Brief Bio
Since May 2025, I have been serving as a Professor at the Anuradha and Prashanth Palakurthi Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (APPCAIR), BITS PILANI, GOA, India. Before this 2022-2025, I worked as a Research Associate Professor at The Artificial Intelligence Institute (AIISC), University of South Carolina, USA. Previously, I spearheaded the establishment of Wipro Labs in Bangalore, India. From June 2015 to June 2018, I worked as an assistant professor in the computer science department at the Indian Institute of Information Technology Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, India. From July 2017 to July 2018,
Recently, I have been elevated to AAAI Senior Member, class 2026.
Research Interests
My research interests broadly span three AI-related areas: human intelligence, cognition/mind, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). I embarked on my journey into NLP in October 2004 as a second-year undergraduate student, and it has since evolved into a lifelong passion. My curiosity and enthusiasm for NLP have. I have been deeply involved in language technologies throughout this time, resulting in a substantial body of work—over 150+ papers — with an H-index of 54 and an i-10 index of 137. In recent years, I have been actively developing the concept of CIVILIZING AI, a term I coined to represent a vision for responsible AI development. This concept will remain my primary focus moving forward. CIVILIZING AI aims to balance the usability of AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs), and their vulnerabilities to adversarial behaviors. CIVILIZING AI has been exceptionally well received by the community – talk, media1, media2, media3. I typically publish in ACL, EMNLP, COLING, EACL, RANLP, CVPR, AAAI, ICWSM, ASONAM, etc., and I received the EMNLP 2023 Outstanding Paper Award.
