    May — Jul 2014
    Securifi Embedded Systems
    Hyderabad, India

    SQL/NoSQL database performance analysis, cloud automation with Cloud-init + Puppet, and embedded-OS driver support on routers.

  8. Engineering Intern

    May — Jul 2013
    Cisco Systems
    Bangalore, India

    A lightweight DHCP client (v4/v6) in Python to test BNG session controllers at 1M+ subscriber-session scale, with round-trip latency measurements.

Education

  1. Ph.D., Electrical Engineering

    May 2024
    Arizona State University
    Tempe, AZ

    Graph theory and optimization, advised by Prof. Gautam Dasarathy.

  2. B.Tech + M.Tech (Dual Degree), Electrical Engineering

    2016
    IIT Madras
    Chennai, India

    Five-year integrated dual degree; specialization in communication systems and signal processing.