Makarand Tapaswi

Hi! I am a Senior Machine Learning Scientist at Wadhwani AI, a non-profit on using AI for Social Good, and an Assistant Professor at the Computer Vision group at IIIT Hyderabad, India.

At Wadhwani AI, we are developing AI solutions that create social impact. In particular, my primary project is estimating the weight of newborns from a video, with the goal to empower primary healthcare workers and facilities to improve lives of at risk low-birth-weight babies.

At IIIT, I continue to work on projects at the intersection of video and language understanding, especially related to analyzing stories.

news [archives]

Dec 2023	Giving a tutorial on Video Understanding through Language at ICVGIP 2023.
Nov 2023	Happy to be serving as Area Chair for ECCV 2024!
Oct 2023	Visited my alma mater NITK Surathkal after 14 years! A lot has changed on campus since we graduated. Happy to give a talk about our Wadhwani AI work.
Sep 2023	Excited to share that SERB has approved funding for my Start-up Research Grant application on video understanding! This happens to be my first proposal funded by the Indian government.
Jul 2023	Speaking about computer vision projects at Wadhwani AI at NCVPRIPG 2023 industry session.
Jul 2023	Speaking about our Wadhwani AI work on newborn anthropometry at Precision Public Health Asia 2023 Conference.
Jun 2023	Excited to receive a research gift from Adobe! Sincere thanks to all involved in this process. Looking forward to a collaboration with Adobe Research India.
May 2023	Wrote an article explaining Transformers for the newspaper The Hindu. link (paywall) \| pdf
Feb 2023	Two papers accepted to CVPR 2023! The first is on emotion recognition in movies arXiv, and the second is on understanding time in videos arXiv.
Dec 2022	Super excited that our paper at ISMIR 2022 on automatic soundtracking for books (by using movie soundtracks) was awarded the Brave New Idea Award! Fantastic example of do what you love and good things will happen :)