Harsha Kokel is a Research Scientist at IBM Research. Her research focuses on automating sequential decision-making using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, she is interested in developing methods that enable AI models to acquire a rich understanding of complex domain-specific knowledge and semantics. She dedicates her time to assessing and refining the capabilities of AI models in areas such as search, planning, reasoning, and generalization. Ultimately, her aim is to equip AI models with these abilities so they make accurate, informed, and effective decisions.

She completed her Ph.D. at The University of Texas at Dallas under the guidance of Prof. Sriraam Natarajan, where her doctoral dissertation received the 2024 David Daniel Thesis Award. Her research has been published at various conferences including: AAAI, NeurIPS, IJCAI, ICAPS and ACS. She has reviewed papers for various journals, conferences, and workshops, including AAAI, IJCAI, NeurIPS, SDM, and DMKD. She served as an assistant electronic publishing editor for JAIR 2020--2023.

Open Office Hours for Students: I'm happy to chat with PhD, master's, and undergraduate students about life, career development, or research ideas in AI/ML. Please email me to schedule a 30-minute meeting, which I'll dedicate every week. I especially extend this invitation to Sindhi students, female students, and students from underrepresented groups.