Dr. Raj Dandekar holds a PhD from MIT and has taught inference engineering to 500+ engineers from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, and Anthropic. He has 700+ citations from 20+ research publications and is currently the CTO and Co-founder of Vizuara AI Labs, one of the leading AI companies in the world.

Yash Dixit is an AI/ML Product Manager at Apple, where he works on bringing machine learning capabilities to Apple's product ecosystem. He holds degrees from MIT and IIT, and spent four years at QuantumBlack (McKinsey's AI division), where he built production-grade ML systems, LLMs, and inference pipelines for Fortune 500 clients. He brings deep hands-on experience in building production AI/ML systems and reference architectures at scale. Yash leads the 1:1 research mentorship track in this course: guiding students through literature review, experiment design, and writing, with the goal of producing a publication-ready research paper.