I am currently a Senior Research Scientist in Google DeepMind, where I am working in the Gemini team. Our team works on improving instruction following and general model quality of the Gemini models in the post-training phase.

I finished my PhD in August 2023 at University of Massachusetts Amherst in the College for Information and Computer Science. I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Mohit Iyyer and worked on exciting problems in long-form text generation. I used to co-organize the Machine Learning and Friends Lunch at UMass Amherst (Fall 2019 - Spring 2022). I graduated with a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay in 2018. I was a part of the CSALT group and was advised by Prof. Preethi Jyothi, working on problems in language modeling and sentiment classification.

I’ve spent some excellent summers in industry and academia via internships. In Summer 2022, I interned at Semantic Scholar in AI2, working with Kyle Lo, Arman Cohan and Pradeep Dasigi on human evaluation of long-form summarization. In Summer 2021, I interned at the Google Research India team with Partha Talukdar and Bidisha Samanta working on low-resource multilingual style transfer. In Summer 2020, I interned at the Google Brain team with Aurko Roy working on retrieval augmented generation algorithms. In Summer 2019 I worked on model extraction attacks with the Google AI Language team in New York under the mentorship of Gaurav Singh Tomar and Ankur Parikh and Nicolas Papernot. In Summer 2017, I worked on end-to-end speech recognition at TTIC, a computer science research institute at The University of Chicago campus, where I was lucky to have the joint advice of professors Karen Livescu, Liang Lu and Kevin Gimpel. Finally in Summer 2016, I contributed to Mozilla’s Automation Team via Google Summer of Code and Quarter of Contribution.

When I’m not working, I am generally birding, hiking, biking reading or star gazing. I like to blog and have written a few articles compiling my experiences with graduate school admissions, visa applications, biking etc. During my undergraduate days, I used to lead a club at IIT Bombay, namely The Web and Coding Club, where we help people get started with code. I also used to actively contribute to StackOverflow and to our club’s wiki, a beginner’s programming guide. Finally, I collect Rubiks puzzles! Unfortunately, I am not good at solving them!

Some people on the internet (especially on Mozilla’s IRC) know me as martianwars.