Welcome!

I am currently an M.S. in Computer Vision (MSCV) student at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. I am working under supervision of Prof. Fernando De la Torre, focusing on generating synthetic datasets for aerial imagery using Stable Diffusion and Vision-Language Models. Before CMU, I worked as an Applied AI Researcher at Product Labs, IIIT Hyderabad, where I contributed to government projects for Bhashini. My work combined computer vision model optimization and inference with full-stack development using React and Node.js to build end-to-end business products. Prior to that, I spent four years as a Junior Research Scientist at the Center for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), IIIT Hyderabad, specializing in computer vision and deep learning for autonomous driving. I had the privilege of working under the guidance of Prof. C. V. Jawahar, Prof. Vineeth N. Balasubramanian, Prof. Chetan Arora. During this time, I contributed to several research projects, leading to publications at WACV 2022 and IROS 2024, and filed one U.S. patent and two Indian patents. I have also served as a reviewer for leading conferences such as WACV, ECCV, and CVPR.Earlier in my career, I worked at Barclays Inc., where I gained valuable experience in IT and developed a strong understanding of building large-scale, end-to-end systems in a corporate environment. I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), India, in 2018.

Volunteering

 I believe in giving back to society what we are fortunate enough to have gained. I had been selected to be a Portfolio Project Mentor for the Changemakers in AI program at AI4ALL. Mentoring the students at a platform like AI4ALL was very exciting, fun and it's a two-way learning process I believe. Previously I had also organized HOUR OF CODE as an initiative for International Coding Week, to teach school students Coding and Algorithmic Concepts through innovative and simple games. 

Research Interests

Back during my undergraduate course in Computer Science, I used to wonder, "What really would be the next revolution in this field?" Back then enjoying my programming courses and being dramatically fascinated by technologies like Jarvis I thought, Mind Reading Computers would just be the next remarkable revolution. Curiosity about developing Mind-Reading Computers drove me towards emerging world-changing technologies in the field of Artificial Intelligence. With that passion, I am fascinated by research works in Object-Object interactions or Object-Scene interactions and their intuitive relationship/intent understanding. My current research work lies in the intersection of vision and language, using causal and explainable AI for problems like pedestrian intent prediction and further exploring visual and abductive reasoning for the same. Some of my previous research works include interesting domains like unsupervised domain adaptation, spatio-temporal reasoning using graph neural networks, and generative adversarial networks to name a few. 

News and Miscellaneous

• [August 2025] Started Master in Computer Vision Program at Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute.

• [October 2024] Presented our work at IEEE International Conference of Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference organised at Abu Dhabi. 

• [June 2024] Our paper titled, "Can Reasons Help Improve Pedestrian Intent Estimation? A Cross-Modal Approach" is accepted at IROS conference.

• [April, 2023] US patent filed, title: System and method for detecting object in an adaptive enviornment using a machine learning model.

• [Nov, 2022] Invited to serve as a reviewer for the 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’23), considering the scientific profile and expertise.

• [May, 2022] Portfolio Project Mentor for the Changemakers in AI program at AI4ALL, a US-based non-profit org. co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li at Stanford.

• [March, 2022] Gave a presentation on my research work for the Mobility get-together at IIIT Hyderabad.

• [January, 2022] Presented our work on 'To Miss-Attend Is to Misalign! Residual Self-Attentive Feature Alignment for Adapting Object Detectors' at WACV 2022, Hawaii USA

• [July, 2021] Reviewed a paper at an international conference, WACV 2022, Hawaii USA.

• [August, 2021] Interviewed students for applications for research scholar position at CVIT lab IIIT, Hyderabad.

• [August, 2020] Gave an interesting presentation on 'Machine Learning and its concepts for the Knowledge Cafe Session organized at Barclays Inc. 

• [July, 2019] Organised HOUR OF CODE as an initiative for International Coding Week, to teach students Coding, Algorithmic Concepts through innovative and simple games.

My non-professional interests include listening to bhakti sangeet, practicing spirituality, watching Sci-Fi movies -- my Favourite being Iron Man. Reading a lot about new tech stuff as well as trending articles and implementations related to my field of interest on Google and Twitter. I’m always up for interesting collaborations or just random chats on AI, feel free to drop me a message on Linkedin or via email. 

Get in touch at [vkhindkar@gmail.com]