About Me!
My name is Colin Pannikkat, and I am a fourth-year computer science student at
Oregon State University! On top of my CS degree, I am pursuing minors in Math
and Economics. I also participate in the Accelerated Masters Platform at OSU
with the intention of pursuing an M.S. in AI.
In my freetime, I cook, play guitar, boulder, bike, binge tv shows,
and read. I would consider myself a jack of all trades, master of none, and the non-exhaustive
list of my other on-and-off hobbies include:
- Cubing
- Lock-picking
- Rock-skipping
- People-watching
- Weightlifting
- Drawing
In school, I attend the Economics Club (following a year of presidency from 2023-2024), and was the President of Skate Club (2023-2025).
My friends and I also frequently compete in the quarterly hackathons ran by OSU's Hackathon Club, of which we have won 1st Place (Spring '25), 1st Place (Fall '24), 2nd Place (Spring '24),
3rd Place (Fall '23), 2nd Place (Spring '23).
Experience
Forest Ecophysiology Lab (2024 - Present)
After leaving SAIL, I was eager to begin more research and explore different research areas at the crossroads of computer science
and other disciplines in the environmental field. I had been interested in computational ecology for a while, and found the Forest
Ecophysiology Lab during my search for research opportunities. In this lab, underneath Professor German Vargas Gutiérrez, I have been
tasked with utilizing and improving an existing process-based mechanistic model of stomatal optimization
(Sperry et al. 2017), and will be
assisting with a scientific evaluation of the model's predictive performance with respect to real world data collected on Populus fremontii
(Fremont Cottonwood) in high-stress drought conditions.
This is my first interaction with Ecological process-based modeling, and I am quite excited to continue my work in the lab and gain more familiarity
within the field.
Supplemental Instruction (2023 - 2025)
I began working as a Supplemental Instruction Leader in the Fall of 2023. Within this position, I followed the practices of
SI to plan and led multiple study tables per week as supplemental support for the ECON201 course, Intro to Microeconomics.
In tables, I implemented best practices of collaborative peer-led learning, and synthesized relevant course content based on course
lectures. I also facilitated review sessions for >100 students, and sometimes office hours to provide extra support outside of tables.
Economics is not a widely liked subject, and so it brought me great utility and worth to transform student's preconceptions of
the subject. Many of the students who attended my tables are there because they are struggling in the course, or feel they don't
understand the course content, and as a result hold a deep distaste for economics and economic thinking. My goal was to make economics
fun, engaging, and personal for my students, and instill in them the philosophy that economics is everywhere and can model just about
anything.
I left this role in June of 2025 in order to have more time to pursue personal projects and research, but I will forever hold it dear in my heart and
hope I can continue to tutor students in Microeconomics occasionally.
Zabble Inc. (2024)
Over the 2024 summer I worked as a QC/QA Intern for Zabble, a waste monitoring SaaS platform for hospitals,
large organizations, universities, and cities. Within Zabble, I developed tests for the Zabble Zero platform,
and reported my testing methods and results in written technical reports detailing any improvements or issues found. I also
conducted pre-release testing, qualitative testing of any new computer vision model upgrades, and also provided ideas
for future improvements and testing to the platform. My final project in the role was a data partitioning project using
AWS Glue and the Boto3 AWS Python SDK to reduce the AWS Athena querying costs associated with updating their Quicksight dashboards.
I never expected to do QA/QC, but it matched my abilities quite well. The whole idea of my role was to break their system,
and figure out any issues or improvements, and in that I consider myself quite adept. It is a pleasure to work in such a small company,
and one dedicated to solving such a big sustainability issue that is overlooked by many, waste!
SAIL (2022 - 2024)
For two-years, I was given the opportunity to work underneath Sanghyun Hong
in the Secure AI Systems Lab (SAIL) as an undergraduate researcher. While working in this lab I was introduced to security and privacy issues in the AI
domain, including adversarial robustness, evaluation and generation of adversarial perturbations in NLP, adversarial
jailbreaking of LLMs, and evaluation of bias detection methods for LLMs.
Although I left the lab without any publications,
I gained significant exposure to novel machine learning techniques, and a high-level understanding of how to develop
efficient, trustworthy, and socially responsible AI-enabled systems.
Oregon State University's College of Business (2024)
Over the 2024 Spring term, I worked as a software backend engineer in a team of 6 to plan and develop a
proof-of-concept chatbot for the College of Business to provide freshman COB students a tool to ask questions,
and gain class, assignment, and advising support instantly without having to go through a human advisor. In the project,
we implemented a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) LLM pipeline using LlamaIndex and ChromaDB for
efficient information retrieval and to guide the chatbot's answers to student questions.
Ultimately, we finished the proof-of-concept and demonstrated accurate information retrieval, but the project ended due to
time-conflicts and a lack of financial commitment from the professor we were working under, which prevented the continuation of our work.
