Nyx Iskandar

Hey! I'm Nyx.

I'm currently leading world generation research at Ramen VR / Aura as the first member of Ramen Labs (researcher #1). I'm also a fellow at V11.

I graduated from UC Berkeley EECS (Honors) in 2.5 years. I spent many semesters as an undergrad ML researcher at BAIR and CHAI, VP of Machine Learning at Berkeley, and avid novice boulderer.

I've learned that I love solving the hardest puzzles in ML alongside the smartest and most driven of them all. I take risks and seek new challenges; falling off walls teaches you more than reaching the top, though only if you aim to reach the top, and only if you pick harder and harder walls to climb.

RESEARCH

Curr: Consistent and physically accurate 3D environments (at Ramen VR)

Action abstractions for efficient planners (with Dr. Cam Allen)
Language model pre-training, evals, and wargame simulations (with Dr. Ritwik Gupta)
Inverse RL (as OpenAI Research Fellow)
Emergent symbols/language for communicating abstract concepts (pet project)

I've published workshop papers at NeurIPS and ICML, and contributed to a chapter in a technical book. I plan to continue publishing.

INDUSTRY

Curr: Research Engineer @ Ramen VR

Founding Engineer @ Foam
Research Intern @ GovTech Singapore
AI Engineer Intern @ Ramen VR

[For recruiters] I'm not actively looking for new roles at this time, but thank you for considering me!

[For VCs/investors] Founding my own startup is a goal of mine, and one of the main reasons as to why I choose the founding eng/researcher startup life. I'd love to keep in touch!