About me

I am a 5th-year PhD student in the Department of Brain and Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. I am a PMRF fellow under Prof. Sridharan Devarajan and Prof. Ambedkar Dukkipati at the Cognition Lab, IISc. Presently, I am working on predicting brain age with diffusion models, semi-supervised source-free domain adaptation methods and multimodal learning. Besides these projects, I have also worked on NLP tasks like Natural Language Inference, advanced self-supervised and generative models like DC-GANs, VQ-VAEs, Diffusion models, etc.

I completed B.E. in Information Technology from Jadavpur University, Kolkata (in 2021); and my schooling from Don Bosco School, Liluah (Kolkata, in 2017). From a very young age, looking at the night sky made me question the reason for our existence. Growing up, the precision in Physics and Mathematics provided the correct food for my inquisitive mind. Great physicists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Richard Feynman became my role models and provided the impetus for me to dream of a career in research and academia. Besides the beauty in science that my mind beheld, teaching became one of my greatest passions, which further reinforced my desire to pursue a PhD after acquiring a bachelor’s degree.

I took up Computer Science and Information Technology as my major for my undergraduate studies. I was introduced to Machine and Deep learning during this time. I worked on projects like spoken language identification, speech emotion detection (besides my bachelor’s thesis in swarm robotics), etc. These projects gave me a fundamental understanding of problems in machine learning. I also worked on tasks like text normalisation during my brief stint at the Samsung Research Institute, Bangalore, as a Student Trainee (in 2020). In the final year of undergraduate studies, I was moved by a series of ideas proposed by scientists like Hinton, and Roger Penrose, about trying to understand consciousness, intelligent species, etc. My desire to understand the brain by using mathematical models (particularly AI models) helped me decide my field for pursuing my PhD.

I read a diverse range of literary works. Detective novels, thrillers, and classics (in English and Bangla) are my favourite genres. Besides having a formal training in chess, I love to play and watch tennis and cricket.