Aditya Chichani

About Me

I am a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Walmart, where I design and launch production-grade ML models and scalable systems that power search for millions of shoppers. My work focuses on ranking, retrieval, intent understanding, and bridging gaps in product attribute comprehension. Several initiatives I’ve led have driven significant GMV lifts and relevance gains across Walmart Search.

Before Walmart, I worked as a Software Engineer at Barclays, developing scalable microservices and real-time payment solutions for major clients such as Amazon.

I hold a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS) from UC Berkeley, where I specialized in Data Science. I also spent time at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab, working on few-shot learning in NLP using semi-supervised methods under Prof. Michael Mahoney and Francisco Utrera.

I have received Excellence Awards at Walmart and Barclays, as well as the Fung Excellence Scholarship at UC Berkeley. Beyond work, I mentor UC Berkeley affinity groups in AI and Data Science and stay active in the research community through conferences such as SIGIR, ICDM, CIKM, and RecSys.

Publications

  • Advancing Recommender Systems by Mitigating Shilling Attacks – IEEE ICCCNT 2018
    Authors: Aditya Chichani, Juzer Golwala, Tejas Gundecha, Kiran Gawande
    [Paper] [Code]
    My talk about this paper with Kyle Polich on the Data Skeptic Podcast:
    🔗 Episode Page
    🔴 YouTube
    🎧 Apple Podcasts

  • Roadmap to Renewable Energy: Integrating Science, Business and AI – Springer Nature (Now available for pre-order!)
    Authors: Disha Gupta, Daniel J. Soeder, Aditya Chichani
    [Pre-order on Walmart]
    [Pre-order on Amazon]

Workshops

ICDM 2025 – Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations (MMSR ’25)

  • Workshop Chairs: Aditya Chichani, Surya Kallumadi, Tracy Holloway King, Yubin Kim, Andrei Lopatenko
  • [Website]

SIGIR 2025 – Workshop on eCommerce (SIGIR eCOM ’25)

  • Workshop Chairs: Yubin Kim, Tracy Holloway King, Aditya Chichani, Pallavi Gudipati, Andrew Trotman
  • [Accepted Papers] [Website] [Paper]

CIKM 2024 – 1st Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations (MMSR ’24)

  • Workshop Chairs: Aditya Chichani, Surya Kallumadi, Tracy Holloway King, Andrei Lopatenko
  • [Proceedings] [Website] [Paper]

Skills

  • Domain Expertise: Search Ranking, Retrieval, Relevance, Intent Understanding, Recommendations
  • Languages: Python, Java, SQL
  • ML Skills: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Transformers, LLMs, Feature Engineering, A/B Testing, Knowledge Distillation
  • Frameworks & Tools: PyTorch, Spark, PySpark, Hadoop, Hive, Cassandra, Kafka, Airflow, GCP, Jenkins, CI/CD