Rupanjali Kukal

ABOUT MYSELF

NEWS

• [Mar'26] Talk on "Data Propagation Techniques for tracking objects in Aerial and Maritime Applications"  at NAML (Naval Applications of Machine Learning) 2026

• [Mar'26] Promotion at Microsoft as an ML Applied Scientist II.

• [Feb'26] "MARS-A Foundational Map Auto-Regressor" accepted at ICLR 2026! 

• [Jan'26] Submitted "Greedy Centroid Weighted Boxes Fusion for Object Detection" patent with Microsoft

• [Nov'25] Submitted "Hierarchical Weighted Non-Maximum Suppression for Multi-Class Object Detection" patent with Microsoft

• [Sept'25] Posted "Geo-R1: Unlocking VLM Geospatial Reasoning with Cross-View Reinforcement Learning" on Arxiv 

• [Jun'25] Submitted "MARS-A Foundational Map Auto-Regressor" patent with Microsoft!

• [Oct'24] "Click&Describe: Multimodal Aerial Grounding and Tracking" accepted at WACV 2025!

• [Oct'24] "Multimodal Aerial Grounding and Tracking" short paper accepted at NeurIPS 2024: Workshop on Video Language Models!

• [Aug'24] Submitted "Click&Describe: Multimodal Aerial Grounding and Tracking" patent with Microsoft

• [Jul'23] Started role as ML Applied Scientist at Microsoft.

• [May'23] Finished master's program at Carnegie Mellon University.

• [Mar'23] Published master's thesis on "Real Time Off-Road Semantic Segmentation" with DARPA and Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon.

• [May'22] Working with Sebastian Scherer at AirLab on off-road semantic segmentation for the summer.

• [Aug'21] Started graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University.

RESEARCH AREA

Multi-Modal Foundational Model

•   Vision Language Modelling

• Cross-Modality Model Development 

Geospatial Modelling 

• Geospatial Map Generation 

• Human in the loop map generation and correction 

Perception

•   End-to-end Tracking Systems

•   Track Linking, Track Fragment Association 

Real-Time Deep Learning Systems

•  High-Speed Off-road Segmentation 

•  Aerial Detection and Tracking

AI Optimization

•  NNI 

•  ONNX Modelling 

• TensorRT

RESEARCH

AWARDS & MEDIA COVERAGE

VOLUNTEERING

• Teaching Assistant Design for Manufacture and the Environment at CMU ( 2021)

• Co-Founder Flaire Unmanned Systems which is acquired by Adani Defense Systems (2019)

• Vice President Unmanned Aerial Systems, DTU(DCE)  (2017-2020)

• Graphic Designer, DTU Times, DTU (DCE) (2018-2019)