Pulkit Madaan

I am a MSE CS student at Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering. For the past 2 years I was working as an Associate Machine Learning Scientist-I (formerly Research Fellow) at Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit organisation using AI for Social Good. I am interested in working on AI solutions that lead to on-ground change. My broad interests include AI for Impact, AI for Social Good, Representation Learning, Machine Translation, Object Detection and Deep Learning in general.

At Wadhwani AI I extended, deployed and improved an AI solution for small to medium landholder farmers to predict pest infestation in their farms. This project reached 15,000 farmers in 4 districts across 3 of the largest cotton-producing states in India, who saw a benefit through increase in profit as well as a reduction in pesticide cost. A part of my work here is up as a preprint at arXiv.

I completed my Bachelors in Technology (with Honors) from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics with the Best Academic Performance Award. I completed my thesis on representation learning using clustering under the guidance of Dr. Saket Anand and Dr. Sushil Mittal.

In the past I interned under the supervision of Dr. Fatiha Sadat at Département d’informatique, UQAM, Canada as part of the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Program. Here, I worked on a creating a Deep Learning model capable of translating low resource languages. The results were submitted to othe LoresMT Shared Task, where we were in the top 3 of the leaderboard in 3 tasks. The work also got published in WILDRE-5, a workshop under LREC 2020. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Dr. Kaushik Kalyanaraman and Dr. Ojaswa Sharma on reconstructing 3-D surfaces from curved cross-sections. I also worked At MIDAS Labs, under the guidance of Dr. Rajiv Ratn Shah, for a short period on using SOTA ASR models, like Jasper. I’vs also been part of LCS2 Lab, under Dr. Tanmoy Chakraborty, on detection sockpuppets in online discussion forums.

Apart from all the cool nerd stuff, you’ll find me playing football and reading (sometimes writing too) about space-stuff in general. More about the non-academic me here.