Nishal Silva

I am a Machine Learning Research Engineer with a PhD and over 10 years of experience across industry and academia, focused on real-time and edge AI systems. I specialize in building and optimizing ML pipelines for audio, sensor, and time-series data, taking ideas from research prototypes to production-grade deployments under tight latency, power, and compute constraints.

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Trento (Jan 2025 – Dec 2025): Led end-to-end ML pipeline development for the EU-funded MUSMET project; achieved <30 ms, >90% F1 real-time inference on edge devices.

Visiting Researcher, McGill University (May 2024 – Aug 2024): Prototyped synthetic audio data generation and evaluated real-time gesture detection on multimodal sensor data.

Visiting Researcher, University of Visual and Performing Arts (Jan 2024 – Mar 2024): Conducted human-centered evaluations of AI-driven interactive systems.

Technical Consultant, Forestpin (Aug 2020 – Feb 2021): Designed and deployed ML pipelines for financial forensics, compliance monitoring, and risk detection.

Research Engineer, MAS Holdings (Jan 2015 – Jul 2020): Built and deployed ML and computer vision systems for industrial manufacturing; improved operational efficiency by up to 300%.

PhD, Information Engineering and Computer Science: University of Trento, Italy (Jan 2025)

MSc, Telecommunication and Electronic Engineering: Sheffield Hallam University, UK (Aug 2018)

BEng (Hons), Electronic Engineering: Sheffield Hallam University, UK (Mar 2014)