What is Vinamra Sharma's background?

Vinamra Sharma is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow researching AI compilers and adaptive optimization for edge devices. He holds an MSc in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow and a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering from BTKIT, India, where he graduated in the top 0.5% of his class. He is also an AI Engineer at Unineed Limited and the founder of mcurio.com, an educational platform for equitable AI education.

Where does Vinamra Sharma work?

Vinamra Sharma works as an AI Engineer at Unineed Limited in Glasgow, UK, where he builds production marketplace, logistics, and customer-operations platforms. He is also pursuing his PhD at the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, supervised by Dr. José Cano Reyes.

mcurio.com is an educational platform founded by Vinamra Sharma that focuses on building equitable AI education for all. It explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and human philosophy, providing resources and community for those interested in understanding AI from both technical and philosophical perspectives.

About Me

Q: What is Vinamra Sharma's research focus?

Vinamra Sharma's research focuses on AI compilers, specifically transfer learning for adaptive compiler optimization in edge devices. His work aims to make AI systems more efficient and accessible across diverse hardware platforms, with recent publications on biases in edge language models and efficient tiny machine learning for human activity recognition.

PhD CandidateAI EngineerHackathonist

Hi, I'm Vinamra (aka Vin), a PhD candidate in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, researching AI compilers under the supervision of Dr José Cano Reyes. Beyond academia, I work as an AI Engineer at Unineed Limited, where I design and implement full-stack AI solutions. During weekends, you can often find me participating in hackathons around the world, developing cross-domain applications and exploring emerging technologies.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

— Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

My Story

My story is essentially one big love affair with technology. Ever since I was a kid, I was that curious troublemaker who had to know how everything worked. I literally unscrewed my mom's hair dryer and took apart the fridge just to see what was inside. That hands-on curiosity never left me. My early attempts at building a simple music streaming site as a kid in India, back when everyone had those old Nokia phones, gave me my first taste of creating something people could actually use.

When I got to college, I met my amazing mentor, Dr. Vishal Kumar, who took me under his wing and showed me just how much more I could do. That's when things really took off. My first big hackathon at Stanford's TreeHacks was a game changer; it opened my eyes to this huge, vibrant world of tech and incredible people. Even though I didn't win that first time, I was hooked. From there, I ended up at MIT's hackathon, winning as the first non-Ivy student, and just kept going. I've now been part of more than 110 hackathons with 65+ awards, but for me, it's never just about the accolades. It's about the community, the incredible people you meet, and the good that technology can bring into the world.

During my master's at the University of Glasgow, I collaborated with STMicroelectronics on Edge AI projects, especially around human activity recognition. Now, as a PhD candidate, I'm diving deep into developing AI compilers for next-gen workloads under the guidance of Dr. José Cano Reyes, who was also my supervisor during my master's. He's been a huge motivator and key part of the incredible work we're doing. I'm deeply passionate about deep tech, learning, research, and improving human life. Whether through compiler optimizations that make AI more efficient, or research that enables applications in healthcare, robotics, and beyond, I'm driven by the potential to make a real difference.

Besides my PhD, I'm working as an AI Engineer at Unineed Limited, shipping production sourcing, pricing, and support platforms used across marketplaces and warehouse workflows. I want AI to be seen as a tool to empower us, not something to worry about. And I just love learning new things every step of the way. Because I believe in giving back, I'm working on Mcurio (previously PERPLEXED), a platform offering free, decentralized educational resources for everyone. I'm also passionate about the environment, working on ClimateThread to connect community action for environmental causes.

In the end, hackathons and open-source resources really changed my life, and that's why I'm so committed to building tools and platforms that help others learn and grow. This is my story so far, and it's only the beginning of what I hope to do.

Key Achievements

Recognition and impact across research, innovation, and community

Publications

Research papers including 3 Best Paper Awards

110+

Hackathons

Global participation and collaboration

65+

Awards & Recognition

Hackathon awards from MIT, Harvard, Duke, UNICEF, and more

550+

Collaborators

From 38+ countries worldwide

Why AI Compilers

While working on high-level programming and developing AI/ML systems, I realized there's a fundamental limit to what you can optimize operationally and algorithmically at the high level of programming. No matter how efficient your algorithms or how well you structure your code, the bottleneck always comes down to one critical question: how can the machine understand these AI workloads and process them efficiently in hardware?

This realization led me to AI compilers; the bridge between high-level AI models and the hardware that executes them. By focusing on how compilers can translate and optimize AI workloads for different hardware architectures, I'm aiming to address the root cause of performance limitations, not just the symptoms.

Explore my research →

Education

🇬🇧

2025-Present

PhD in Computing Science

University of Glasgow, School of Computing Science, UK

Researching Transfer Learning for Adaptive Compiler Optimization in Edge Devices. Developing advanced AI Compilers to make AI systems more efficient and accessible across diverse hardware platforms. Supervised by Dr. José Cano Reyes. College Scholarship (3.5 years), School of Computing Science — Year 1 co-funded by Unineed Limited; Year 2 co-funded by AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.).

College Scholarship · Co-funded by Unineed (Y1) & AMD (Y2)

🇬🇧

2022-2023

MSc in Computing Science

University of Glasgow, School of Computing Science, UK

Specialized in Edge AI and On-Device Learning. Key courses: Programming Systems, Data Science and Systems, Human-Centred Security, Cyber Security Fundamentals, Text as Data (NLP), Web Science. Collaborated with Danilo Pietro Pau from STMicroelectronics and Dr. José Cano Reyes. Thesis grade: A3.

Thesis Grade: A3

🇮🇳

2018-2022

B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering

Bipin Tripathi Kumaon Institute Of Technology, Uttarakhand Technical University, India

Graduated with First Class Honours (84%, Top 1% of class). Merit-Based Scholar. Focused on foundational computer science, algorithms, and software engineering. Completed thesis under Dr. Vishal Kumar. Served as Class Representative for 4 years, Secretary IEEE Student Branch BTKIT, and Mess Secretary for Gomukh and Kailash Hostel.

84% | Top 1% of Class | Merit-Based Scholar

Professional Experience

Production AI systems shipped alongside research

AI Engineer

Unineed Limited · Glasgow, UK

2024–Present · Full-time until Oct 2025; part-time with PhD thereafter

Architected sourcing and pricing platforms across 14+ marketplaces and 100+ stores, including parallel pricing of 1,500+ SKUs.
Built marketplace and supplier automation (catalogue sync, bidding, ERP integrations), synchronising 600+ trade-in listings.
Designed a cross-platform Device Analyzer for warehouse intake (USB IMEI/serial capture, carrier/FMI checks, labels, inventory sync).
Built UniSupport for Amazon and Back Market operations — 800+ live conversations and 300+ Care cases for an 8-person support team.

Full Stack Developer

Amped Digital · Glasgow, UK

2023–2024

Led an AI-driven analytics platform for real-time KPI forecasting and marketing intelligence on GCP with custom ML pipelines.
Helped secure £50,000 UKRI funding through technical leadership, architecture, and a rapid MVP.
Optimised GCP workflows, improving reliability and cutting infrastructure cost by 36%.

Skills & Technologies

A comprehensive toolkit for building AI systems and applications

Programming Languages

Python3C++CJavaScriptSwiftOCamlDart

Libraries

NLTKTensorFlowPyTorchKerasPandasNumpyOpenNNSeleniumOpenCV

Frameworks

FastAPIReact.jsNext.jsLangChainFlaskTensorFlow LiteStreamlitGradioLlamaIndexOllamaLLVMMLIRIREE

LLM APIs/SDKs

OpenAI SDKLlama 2.0 & 3.0GeminiPerplexity SonarDeepSeekElevenLabsGrokMistral

DevOps & Cloud

GitDockerAWS LambdaHugging FaceGoogle Cloud PlatformVercelLinux Serversllama.cpp

Tools

NotionJiran8nCoursor/Bolt.new/v0OxyLab

Recent Projects

Turning ideas into real-world impact

Entrepreneurial Venture

Mcurio

Building Equitable AI Education for All

At mcurio I am building a free Decentralised AI-powered EdTech platform that allows you to design your own learning journey using the best open courses, hackathons, and global opportunities.