Abhiram Mullapudi

అభిరామ్ ముళ్లపూడిAbhiram Mullapudi

Abhiram Mullapudi

I build digital water systems that integrate machine learning, wireless sensor networks, and physical modeling to improve the resilience of urban water infrastructure. I am currently working at Inframark as a Lead Data Scientist, where I develop scalable machine learning solutions for small and medium-sized water utilities. My interests lie in signal processing, probabilistic methods, and optimization for cyber-physical infrastructure systems. I have a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, specializing in intelligent infrastructure systems. I write about some of these at randomstorms.substack.com. I am based in Washington, DC 🌸. During my free time, I row with the amazing crew at Capital Rowing Club and try to get my heart rate into a Gaussian distribution.

Live Side Quests

Small things I'm tinkering with right now, updated as they evolve.

HYSEP baseflow

Splits a streamflow record into baseflow and storm runoff. A line-for-line port of the 1996 USGS Fortran program, running in your browser.

OpenFloodHub

An open take on Google Flood Hub. Each river gauge gets its own tiny model that forecasts the next 12 hours.

flood sim

Shallow-water flood physics on your GPU, in the browser. The DC demo is built from open data and should work for any river.

Sift

A fast Mac app for saving, tagging, and finding the papers I read. Plain files, no accounts.

Work Experience

Field notes

Utilities and cities I've worked with, and the ones I'm working with now.

Gotta catch 'em all.

not yet Great Lakes 🏠 home 📜 grad school

Lead Data Scientist

2025 — Present

Inframark

Lead Inframark's data science team, working with product, executive leadership, and utility operations to build the machine learning models behind its digital water products. Leading the design and development of Inframark's shared ML platform, covering data ingestion, model training, deployment, and retraining. Deployed ML-based chemical dosing control for phosphorus removal and chlorine disinfection across multiple utilities, and leading the development of an inflow & infiltration detection system that attributes wet-weather flow to specific pipe segments and ranks rehabilitation candidates.

Senior Data Scientist

2023 — 2025

Xylem

Developed the machine learning platform for Xylem's digital water products. Led the development of statistical and machine learning methods for time-series filtering and anomaly detection, used for predictive maintenance and plant operations. Built an MLOps platform on Flyte that Xylem's product teams used to train, deploy, and maintain their models, and that ran large SWMM simulations at scale on AWS clusters for optimization studies and model development.

Hydraulic Control and Optimization Engineer

2020 — 2023

Xylem

Built machine learning and data engineering systems for Xylem's wastewater network optimization products, used daily by utility operators. Developed a 1D-CNN model that combines NOAA rainfall forecasts with near-real-time flow measurements to predict 24-hour inflow to wastewater treatment plants, and a real-time anomaly detection system covering 600+ concurrent data streams. Helped develop a real-time controller for an in-line storage site in a combined sewer system, and built operator-facing dashboards including the City of Richmond's public CSO notification map.

Open Source Projects

Publications

Constrained Bayesian optimization, showing feasible and infeasible regions inferred during sampling

Bayesian Optimization with Unknown Constraints for the Design and Real-Time Control of Stormwater Systems

Travis A. Dantzer, Abhiram Mullapudi, Branko Kerkez

Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 2026

Designing and controlling stormwater systems when you don't know the constraints up front.

Bayesian Optimization

Identification of stormwater control strategies and their associated uncertainties using Bayesian Optimization

Abhiram Mullapudi, Branko Kerkez

Preprint, 2023

Finding stormwater control strategies with Bayesian optimization, plus how uncertain they are.

pystorms

pystorms: Simulation sandbox for the evaluation and design of stormwater control algorithms

Sara P. Rimer, Abhiram Mullapudi, et al.

Environmental Modelling and Software, 2023

A set of stormwater control scenarios for building and comparing control algorithms.

Phosphorus removal

Improvement of phosphorus removal in bioretention cells using real-time control

Brooke E. Mason, Abhiram Mullapudi, Cyndee L. Gruden, Branko Kerkez

Urban Water Journal, 2022

Real-time control helps bioretention cells capture more nutrients, so they can be built smaller.

StormReactor

StormReactor: An open-source Python package for the integrated modeling of water quality and water balance

Brooke E. Mason, Abhiram Mullapudi, Branko Kerkez

Environmental Modelling and Software, 2021

Python package that adds pollutant modeling to SWMM simulations.

PySWMM

PySWMM: The Python Interface to Stormwater Management Model (SWMM)

Bryant E. McDonnell, Katherine Ratliff, Michael E. Tryby, Jennifer Jia Xin Wu, Abhiram Mullapudi

Journal of Open Source Software, 2020

Python wrapper for EPA's Stormwater Management Model.

Deep RL

Deep Reinforcement Learning for the Real Time Control of Stormwater Systems

Abhiram Mullapudi, Matthew J. Lewis, Cyndee L. Gruden, Branko Kerkez

Advances in Water Resources, 2020

Reinforcement learning that lets stormwater systems adapt to changing conditions.

rrcf

rrcf: Implementation of the Robust Random Cut Forest algorithm for anomaly detection on streams

Matt D. Bartos, Abhiram Mullapudi, Sara C. Troutman

Journal of Open Source Software, 2019

Finding anomalies in streaming data with random cut forests.

Shaping streamflow

Shaping streamflow using a real-time stormwater control network

Abhiram Mullapudi, Matt D. Bartos, Brandon P. Wong, Branko Kerkez

Sensors, 2018

Using wireless sensors to shape how a stormwater network responds to storms.

Smart stormwater

Building a theory for smart stormwater systems

Abhiram Mullapudi, Brandon P. Wong, Branko Kerkez

Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology, 2017

Treating watersheds as systems that can be reconfigured on the fly to remove pollutants.

Writing

Rowing

Rowing on the Anacostia River

I row with the amazing crew at Capital Rowing Club on the Anacostia River. Nothing motivates you to reduce CSOs more than rowing past them every other day.

Orangetheory

OTF heart rate zones with Gaussian distribution

I love trying to make a Gaussian distribution with my heart rate zones in HIITs :P

Thanks for scrolling down. Here are some of my dogs