Adway Kanhere

Hey there! Welcome to my slice of the web - part dev notebook, part research shenanigans and the rest about coaxing GPUs to behave.

I’m an incoming CS PhD student at JHU, advised by Prof. Vishal M. Patel. I currently work as a Research Engineer for Dr. Amal Isaiah at the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing where I develop ML/AI for translational biomedical applications in surgery, radiology, and healthtech infra.

On the academic side, I also occasionally lecture as an Adjunct Instructor at JHU’s Carey Business School. Before that, I received a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, also from Hopkins, where I learned the fine art of taking really expensive 3D selfies of internal organs via MRI and CT. Turns out there’s decent money in professional photography of the human body, as long as you call it “medical imaging.”

Research:

My research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence, neuroscience and medical imaging. Feel free to connect with me if you want to share a thought!

CS Research:

• Multimodal learning, Vision-Language, and reasoning: Data and compute optimization strategies for LLMs/LMMs using non-convex optimization techniques.
• Mechanistic interpretability: I’m interested in understanding how LLMs reason and develop internal biases, and developing methods to overcome these biases, with a focus on healthcare.
• AI Mis/Alignment: Surgically understanding and removing features in LLMs that lead to AI misalignment
• Federated learning: Harmonizing heterogeneous non-i.i.d data in a model agnostic and modality agnostic setting while maintaining SOTA privacy measures.

Clinical Research:

• Biomarker discovery: Identifying novel biomarkers to predict cognitive outcomes based on gross anatomy
• Medical image analysis: Building segmentation models for translational applications in radiology and surgery using foundational models

Entrepreneurial Detour:

I was also the co-founder of Farmplus, a dairy-tech startup where we built a cool fitbit for cows, tracked it with good ol’ telecom frequecies, snagged 1st place at the 2022 Hopkins New Venture Challenge (HOPSTART) and were subsequently incubated at the JHU Spark Incubator. Check out the BTS story of how that came to be in my blog (because my other co-founder and best friend wants me to take public accountability)

IRL:

When the GPUs cool down and my attention span times out, I swap keyboards for hand wraps and go a few rounds with a punching bag, or log suspicious “cardiovascular spikes” at Centennial Park/JHU Homewood campus (translation: marathon training, but with a strategic 🧋 stop at the end). Apart from cardio, I like to indulge in acoustic sessions where I attempt to merge film-score strings with indian classical strings like the santoor and sitar, and emerge as something my neighbors describe “formally interesting.” I also enjoy cooking, and if friends arrive for the food they stay for the impromptu debate on whether prompt engineering and vibe coding should be on my résumé. Once a month I also attempt a full digital detox in the mountains. No Wi-Fi, no federated anything - just me, my playlist, and whatever existential bug reports nature files. It’s amazing how well our brain’s neural networks converge when the only feedback loop is nature telling you to chill.