Bio

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

I am very interested in using AI for Social Good. At Wadhwani AI, I work on projects in healthcare and education, a couple are highlighted below. Millions of newborns in India face a life of prolonged and serious ill-health as they are born with low birth-weight and interventions are missed by the health system. We are deploying a video-based neonatal weight estimation approach to identify underweight newborns and monitor their growth using in order to facilitate timely care for those in need. In education, I am working on tools for automated assessment of oral reading fluency in school children. Our model has been deployed in Gujarat and over 3 million assessments have already been conducted by over 1 million children.

My academic research interests revolve around machine understanding of videos, language, and people. I enjoy working with movies and TV series, especially teaching machines about human behavior and analyzing storylines. Two large projects from my past are MovieGraphs and MovieQA. My journey in machine learning started with work on clustering and identifying characters in videos, a crucial building block for high-level understanding, this continues to remain a favorite problem I visit often.

Previously, I was a PostDoctoral Fellow at Inria Paris, working in the Willow group with Ivan Laptev and Josef Sivic. Before that I was with the Machine Learning group at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute, working with Sanja Fidler. I completed my PhD at the Computer Vision for Human Computer Interaction (CVHCI) lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, advised by Rainer Stiefelhagen.

Professional service

In a year, I usually review for 4-6 major CV, ML, or NLP conferences and about 3 journal articles. Some of the venues I am reviewing for, or have reviewed for in the past include:

  • Area Chair: ICCV 2023, ECCV 2024, ACCV 2024
  • Journals: IJCV, T-PAMI, T-IP, T-CYB, T-NNLS, T-CSVT, T-MM, ACM TMC, IMAVIS
  • Conferences: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, EACL, ACCV, ICMI, AAAI, WACV, ICVGIP, NCVPRIPG

I have been recognized as an outstanding reviewer at:
CVPR 2019, ACCV 2020, ECCV 2020, CVPR 2021, ICML 2022

Research in Media