Experience

Internships & Full-time work experience

Cruise LLC, San Francisco, USACruise LLC on Robotics 24/7
Intern, Machine Learning Engineer, Perception – I
May 2022 – Aug 2022 | Mentor: Siddharth Mahendran

  • Proposed models for LiDAR-based 3D object detection that showed promising results for critical objects.
  • Developed novel visualization tools and metrics to improve model debuggability and identify new impact areas.

Couture AI, Bangalore, IndiaCouture.ai - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding
Data Scientist – I
Oct 2020 – Jul 2021

  • Worked with cross-functional teams to invent AI automation algorithms for use cases such as video & movie summarization, fashion apparel attribute prediction, and bilingual call analytics.
  • Awarded Rising Star for owning and deploying end-to-end solutions that generated new business opportunities.

Video Analytics Lab, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Project Assistant | Advisor: Prof. R. Venkatesh Babu
Jun 2019 – Sep 2020
Research Intern | Advisor: Prof. R. Venkatesh Babu
Jan 2019 – May 2020

  • Innovated multiple data & compute-efficient neural network training algorithms for open-set, class-incremental, multi-source domain adaptation and adversarial robustness of neural networks (CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS 2020).
  • Proposed the Source-free Domain Adaptation, a (now) popular privacy-preserving unsupervised DA paradigm, and a plug & play regularizer that yields true robustness against adversarial attacks with linear time complexity.
  • Led over 10 interns, students & research assistants; conducted a hands-on Pytorch tutorial at IISc.

Samsung Research, Bangalore, Indiasamsung-r-and-d-institute-india-squarelogo-1535345464542
Intern
May 2018 – Jul 2018 | Mentor: Dr. Pinaki Bhaskar

  • Developed an affective computing framework using speech and visual perception to deploy on a social robot.
  • Designed a user-behavior-based feedback loop to personalize the robot’s responses and interactions.

Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute, Chennai, IndiaLogo
Intern (Practice School – 1)
May 2017 – Jul 2017 | Mentor: Dr. Bala Pesala

  • Prototyped a wearable watch to detect fatigue in car drivers (using PPG signals – a non-invasive pulse monitoring technology).
  • Developed an Android app for efficient realtime communication with the wearable device.
Academic Research

Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction RI Branding & Identity - The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University
Physical Perception Lab, Carnegie Mellon University
Jan 2022 – Present | Advisor: Prof. Shubham Tulsiani

  • Working on the reconstruction of novel views given a few (3-5) context views with approximate cameras.
  • Developed a Transformer-based model that outperforms PixelNeRF on generalization and compute overhead.

Face Spoof Detection, CSIR-CEERI PilaniCSIR-career
Aug 2018 – Dec 2018 | Advisor: Prof. Santanu Chaudhury

  • Implemented a fast stable face tracking algorithm that was used to collect facial data for detecting spoof.
  • Trained a CNN-based model on self-collected face spoof data which achieved less than 6% false acceptance rate on the standard imposter detection task on the NUAA dataset.
  • Extracted motion-robust remote PPG signals from a single RGB webcam for living skin detection.
  • Recreated RGB images from Hyperspectral images with applications to PPG signal generation.

Deep Learning for Brain-Computer Interfaces, BITS PilaniImage result for bits pilani logo
Jan 2018 – May 2018 | Advisor: Prof. Vandana Agarwal

  • Explored the EEG Confusion Dataset to identify learner’s confusion in MOOC videos.
  • Compared various classification methods such as like SVM, K-Nearest Neighbor, Gaussian Naive Bayes.
  • Built an end-to-end Deep Learning pipeline using features from Band Power Estimation and LSTM, and trained a model that achieves much higher accuracy than those achieved previously on the dataset.

Threat Detection in Baggages using X-Ray Images, CSIR-CEERICSIR-career
Aug 2017 – Dec 2017 | Advisor: Dr. Dhiraj Sangwan

    • Primary study on detection of harmful objects (such as knives, bombs etc.) from X-Ray images of baggages
    • Implemented a bag-of-words model with sparse KNN classification
    • Trained and achieved better detection accuracy with a combination of CNN & SVM

Advanced Data Analytics and Parallel Technologies lab, BITS Pilani Image result for bits pilani logo
Aug 2017 – Dec 2017 | Advisor: Prof. Navneet Goel

  • Studied Concurrent and Distributed Data Structures
  • Parallelized algorithms using MPI and OpenMP in C++
Positions Held

AI Team Lead, Sally Robotics sally
Jul 2018 – Dec 2018 | Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems

  • Sally Robotics is an Intelligent Mobility Research Team at CRIS, BITS Pilani
  • Led the AI subsystem with research focus on Autonomous Motion Control using Deep Learning

Design Chair, ACM-BITS Pilani Image result for bitsacm
Mar 2017 – Mar 2018 | BITS Pilani

  • BITSACM won the best student chapter awards for 3 consecutive years
  • Lead the design team, building the front end for Checkmate 2017 – an interactive quizzing game

Chief Design Officer, Conquest 2017 Image result for conquest 2018 bits pilani
Aug 2016 – Aug 2017 | India

  • Conquest is India’s first student run start-up launchpad, organized by Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL), BITS Pilani
  • Designed the branding for Conquest and CEL & was responsible for effective online campaigns to increase outreach

Co-Founder & Programming Lead, SoftSol mcs.png
Aug 2013 – Jul 2014 | Mount Carmel School, New Delhi

  • SoftSol was established as the computer club of the school
  • Lead the programming division brought accolades to the school
Service

Peer Reviewer: NeurIPS (Outstanding Reviewer) (2021/22), Pattern Recognition (2021), TMLR (2022), Neurocomputing (2022), NCVPRIPG (2019)

Conference Volunteer: NeurIPS 2020/21, ICLR 2020

Teaching Volunteer, NSS – Computer Literacy Programme
Aug 2015 – Dec 2015 | India

  • Taught elementary computer science concepts to underprivileged middle-school & high-school students
  • Conducted hands-on programming sessions in C++, Python & HTML/CSS at Pilani Resource Center
Associations

AI Subsystem Lead, Sally Robotics
Jul 2018 – Dec 2018

Core Team Member, Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL), BITS Pilani
Feb 2016 – Present

Core Team Member, ACM BITS Pilani
Feb 2016 – Present

Core Team Member & Design Associate, Aarohan 2016
Aug 2015 – Aug 2016

Teaching Volunteer, NSS – Computer Literacy Programme
Aug 2015 – Dec 2015

Member, Model United Nations, Mount Carmel School
Apr 2013 – Apr 2014

Member & Vocalist, Indian Music Choir, Mount Carmel School
Apr 2005 – Apr 2014