Lucas Bandarkar

UCLA — Ph.D. Student

Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing

Summary

I'm a second-year A.I. Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at UCLA. I'm advised by Nanyun (Violet) Peng in the PLUS Lab and study multilinguality in LLMs. 

Before this, I spent over two years as a research data scientist at Meta/Facebook AI working on large-scale multilingual NLP. There, I generally focused on model evaluation, resource creation & data annotation, and global language strategy for a suite of production models such as machine translation, language identification, and text embeddings. Notably, I led the development of the Belebele dataset (GitHub, HuggingFace), which has over a million downloads. During my undergrad at UC Berkeley, I worked in Marti Hearst's NLP lab under the mentorship of Philippe Laban.

Research Interests

Applications: multilingual embeddings, LLM language adaptation, LMs in low-resource languages, language identification, machine translation

Employment 

Research Scientist Intern, Meta AI

Jun 2024 - Sep 2024

LLM cross-lingual transfer

Research Data Scientist, Meta AI

Aug 2021 - Sep 2023

(Data Scientist from Aug 2021 - Nov 2022)

machine translation, language identification, multilingual text embeddings, multilingual optical character recognition, Arabic dialect identification, 

machine translation for human content review & automated moderation

Data Scientist Intern, Meta AI

May 2020 - Aug 2020

optical character recognition

Education

(in progress) Ph.D. in Computer Science, UCLA

Sep 2023 - current

B.A. in Statistics, Data Science, UC Berkeley

Aug 2017 - May 2021