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

Academic Service

  • Assistant Electronic Publishing Editors for JAIR 2020 - present.
  • PC Member for AAAI-24 Student Abstract and Poster Program.
  • PC Member for CODS-COMAD 2024.
  • 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.

Talks

  • 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.
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  • 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.

Awards and Recognitions

  • Our team won Hackathon at Amadeus in November 2016
  • Certified Lead Developer for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) 6.0 and 5.6
  • Star Employee of Sapient Bangalore, awarded in 2015 for the work on Loblaws project in the United Content Workz vertical
  • Nominated and Recognised at Sapient for exhibiting the Core Value of Client-Focused Delivery
  • Ranked among top 15% performer of the 2013 batch at Sapient and rewarded accordingly
  • Student Representative in Disciplinary action Committee (2012-2013)
  • Deputy convener of Cultural Committee (2012-2013)
  • Elected as Deputy Convener of the Cultural Committee in 2012-13 at DAIICT
  • Elected as the first student representative in the Disciplinary Action Committee at DAIICT for academic year 2012-13