Anisha Palaparthi
MSCS-AI @ Stanford, CECS @ USC
Co-Founder @ Eka Technologies
Hi! I’m Anisha.
I love using code to explore, discover, and create new things! Check out some of my experience, interests, and projects I’ve built over the last few years.
– EXPERIENCE
My Current and Previous Work in Industry/Research
2024-Present
Co-Founder, Founding Engineer – Eka Technologies, LLC
- Startup providing a digital out-of-home advertising solution; development during 2024, POC launch in 2025
- Built out full stack of backend Node server/Mongo DB and frontend React Native mobile app for iOS/Android in Typescript; developed app features including Firebase authentication, Stripe payment integration, and AWS SNS notifications
- DevOps – Set up AWS cloud hosting infrastructure using EC2, load balancing, WAF, database replication/backup, Docker ECS containers, API gateway; Interface with MQTT IoT solution for rapid content deployment
- Bootstrapped development/launch, reached 7000+ daily viewers across Bay Area within a year, 35+ advertisers on the network
Fall 2025
Independent Study with Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Working with Dr. Erica Plambeck to extract insight from data to build an economic/policy model for two environmental issues – lead pollution in Bangladesh from battery smelting and sequestration of sulfuryl fluoride emissions from termite fumigations
- Utilizing VLMs, segmentation models, and image processing/CV techniques to identify lead smelting/fumigation activity
Summer 2023 – Spring 2024
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme’s Group)
- Contribute to AI/ML research on increasing RL policy robustness and bridging the sim-to-real performance gap between simulated and real-world robotics environments as part of USC’s Robotic Embedded Systems Lab
- Integrate Deep RL architectures with evolutionary/genetic algorithms to build generalizable methods for robotics learning objectives, enabling robots to achieve consistently high performance across dynamic environments
- Currently developing novel RL accelerators using Quality-Diversity techniques to optimize and illuminate the latent space of robot locomotion policies
Summer 2022 – Spring 2024
Undergraduate Research Assistant (Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis’s Group)
- Contribute to projects enabling policy generation for robotic autonomous tasks as part of Prof. Stefanos Nikolaidis’s group in USC’s Interactive and Collaborative Autonomous Robotics lab
- Utilize statistical and ML libraries to develop new quality diversity optimization algorithms for stochastic RL contexts, working with Deep Learning models such as StyleGAN and algorithms including MAP-Elites
- Current work focuses on identifying new archiving mechanisms to generalize Quality-Diversity to non-uniform domains and adapting existing illumination algorithms to distortions when searching high-dimensional spaces
- Publication: Lee, D. H., Palaparthi, A. V., Fontaine, M. C., Tjanaka, B, & Nikolaidis, S. Density Descent for Diversity Optimization https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2312.11331 – Submitted to Artificial Intelligence and Statistics Conference 2024
2017 – 2021
Summer Intern
- Programming projects: created a solution to automate workload distribution using Python/JSON; designing and building company website using HTML/CSS; helped set up network, configured switches/WiFi access points
- Microbiology: leveraged lab robotics to process/analyze product and environmental samples to ensure food safety
– Teaching
Course Staff Experience and Student Resources
CS 161 @ Stanford
Design and Analysis of Algorithms
Head Graduate TA
Fall 2025
- Led a team of 16 graduate instructors to manage content development, organize office hours to provide student assistance, arrange for student feedback collection, and grade assignments for a class of 400+ students
- Ensure students receive timely and consistent support from course staff by overseeing weekly sections, exam review sessions, office hours, and discussion forums as well as coordinating homework/exam testing before release
CS 103 @ Stanford
Mathematical Foundations of Computing
Graduate TA
Winter 2024 – Spring 2024
- Led biweekly office hours to provide students with support on homework assignments, provide supplemental review of lecture topics, and work through practice problems; held review sessions to reinforce course concepts and prepare students for exams
- Taught discrete math concepts, including proof techniques and logical reasoning, as well as introductory CS theory concepts such as Turing machines and automata theory
CSCI 270 @ USC
Introduction to Algorithms
Head Undergraduate TA
Fall 2023
- Lead a team of 30+ student instructors and graders to provide teaching support for students learning complex algorithm design, runtime analysis, and rigorous proof concepts through office hours, discussion sections, and exam preparation
- Head content design and development of course materials and supplemental guides for students
- Mentor novice course producers on how to approach teaching difficult topics in an individual and group setting
CSCI 170 @ USC
Discrete Methods in Computer Science
Head Undergraduate TA
Spring 2023
- Led a team of 40 undergraduate instructors and graders to organize office hours, lead homework collaboration sessions, and facilitate content development/testing in order to support to a 370+ student course
- Held exam review sessions with 150+ students and weekly discussions with 70+ attendees, where I designed comprehensive mini-lectures to review content and engage in problem-solving sessions to solidify understanding of course material
CSCI 170 @ USC
Discrete Methods in Computer Science
Undergraduate TA (Course Producer)
Spring/Fall 2022
- Explained discrete math principles behind fundamental computer science concepts, including logical equivalencies, proof techniques, combinatorics, and graph theory
- Held biweekly office hours to help students with homework problems and understanding course concepts
EE 109 @ USC
Embedded Systems
Undergraduate TA (Course Producer)
Fall 2022
- Teach theory and practical applications of embedded systems in weekly lab sessions/office hours of ~30 students
- Work with students to debug a variety of hardware and software problems, ranging from circuit design to building state machines using low-level programming techniques
– Projects
Cool Software I’ve Worked On
This is The Way: Vision-Based End-to-End Planning for Autonomous Driving
(Waymo Open Dataset 2025) Designed ML architecture utilizing vision transformers, LSTMs, and LLMs to produce high performing vehicle trajectories and demonstrated potential for improving performance with more data/compute. Check out our paper and poster here!
Code available upon request.
Application of ML Techniques to Predict Wildfire Risk Using Satellite Imagery
Designed ML pipeline involving clustering, dimensionality reduction, and classical machine learning techniques to classify the wildfire risk of areas given satellite imagery that performs under low-compute regimes. Check out our paper and poster here!
Code available upon request.
Accelerating Classification Models on GPUs with CUDA (From Scratch)
Implemented linear regression, support vector machines, and multi-layer perceptron architectures entirely from scratch in C++/CUDA for binary/MNIST multiclass classification.
Code available upon request.
NXTMode IOS Mobile App
Designed the architecture and implemented the React Native frontend, Node.js/Express backend, and Shopify integration of an MVP for NXTMode, a fashion marketplace startup.
FPGA Plants vs Zombies
Designed and built a playable version of the classic game Plants vs Zombies on an FPGA, including in-game plant motion animation.
Code available upon request.
Amadeus
Designed and built an audio analysis program using a Raspberry Pi to detect audio input, an ML model to generate sheet music, and subsequent analysis to convert and play the equivalent piano song.
Code available upon request.
Planner Pal
Designed and created a multifunctional web app extension where users can think, plan, and remember their day-to-day tasks and long-term goals.
Code available upon request.
Network Stack
Implemented an overlay network for communication between servers, building the Link, Network, Transport, and Applications layers from scratch.
Code available upon request.
Wordle
Implemented a dynamic cheat code generator to the probablistic, interactive word-guessing game Wordle in C++.
Code available upon request.
Paddle
Designed, developed, and pitched Paddle, a full-stack React Native web application that generates customized test prep plans tailored to help students meet their academic goals.
GitHub | Demo Video
Stock Trading
Created a parallelized model of a stock trading system in which multiple shares can be traded simultaneously across companies. Implemented using multithreading in Java.
Code available upon request.
– Volunteering
Organizations I’m Involved in Outside the Classroom
SCHS FIRST Robotics Team
Mentor, Founder, Former Captain
For five years, I have been involved in creating, leading, and coaching the FIRST robotics team at Silver Creek High School. As a mentor, I strive to help students interested in STEM learn and practice introductory principles of engineering through designing, building, and testing a competition-ready robot. The SCHS Raiderbots have also achieved and maintained gender parity among the team for several years; we focus on creating an environment where students of all backgrounds and experience levels are welcomed and encouraged to participate.
Alpha Lambda Delta, Phi Kappa Phi
Organization Member
At USC, I am involved in the Alpha Lambda Delta and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies, invitation-only societies with membership awarded to select engineering students based on outstanding academic achievement.
Girls Teaching Girls to Code
Organization Member
I am a member of GTGTC, an international organization centered on empowering young women to explore careers in computer science and engineering.