About me

I am current a 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, and supervised domain adaptation techniques. The project aims to leverage unlabeled, out of distribution dataset, as well as generate structural connectivity matrices conditioned on brain age and use them for data augmentation to solve the issue of data scarcity in Neuroscience. Previously, I have worked with explainable deep learning models to understand the neural mechanisms of attention and expectation in the brain. Besides these projects I have also worked (implemented and tested) on NLP tasks like Natural Language Inference, advanced self-supervised and generative models like DC-GANs, VQ-VAEs, Diffusion models, etc.

I completed Bachelor’s in Engineering in Information Technology at 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 our existence. Growing up, the preciseness in Physics and Mathematics provided the correct food for my inquisitive mind. Great physicists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Richard Feynman became my role models. During high school, the prospect of understanding the universe through simple equations/models became alluring to me, which in turn provided the impetus for me to dream (as early as high school) 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 by bachelor’s thesis in swarm robotics), etc. These projects gave me fundamental understanding of problems in machine learning. I also worked on tasks like text normalization during my stint at 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 computer scientists like Hinton, physicists, and mathematicians 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.