Background

I completed my Ph.D. in 2020 at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, where I specialized in Computer Science and Engineering with a focus on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, under the guidance of Prof. Asif Ekbal and Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya. My thesis focused on applying Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to Scholarly Documents for downstream problems, such as Novelty Detection, Scope Detection, and Peer Review processing in scholarly communications. Thereafter, I did my PostDoc (2020-2022) from the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL), Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Czech Republic, working on Speech and Language Processing in the Horizon 2020 EU projects European Live Translator (ELITR) and Neural Representations in Multi-modal and Multi-lingual Modelling (NEUREM3) with Prof. Ondřej Bojar. I was the Work Package lead of the Automatic Minuting module, where we developed multilingual methods and datasets for automatically generating minutes from multiparty meeting proceedings. I led the formation of the bi-annual Automatic Minuting shared task challenge and created the community around this problem. I am also the founding organizer of the Scholarly Document Processing workshop series, starting back in 2019. I also co-founded the Workshop for Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Publications (WASP) series with my colleagues at NASA/ADS at the CfA, Harvard Smithsonian, back in 2021.

I joined SciSpace (2022-2023) in Bengaluru, India (headquartered in Palo Alto, California) as the Head of Research, leading the Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning team (which I built from scratch). We developed a semantic search engine and an AI tool to support academic research, addressing several scholarly use-cases. I was also the principal science advisor of the Automotive Repair Intelligence company Predii and an NLP Consultant in the litigation support services company Lexitas, both based in Palo Alto, California. I finally joined ORNL in May 2023 and relocated to the US. I have served as Principal Investigator and Advisor in several industry-funded projects from Cactus Communications, Acta.ai, Lexitas, RAx, ORKG, and Elsevier.

Before joining my Ph.D. program at IIT Patna, I was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering (2012-2016) at the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim, India. I hold two Master’s degrees: one in Computer Applications (MCA) and the other in Computer Science and Engineering (M.Tech.). I am a gold medalist (University First Rank Holder) in both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of North Bengal, India.

I currently live in Knoxville, TN, with my wife and daughter. I am originally from Siliguri, a city at the foothills of the Himalayas in West Bengal, India where I grew up in the lush green tea gardens of the terai-dooars area. If you are a Darjeeling Tea lover, you have my attention! I enjoy travelling (especially road trips), exploring new places, cooking spicy Indian food, reading Bengali literature, watching good movies, and, above all, playing with my little one. My daughter’s name is Sharanya, which means one who gives refuge to others. I am also actively engaged in the cultural events organization and shaping up the East Tennessee Bengali Association (ETBA) in Knoxville.

I envision a future where Artificial Intelligence (or AGI or Super Intelligence) plays a pivotal role in solving the majority of our global challenges, enabling us to become an AI-augmented human civilization, yet having empathy at the core of development and progress. I do believe love can transcend time, space, gravity (Interstellar)! I deeply connect with Dave Patterson's reflections after a glorious career in Computer Science.