Jayant

When I was in high school, mooning over my crush, I never imagined I’d end up researching emotions for a living, life’s little plot twists are cruelly efficient. Yet here I am, a year into my PhD, having devoured a mountain of emotion theories, each somehow more elegantly incomplete than the last. What puzzles me most is that we still don’t understand how emotions emerge or evolve; honestly, we still treat the brain like a mysterious black box with good PR. And still, we’re aiming for super-intelligent AI. Our grand ambition rests on the slender shoulders of probability theory, essentially math’s way of shrugging. But really, how probable is it that probability can decode the mind’s mysteries? Maybe God didn’t play dice with the universe, but we certainly seem to be rolling them.

Well, I’m currently attempting to tame this chaos through my research on AI models of emotion and affective cognition, basically trying to teach machines to feel without giving them existential angst. If your work or curiosity intersects with the science of emotions, brain-inspired AI, or anything that requires equal parts rigour and philosophical eyebrow-raising, I’d love to explore a collaboration. After all, decoding the mind is a team sport and the dice roll better when more people throw them.

News

• 24th Dec, 2024 - Published a paper in Proceedings of ICDM Workshops
• 10th Dec, 2024 - Paper accepted at AAAI’25
• 12th Aug, 2024 - Started my PhD at NTU
• 29th Jan, 2024 - Paper accepted at ICRA’24
• 11th Jan, 2024 - Gave a talk on Object Detection at Faculty Development Program (IISc)