Experience

Industry

  • Research Scientist, IBM Research, USA   [March 2023 - present]
  • Research Intern, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA   [ Summer 2021, Summer 2022]
    Bridging the gap between Symbolic planning and Reinforcement Learning.
    Manager: Dr. Shirin Sohrabi
  • ML Intern, Turvo Inc., CA, USA   [ Summer 2018 ]
    Modeled a cost estimator that leverages the knowledge of the domain experts. Kokel et al. AAAI 2020 was motivated by the work at Turvo.
  • Senior Software Engineer, Amadeus Software Labs, Bangalore, India   [ 2016-17 ]
    Implemented efficient low fare search for Air Canada.
  • Associate Technology, Publicis Sapient, Bangalore, India   [ 2013-16 ]
    Provided content management solutions for enhanced digital presence.

Academia

  • Research Assistant, Starling Lab, UT Dallas, TX, USA   [ Spring 2019 - Fall 2022 ]
  • Instructor, UT Dallas, TX, USA   [ Fall 2021 ]
    Designed and organized labs for an 8-Week course on Advanced Machine Learning for engineers from Vistra Corporation.
  • Teaching Assistant, UT Dallas, TX, USA   [ Fall 2018 ]
    CS6343: Artificial Intelligence (graduate level)
    CS4365: Artificial Intelligence (undergrad level)
  • Research Assistant, IR Lab, DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India   [ 2012-13 ]
    Worked on Sandhan, a multilingual search engine for 8 Indian languages. Including cross-lingual search.
    Advisor: Prasenjit Majumder
  • Research Intern, Mobile Research Lab, NID, Gandhinagar, India   [ Summmer 2011 ]
    Developed a Point of Interest (POI) collector with Google maps for Android Smart Phones.
    Advisor: Jignesh Khakhar

Education

Awards and Recognitions

  • IBM Culture Catalyst Award 2025

    Recognition for exceptional leadership and impact across our research community!

    Harsha has been a driving force behind major initiatives—including the Bridging Planning and Reasoning in Natural Language (PLAN-FM) Bridge at AAAI, the AI Planning and Reinforcement (PRL) workshop series, and her NeurIPS tutorial on planning in the era of language models — while also mentoring students and junior colleagues with openness, generosity, and collaborative spirit

  • Tutorial on Planning in the Era of LLMs at NeurIPS 2025
    Delivered a tutorial to global AI research community on leveraging LLMs for sequential decision-making and planning.
  • Open-Source Contribution with ~10,000 Downloads
    ACPBench, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of Action, Change, and Planning released on HuggingFace received ~10,000 Downloads
  • Top Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025
    Ranked in the top 10% for excellence in reviewing and decision-making at one of the most prestigious AI conferences.
  • 2024 IBM Outstanding Technical Accomplishment: Granite 3.0 Release
    IBM Recognition for the open release of Granite 3.0 family of models, with its state-of-the-art performance in its weight class, marks a major milestone in IBM’s LLM journey.
  • 2024 Best Dissertation Award
    PhD Thesis on Beyond Data: Efficient Knowledge-guided Learning for Sparse and Structured Domains was honored with David Daniel Thesis Award by the faculty in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Talks

  • Invited talk, LLMs for AI Planning at Nxt AI Conference, San Francisco, Nov 4, 2025.
  • Invited talk, LLMs for AI Planning at AI Institute at UofSC - #AIISC, Sep 26, 2025.
    slide | video
  • Invited talk, Integrated Planning and Reinforcement Learning at 1st DAAIG Workshop on Modern LLMs and Applications, Mar 23, 2025.
    slide
  • Networking talk, Integrated Planning and Reinforcement Learning at Almaden Women’s Interest and Networking Group (AWING) at IBM, Jun 7, 2023.
    slide
  • Invited talk, Integrated Planning and Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Domains at AI Seminar at OSU, May 26, 2023.
    slide | video
  • Invited talk, Dynamic probabilistic logic models for effective task-specific abstractions in RL at Robotics Lab at the Brown University, Sep 16, 2022.
    slide | video
  • Presented paper, Hybrid Deep RePReL: Integrating Relational Planning and Reinforcement Learning for Information Fusion at IEEE 25th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION), Linköping, Sweden, Jul 5, 2022.
    slide | video
  • Invited talk, RePReL: Integrating Relational Planning and Reinforcement Learning for Effective Abstractions at Eleventh RBCDSAI Workshop on Recent progress in Data Science and AI, IIT Madras, India, Nov 17, 2021.
    slide | video
  • Ph.D. mixer talk, Human Allied Artificial Intelligence at UT Dallas, USA, Sep 10, 2021.
    slide
  • Invited talk, A Unified Framework for Knowledge Intensive Gradient Boosting: Leveraging Human Experts for Noisy Sparse Domain at AAIR Lab Spring Meeting, ASU, USA, Jan 22, 2021.

Academic Service

  • Assistant Electronic Publishing Editors for JAIR 2020 - present.
  • Top 10% Area Chair at NeurIPS 2025
  • PC Member for CODS-COMAD 2024.
  • PC Member for AAAI-24 Student Abstract and Poster Program.
  • Reviewing papers for AAAI 2024
  • PC Member for Gen Plan Workshop at NeurIPS 2023.
  • Reviewed papers for NeurIPS 2023.
  • PC Member for AAAI-23 (main track as well as AI for social good track).
  • Co-organized workshop on Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL) at IJCAI and ICAPS 2023.
  • PC Member for IJCAI Demo Track 2022.
  • Reviewed papers for ML Reproducibility Challenge 2021 Fall.
  • PC Member for Workshop on Graphs and more Complex structures for Learning and Reasoning (GCLR) at AAAI 2022.
  • Reviewed papers for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better (ICBINB) Workshop at NeurIPS 2021.
  • Reviewer for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal.
  • Volunteered at ICAPS 2021.
  • Volunteered at AAAI 2021.
  • Reviewer for Big Data Journal.
  • Reviewed papers for AAAI 2021.
  • Student volunteer at ICDE 2020.
  • Reviewed papers for CODS-COMAD, 2020 and SDM, 2020.
  • Helped organize meeting of Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), 2018, 2013.
  • Conducted a lab on Information Retrieval with Terrier, an open source search engine, in MSR & IRSI Pre-FIRE workshop 2013 at Microsoft Research India.