Joyston Menezes

Los Angeles, CA | (213) 519-8504 | menezesjoyston@gmail.com | linkedin.com/in/joymenezes | joystonmenez.info | Google Scholar

Professional Summary & Focus

Research-oriented Machine Learning & full-stack engineer specializing in Computational Social Science, NLP, and building adaptive, human-centered AI systems. Skilled in architecting robust Python/Node microservices, fine-tuning and prompting Large Language Models, and applying multimodal analysis to investigate collective behavior and online-safety ecosystems. Experienced in transforming messy, high-volume unstructured data into production-grade, scalable products. Core focus areas: auditing algorithmic influence, detecting digital harm at scale, and engineering resilience against misinformation.

Education

University of Southern California (USC) Dec 2024
Master of Science in Computer Science Los Angeles, CA

Relevant Coursework: Applied Natural Language Processing, Multimedia, Data Structures & Algorithms, Database Systems, Web Technologies (Cloud).

Honors: Recipient of the Order of the Laurel and the Palm (2025) — USC's highest honor awarded to graduating students for exceptional leadership and scholarship.

NMAM Institute of Technology, Nitte Aug 2021
Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science Karnataka, India

Relevant Coursework: Machine Learning, Object-Oriented Programming, Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Compiler Design.

Honors: Outstanding Student of the College & Best Outgoing Student, CS Department; Student President (2017–2021).

Technical Skills

Languages & Databases: Python, Java, C/C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, HTML5, CSS3, SQL, NoSQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Firebase, CockroachDB.

Machine Learning & AI: Large Language Models (LLaMA, Gemini, GPT-4o), BERT, BERTopic, UMAP, VADER, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, Scikit-learn, Hugging Face, NLTK, OpenCV.

Data Engineering & Cloud: Apache Spark, Pandas, Plotly/Dash, Seaborn, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Git, Jenkins, CI/CD, UNIX.

Web & Frameworks: React.js, Flask, Django, Express.js, Redux, REST APIs, Microservices, Bootstrap, Pydantic, ArcGIS/GeoJSON, Android Studio.

Professional & Research Experience

Research Assistant 2026 – Present
UCLA Communication Dept. (Advisors: Prof. Homa Hosseinmardi & Prof. Amir Ghasemian) Los Angeles, CA
Research Assistant (HUMANS Lab) Aug 2024 – Present
USC Information Sciences Institute (Supervisors: Prof. Luca Luceri & Prof. Emilio Ferrara) Los Angeles, CA
Research Assistant (Lerman Lab) Aug 2024 – May 2025
USC Information Sciences Institute (Supervisor: Prof. Kristina Lerman) Los Angeles, CA
Software Developer Jan 2023 – Present
Center for Homelessness, Housing, and Health Equity Research (USC) Los Angeles, CA
Software Engineer (Web, ML & Blockchain) June 2020 – Nov 2022
Alphonso & Dlithe Consultancy Bengaluru, India

Academic Projects

Augmenting LLMs using Dense Retrievers (USC Applied NLP): Integrated the DRAGON dense retriever with LLaMA-7b-Chat and N-gram context segmentation to reduce QA hallucinations, achieving up to 59% accuracy improvement on TriviaQA.

Deep Learning Photo Caption Generator: Built a VGG-16 + LSTM encoder–decoder on the Flickr8k dataset and deployed a Node.js caption web server, generating contextually accurate captions with high BLEU scores.

Bone Abnormality Detection: Executed an ML project using DenseNet/ResNet on the MURA dataset (40,000+ radiographs) with SMOOTHGRAD visualization and 5-fold cross-validation; honored as the top departmental project and university-funded.

Brain Tumor Detection: Developed a CNN model for MRI images, benchmarking AlexNet/ResNet/VGG-16 against a custom architecture; achieved 89% test and 87.21% validation accuracy.

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis: Built a feature-level sentiment engine (NLTK, Scikit-learn) to extract product aspects from mobile reviews and classify sentiment per feature.

Publications and Patents

Under Review (2026): "Beyond Binary Detection: A Multi-Dimensional Taxonomy of Cancer Misinformation on Reddit" — an expert-annotated, multi-dimensional framework using LLMs to characterize online health misinformation across ~134K Reddit posts.

Publications: Co-author, WWW (ACM) 2025: "Tracking the 2024 US Presidential Election Chatter on TikTok"; co-author, CRC Press book chapter (2021): "Identification & Classification of Paddy Crop Diseases using Big Data ML"; co-author, IEEE (2021): "Deep Learning Photograph Caption Generator".

Patents (Indian Patent Office, Sept 2024): "E-Commerce Product Comparison System" & "Automated Extraction and Summarization System".

Leadership & Service

Teaching Assistant & Course Producer, Database Systems (USC): Assisted Prof. Saty Ragavachari for two semesters (Aug 2023 – May 2024) — managed course logistics, conducted office hours, and crafted materials supporting hundreds of students.

Team Lead, Greater LA Homeless Count (2022–Present): Coordinated large-scale data collection and volunteer training across Los Angeles to support regional housing and health-equity research.

Lead Organizer, HackRidea (2020): Orchestrated a 24-hour national-level hackathon, managing logistics for 50+ teams and coordinating industry panels.

International Service (2024): Collaborated with Esperanza to build housing in Tijuana, Mexico, and assisted in building water infrastructure for indigenous Wayuu communities in Colombia.

National Service Scheme (NSS), India (2017–2021): Led rural waste-management solutions and social-support projects.

Honors & Awards