Greetings! I'm Piyush, a Senior AI Researcher driving innovation at American Express AI Labs in vibrant Gurgaon, India. My passion lies in harnessing the power of natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML) to untangle complex challenges within the financial domain. Committed to shaping responsible AI practices, my focus extends to data governance and the ethical deployment of NLP & ML models for impactful enterprise solutions. Currently, I'm at the forefront of exploring Generative AI models, aiming to sculpt innovative NLP solutions that redefine possibilities.

Proud holder of a PhD from Dublin City University, and earlier, I earned my MS and B.Tech (Hons) from IIIT Hyderabad.

Before joining the dynamic AMEX team, I contributed as a Post-Doctoral researcher at the renowned ADAPT Centre in Dublin, Ireland. Our endeavors were centered around enhancing digital media engagement through multi-modal interactions, creating richer user experiences.

My expertise spans Information Extraction & Retrieval, Machine Learning, User Search Behavior Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis, and Deep Learning.

• March 2023  -At Present

• Senior AI Researcher-II

• American Express AI Labs, Gurgaon India

• March 2021  - March 2023

• Senior AI Researcher-I

• American Express AI Labs, Bangalore India

• September 2019  - February 2021

• Research Scientist

• American Express AI Labs, Bangalore India

• September 2018  - August 2019

• Post Doctoral Researcher

• ADAPT, Dublin City University, Dublin , Ireland

• July 2013  - July 2018

• PhD in Computer Science

• My PhD supervisors were Dr. Gareth Jones and Dr. Jennifer Foster

• Dublin City University, Ireland

• August 2011  - June 2013

• MS by Research in Computer Science

• My MS supervisor was Dr. Vasudeva Varma

• IIIT Hyderabad, India

• July 2007  - August 2011

• B.Tech in Computer Science (with Hons)

• IIIT Hyderabad, India

• Our industrial collaborative project on Enhanced Supply Chain Performance & Risk Management Platform, won DCU INVENT 2018 commercialisaton award, in ICT category.

• Our industrial collaborative project on Legal Semantic Search, won DCU INVENT 2017 commercialisaton award, in ICT category.

• I was selected as one of the 200 young researchers to attend and participate in the 5th Heidelberg Lauretae Forum in September 2017, at Heidelberg in Germany

• I was selected as one of the SIGIR student ambassadors to represent SIGIR at the 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration held in June 2017.

• Participated and achieved good results (rank 14/45) and (rank 3/10) for Semantic Textual Similarity shared task for English and Spanish language respectively at SEMEVAL-2016

• Our project idea StudentsForResearch got selected for UStart, 2015 startup accelerator programme run by DCU Ryan Academy

• Participated and achieved average results (rank 26/74) for Semantic Textual Similarity shared task at SEMEVAL-2015

• Came first in Aspect Based Polarity Detection shared task at SEMEVAL-2014

• Came second in Cross Language Indian News Story Search shared task at FIRE-2013

• Awarded with Research Award for academic year 2010-11

• Dean Merit List (Spring 2010), Merit List (Monsoon 2010, Spring 2011)

• Represented DCU Squash and Volleyball Team at Irish Intervarsitities 2016 (definitely had some wondeful time in my final year with DCU team)

• Runner-up in Badminton SSI-League 2014 and Plate winners in Irish Volleyball Intervarsities 2014: details

• Banyan Award for dedicated services throughout the BTech life (July'07 - May'11)

• Won prizes at various sports and extra curricular activities

How is life as a PhD student?

Some people describe it as a roller coaster ride and can be a nightmare for few. But I believe it's easy to comment in the end, when you are done to look back but hard to decipher when you are in between. For me, it has been a nice experience till now let see how things unfold in future. A nice detailed blog discussing different aspects about PhD: A Survival Guide to PhD.

What kind of work is expected in Ph.D?

A nice way of describing same visually: What is Ph.D ?.

How to learn basics of Information retrieval?

I will advice to follow two main books:Introduction to Information Retrieval and Modern Information Retrieval. In my opinion understand and try to question yourself as the basics remain same but there is a lot evolving both in theoretical and practical aspects.

Where can I learn more on User Search Behavior and complex search task?

I'm new to this area but some very useful and important pieces of recent papers, discussion can be checked at:

• Task Based Search

• Search Tasks

There are some nice groups working in this area from long time. Some starting pointers: Microsoft Research, Group at University of North Carolina, Group at Yahoo labs, Group at University of Tampere, Group at University of Glasgow.

Some standard benchmark competitions:

If you want to gain practical knowledge, start playing around with so many freely available standard benchmark datasets from different platforms such as: TREC, CLEF, NTCIR , FIRE, SEMEVAL etc.