My Education and Career
I like to explore a lot, both academically and geographically. Consequently, I have a varied technical background and have worked/studied in five countries.
I have long been a robotics fanatic and a immense physics lover. I am attracted to all things mathematical and computational. Lately, I have been very curious about intelligence, learning, and reasoning, in both natural and artificial systems. Thus I am currently furthering my interest in cybernetics and my research is mostly focused on NeuroAI; vis-à-vis motivating methods from observations in neuroscience to develop self-learning and self-exploring AI. Vice-versa, I also have an interest in using these models to learn more about the processes in the brain, particularly in the context of cognitive disorders and sensorimotor learning.
I completed my Bachelor’s in Technology in 2018 from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in India, in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. I specialized in robotics and extensively indulged in competitive robotics for three years. To explore further, I also did an industrial internship as an Automation Engineer at ITC Ltd. (an FMCG conglomerate). My Bachelor’s thesis was in biorobotics, titled “Mathematical Modeling of Humanoid Robot Gait on a Vibrating Beam”.
After graduation, I transitioned to the industry and moved to Japan to work as a software engineer in Tokyo for three years in IIoT and AI, at JIG-SAW Inc. (a mid-size IT company) and briefly at Resonest Corporation (a startup). In that capacity, I took varied roles spanning Data Analyst, Machine Learning Specialist, Embedded Systems Engineer, Backend Web Developer, and Cloud Architect. I also worked as the Lead Technical Advisor for JIG-SAW US for business expansion in the USA for a year and helped form partnerships with other companies such as SAP, Tridium, and Datadog, among others.
During this time, I developed an interest in theoretical neuroscience and mathematical modeling of brain processes, and decided to go back to research to further explore these interests. Subsequently, I did my Master’s in Neural Information Processing at the University of Tübingen in Germany, where I studied a range of subjects, from systems and computational neuroscience to brain computer interfaces and deep learning.
During my graduate studies, I worked as a computational research assistant at cellular neuroscience and brain imaging labs, with Prof. Dr. Andrea Burgalossi and Prof. Dr. Zhaoping Li, at the Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, respectively.
I also did an internship at a rehabilitation institute in Vitznau, Switzerland, in data analysis of non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (fNIRS), and developed fnirsPy, in collaboration with RELab (ETH Zürich) and the University of Zürich. (To see a list of my other open-source software projects for research, click here or visit my GitHub account.)
My Master’s thesis was in reinforcement learning, titled “Building Visual Semantic Bias in Curious Exploration during Free Play”, which I completed in 2024 under guidance from Prof. Dr. Georg Martius at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen.
After graduation, since May 2024, I have working with Prof. Jun Tani at the Cognitive Neurorobotics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, on computational modeling of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in self-exploring model-based reinforcement learning agents, based on a theory I motivated in an earlier essay using methods from active inference and the free energy principle.
I am also an ELLIS PhD student.