Nick Kashani Motlagh

04 Experience

AFRL-sponsored ML research every year since 2020. DCS Corp since May 2025; Ohio State’s Computer Vision Lab, 2021–2026.

  1. May 2025 — Present

    AFRL-sponsored · Dayton, OH

    Computer Engineer II — DCS Corp

    1. Develop synthetic question-answer datasets from domain-specific documents and train QA models.
    2. Own the full pipeline from data generation through training and evaluation, using Slurm in high-performance computing environments.

  2. Aug 2021 — Aug 2026

    Ohio State University · Columbus, OH

    Graduate Research Associate — Computer Vision Lab

    1. Developed per-class abstention methods without preset rejection costs or accuracy/coverage targets (ISVC 2022; MVA 2025): 97.4% selective accuracy at 79.7% coverage on ImageNet validation.
    2. Designed ImageCoMMuTE (WMT 2024), a metric for translation models facing ambiguity; compared confidence in fixed translations under matched and mismatched images across three English-to-French model families.
    3. Implemented paired-outcome evaluation pipelines to measure recoverability in retrieval-augmented QA; fine-tuned return-or-revise policies and evaluated 25,870 held-out questions (Return or Revise?, preprint). Work spanned OSU and DCS; completed at DCS.

  3. Summers 2022–2024

    Dayton, OH

    Graduate Research Intern — AFRL

    1. Summer 2024: Built and evaluated self-supervised vision models using distributed, containerized training workflows.
    2. Summer 2023: Developed Reject Option Beam Search for machine translation at large beam widths.
    3. Summer 2022: Built the end-to-end training procedure for Naturally Constrained Reject Option Classification.

  4. 2023–2026

    Ohio State University · Columbus, OH

    Graduate Teaching Associate and Course Grader — Ohio State University

    1. Led Excel labs (Spring 2026); held office hours and graded for Machine Learning and Foundations of NLP (2023–2025).

  5. Summers 2020–2021

    Dayton, OH

    Undergraduate Research Intern — AFRL

    1. Summer 2021: Studied ensemble distillation for ambiguous instances.
    2. Summer 2020: Built a semi-automated system for temporal satellite imagery collection (ICCV 2021 workshop), released as the Construction-Site-Satellite-Imagery dataset.

  6. 2020 — 2021

    Ohio State University · Columbus, OH

    Undergraduate Research Associate — Computer Vision Lab

    1. Built semi-automatic labeling workflows for remote-sensing change detection, including Python tooling for collecting and preparing temporal satellite datasets.

  7. Summer 2019

    Montreal, QC

    Summer Research Intern — Sii Canada / Concordia University

    1. Built anomaly-detection dashboards on behavioral telemetry to prioritize follow-up experiments.

  8. 2018 — 2019

    Ohio State University · Columbus, OH

    Undergraduate Teaching Associate — Discrete Structures & Algorithms

    1. Led recitations and office hours for discrete structures and algorithms.

4.1Education The Ohio State University, start to finish.

  1. Aug 2021 — Aug 2026

    Columbus, OH

    Ph.D. Computer Science and Engineering

    The Ohio State University

    • Degree conferred August 2026. Dissertation: Answering Under Uncertainty: Abstention, Ambiguity, and Recoverability, defended July 8, 2026.
    • GPA 3.70. Advised by Prof. Jim Davis. Minors in Mathematics and High-Performance Computing.

  2. Aug 2021 — May 2025

    Columbus, OH

    M.S. Computer Science and Engineering

    The Ohio State University

    • GPA 3.70. Advised by Prof. Jim Davis.

  3. Aug 2017 — May 2021

    Columbus, OH

    B.S. with Honors Computer Science and Engineering

    The Ohio State University

    • GPA 3.86. Minor in Mathematics.
    • Maximus, Ten-Hai Lai, Ansel, and Name and Seal scholarships.

4.2Service Peer review and community.

Reviewer
  • ICCV 2023
  • CVPR 2023
  • ECCV 2022
  • CVPR 2022
Volunteer
  • HackOHI/O 2023
Resume (PDF)