Hi, I'm Aniket SakpalI build AI Agents that
reason, create & take action

I design the reasoning loops, memory architectures, and tool systems that make LLM agents reliable in production — at Expedia Group and through my own startups.

10+
Years in ML
Fortune 100 → startup
2
U.S. Patents
AI & Agentic Systems
$7M+
Revenue Uplift
Deployed at scale
Key Career Highlights
🏆2× U.S. Patent holder in AI hallucination detection & agentic video systems
🎓M.S. Data Science — Carnegie Mellon University
🏢ML Scientist at Expedia Group · Top performer, highest-band reviews
🚀Co-founder of Aitado ↗ — AI learning platform with multi-agent architecture
📈$7M+ revenue uplift from patented AI video system deployed across travel
Research & Ideas

Research & Publications

Papers, notes, and ideas from my work in agentic AI, search systems, and ML infrastructure — research in progress and published.

Recommender Systems
Bridging Choice Theory and Recommender Systems

Exploring the intersection of discrete choice models and modern recommender systems — applying latent-class demand modeling to uncover heterogeneous user preferences and substitution patterns.

🔄 Under Review · ACM RecSys 2026
Apr 2024Read Paper →
Computer Vision · GenAI🏆 U.S. Patent
Image to Video Generation at Scale

How we built and deployed the first AI image-to-video system in travel at scale — covering hallucination detection, camera-motion analysis, and autonomous regeneration loops across 10,000+ properties.

🔄 Under Review · ACM MM 2026
Dec 2025Read Paper →
Agentic AI
Why most RAG pipelines fail in production — and how knowledge graphs fix it

The gap between a RAG demo and a RAG system that answers business questions reliably is wider than most teams expect. Here's what I learned building one at Expedia.

Coming soonComing soon

Research notes coming soon — follow on LinkedIn for updates.

Experience

10 years of building things
that matter

From Fortune 100 clients to my own startup — always focused on production systems, real impact, and rigorous ML.

ML Scientist — Agentic & Multimodal AI
Jun 2024 – Present
Expedia Group · Austin, TX
🏆 2× U.S. Patent Holder
  • Built production-grade AI analytics copilot with adaptive reasoning loop — ReAct tool selection, multimodal execution, and episodic history compaction.
    • Declarative skill system — YAML-manifest-driven workflows (metric diagnosis, root cause analysis) with hot-loading to eliminate LLM drift.
    • Redis state management — key-sharding, TTL policies, partial-state hydration for sub-second agent transitions.
    • Tiered memory architecture — factual, episodic, and preference memories with vector compression, relevance decay, and attention-gated retrieval.
    • Context-engineering layer — dynamic pruning, hierarchical chunk selection, and semantic routing to optimize LLM context windows.
    • Knowledge graph RAG — MBR/WBR retrieval via KG expansion, embedding debiasing, query rewriting, and MMR reranking.
    • Production orchestration — async FastAPI + Redis Streams on Kubernetes; Datadog APM + Langfuse LLM tracing.
  • Built patented agentic image-to-video system — first in travel at scale, delivering $7M+ marketing uplift across 10,000+ hotel properties.
    • Hallucination detection — Vision-LLM reasoning, object-mask tracking, and temporal cross-attention validation.
    • Camera-motion detector — RAFT-style optical flow + custom video-embedding encoders to flag jitter and misaligned trajectories.
    • Autonomous regeneration loop — LLM-driven prompt optimization, shot-plan adjustments, and diffusion-model control tuning.
    • Image-selection module — fine-tuned YOLOv8 + CLIP dual-encoder on 1M+ images; LangGraph workflow for frame scoring and quality gating.
    • Video upscalers — 3D-UNet + latent-space SR transformers with GAN-based perceptual loss and motion-aware temporal consistency.
Co-founder & Lead AI Research Scientist
Aug 2022 – Present
Aitado · Austin, TX
  • Built AI learning co-pilot transforming documents into interactive notebooks — explainer videos, Socratic audio, adaptive quizzes, and text Q&A.
    • Multi-agent architecture — RAG, code generation, visualization, evaluation, and TTS agents coordinated for structured learning modules.
    • RL fine-tuning (GRPO/RLHF) and multi-agent orchestration powering scalable content-assembly pipelines.
ML Scientist — Search & Discovery
Oct 2022 – Jun 2024
Expedia Group · Austin, TX
  • Developed Search & Ranking Interpretation Framework — latent-class discrete choice models, causal inference, and ranking-explainability diagnostics.
    • Latent-class choice models via custom EM algorithm — uncovered heterogeneous segments, utility functions, and substitution patterns driving conversion.
    • Structural causal modeling — instrumental variables, propensity weighting, and counterfactual estimators to isolate true booking drivers from bias.
    • Ranking-evaluation layer — NDCG, ERR, Shapley/IG attributions to diagnose where algorithmic ordering diverged from customer utility.
  • Owned A/B testing infrastructure for Ranking ML models — statistically rigorous, interpretable evaluation at scale.
    • Interleaving pipelines (team draft / probabilistic) enabling 10× faster model iteration with variance-reduced comparisons.
    • Interpretable ranking metrics — qualified CTR, position-normalized engagement, and intent-aligned utility gains.
Associate Manager — Product Analytics
Dec 2020 – Jun 2021
Dream11 · Mumbai, India
  • Improved app rating 3.1 → 3.7 leading product analytics and UX experimentation — drove six major feature launches; built funnel-conversion, marketing-effectiveness, and KPI alerting dashboards.
Lead Data Scientist
Oct 2016 – Dec 2020
Mu Sigma · Bangalore, India
  • Led team of 5 delivering ML for Fortune 100 CPG and Fortune 1 retailer — predictive modeling, optimization, and large-scale analytics.
  • Reduced churn 11% → 8% — survival models (Cox PH, Weibull AFT) + clustering (k-means/GMM) to identify high-risk segments.
  • Improved lead conversion 26% → 29% — regularized logistic-regression scoring and uplift-based ranking of sales prospects.
  • Increased manufacturing uptime 86% → 92% — gradient boosting failure detection and real-time scoring pipelines.
  • Marketing mix modeling (MMM/ROI) and market-basket analysis via association-rule mining for strategic product placement.
Skills & expertise

Full-spectrum ML engineering

From research and experimentation to large-scale production deployment — covering the full ML lifecycle.

🤖
AI & ML
Agentic AIRAGDeep LearningReinforcement LearningPPO / GRPOMulti-Agent SystemsVideo LLMsLLMs
⚙️
Engineering
PyTorchFastAPIFlaskNext.jsLangGraphSQLPySparkRedisKubernetes
📊
Analytics
A/B TestingInterleavingCausal InferenceRegressionPredictive ModelingOptimizationFeature Engineering
🛠
Tools & Infra
PythonTableauRGitDistributed SystemsKnowledge GraphsDatadogLangfuse
Contact

Let's work together

I'm open to senior ML and Applied Scientist roles — particularly teams working on agentic AI, search, ranking, or multimodal systems. Reach out directly.

aniket17sakpal@gmail.com🔗linkedin.com/in/aniket-sakpal🚀aitado.com📍Austin, TX · Open to USA-wide