I’m the type of person who’s always up for a challenge—whether it’s tackling a tough project, giving my all on the basketball court, or tracking down the best pizza in town. I love diving into new opportunities and collaborating with people who push me to think differently. Outside of work, you’ll probably find me watching basketball, working out, busting out some questionable dance moves, or just enjoying time with my close friends.
As an AI Software Engineer at Aon, I build AI-powered tools that help people work more effectively. My work involves understanding how different teams operate, exploring where AI can make a meaningful difference, and developing solutions that fit naturally into the way they already work.
Prior to Aon, I earned a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Bachelor's in Computer Science from BITS Goa, which gave me a strong foundation to build and problem-solve.
A lot of my work so far has come from stepping into unfamiliar problems and figuring things out as I go. I tend to enjoy situations where the problem is not fully defined at the start, and you have to explore, break things down, and gradually build clarity through the work itself.
Published Research at EMNLP 2025:
Preventing Catastrophic Forgetting: Behavior-Aware Sampling for Safer Language Model Fine-Tuning
Open-source contribution: (*contribution was not merged due to a shift in project direction)
Published a dataset on Kaggle:
USPTO Climate-Positive Patent Abstracts.
Published blogs on Medium:
Decrypting the secrets of JPEG Compression
Behind the biggest social network Engine: Facebook TAO
Published Research at IEEE:
Building an Extensible Model for Healthcare Resource Allocation
(Dec 2025) Published paper with Microsoft on Safety tuning of LLMs
(Jan 2025) Slated Fraud Detection paper for publication [Rejected]
(Jan 2025) Completed collaboration: Data Modeling and analytics pipelines for Nereus
(Dec 2024) Submitted Project: Fine-Grained Image Classification
(Aug 2024) Completed my machine learning internship with CAE
(July 2024) Completed project with Zura Labs: Predictive Maintenance for Fleet Management
(Jun 2024) Completed project with Nockout: Personalized player advice system for badminton
(May 2024) Completed courses: Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning
(May 2024) Submitted project: Topic Extraction for Climate-positive patents with TopicGPT
(Apr 2024) Completed mini-project: High-Resolution Image Compression and Cancer Detection in Parasitic Microorganisms
(Dec 2023) Completed courses: Software Engineering, Algorithms for data science, Reinforcement Learning
(Dec 2023) Submitted project: CICS Course informer web app
Email: mthalanki@umass.edu
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihir-thalanki/
Github: https://github.com/MihirT906