Open-ended Reasoning and Knowledge Acquisition (ORCA) Lab

We are a research group at the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department at Auburn University. Our aim is to explore algorithms that can function in an open world, i.e., where intelligent agents can learn novel concepts (or knowledge) without explicit supervision.

The ORCA Lab develops neuro-symbolic approaches that leverage large-scale symbolic knowledge to guide representation learning with neural networks. Much of our research is inspired by cognitive theories of event and sensori-motor perception. We currently work on research related to open-world event understanding fomr multi-modal data, self-supervised spatio-temporal perception, and active vision for event perception and understanding. Our goal is to develop rich, graph-based representations of events that go beyond what is observed in the scene. This includes unobserved, implicit knowledge that is required to describe the entities in the scene and their relationships with each other.

Check out Recruiting for any open positions.

War Eagle!

People

Sanjoy Kundu
Ph.D. Candidate
(Spring 2020 - Present)

Shubham Trehan
Ph.D. Student
(Fall 2020 - Present)

Shanmukha Vellamchetti
Ph.D. Student
(Spring 2024 - Present)

Disharee Bhowmick
Ph.D. Student
(Spring 2024 - Present)

Zhou Chen
Ph.D. Student
(Summer 2024 - Present)

Devesh Khandelwal
Ph.D. Student
(Summer 2024 - Present)

Akash Rao
Ph.D. Student
(Summer 2024 - Present)

Joe Lin
Ph.D Student
(Fall 2025 - Present)

John Lieb
B.S. Student
(Spring 2024 - Present)

Udhav Ramachandran
B.S. Student (OSU)
(Fall 2022 - Present)

ORCA Lab Member's Honors and Achievements

2025 Beau Brechtel (B.S. C.E, AU) was named Outstanding Student in Computer Science.
2025 John Lieb (B.S. C.S, AU) was awarded the Auburn University Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
2024 Elijah Parker (B.S. C.E, AU) was named Outstanding Student in Computer Engineering.
2024 Carson Bulgin (B.S. C.S, AU) was awarded the Auburn University Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
2024 Udhav Ramachandran (B.S, OSU) was awarded the Niblack Research Scholarship at OSU.
2023 Shubham Trehan (Ph.D., AU) and Udhav Ramachandran (B.S, OSU) won the 2023 OSU App competition for their product idea BugScope, based on their ICMLA'23 publication, ProtoKD.
2022 Sai Narayanan (Ph.D., OSU) won the J. Lindsay Oaks Best Student Molecular Biology Presentation at AAVLD 2022
2021 Sai Narayanan (Ph.D., OSU) won the J. Lindsay Oaks Best Student Molecular Biology Presentation at AAVLD 2021
2021 Sanjoy Kundu (Ph.D., AU) won the Robberson Summer Dissertation Award at OSU.

Alumni

Joe Lin. AU, B.S. C.S. Spring 2024 - Spring 2025. Next: PhD at Auburn University.
Carson Bulgin. AU, B.S. C.S. Fall 2023 - Spring 2025.
Jackson Young. AU, M.S. C.S. (Summer 2024 - Fall 2024). Next: Data Scientist, Kansas City Chiefs
Charles "Thomas" Dunn. AU, M.S. C.S. (Summer 2024 - Fall 2024).
Zhou Chen. AU, M.S. C.S. (Fall 2023 - Spring 2024). Next: Ph.D. at Auburn University.
Elijah Parker. AU, B.S C.E. (Fall 2023 - Spring 2024). Next: Engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
Chi-Jui Wu. AU, M.S. C.S. (Spring 2024).
Shengfang Ma. OSU, M.S. C.S. (Thesis) (Summer 2021 - Spring 2024). Next: SDE at OSU
Venkata Ragavendra Vavilthota. OSU, M.S. C.S. (Thesis) (Fall 2022 - Fall 2023). Next: Data Engineer, Wayfair.
Priyadharsini Ramamurthy. OSU, Ph.D. Student (Fall 2020 - Summer 2023). Next: Ph.D. Student at OSU.
Devyn Hubbard. OSU, B.S. (CS) Student (Spring 2022 - Spring 2023). Next: B.S. at OSU.
Udhav Ramachandran. High School Research Intern (Spring 2021 - Summer 2022). Next B.S. at OSU.
Sai Narayanan. OSU Ph.D. (Microbiology) Student. (Fall 2019 - Fall 2022). Next: Pathology Resident at OADDL, OSU.
Deepthi Mikkilineni. OSU, M.S. (CS) Student (Fall 2022).
Sriram Madepalli. OSU, M.S. (CS) Student (Summer 2022). Next: SDE, Amazon.
Swapna Darsi. OSU, M.S. (CS) Student (Summer 2022). Next: Quality Assurance Analyst, Atlantic Casualty Insurance Co.
Ramya Mikkilineni. OSU, M.S. (CS) Student (Summer 2022). Next: SDE, Samsung
Yashwanth Peddaboina. OSU, M.S. (CS) Student (Fall 2021 - Spring 2022). Next: SDE at Amazon.
Vineela Indla. OSU, M.S. (CS) Student (Fall 2020 - Fall 2021). Next: SDE, Amazon.
Makenzie Terrell. OSU, B.S. (CS) Student (Fall 2020 - Fall 2021). Next: B.S. at OSU.
Trae Primm. OSU, REU Student (Summer 2021).
Madison Rushing. OSU, REU Student (Summer 2021).
Nikhil Gunti. OSU, Master's Student (BA&DS) (Fall 2019 - Spring 2021). Next: Data Scientist, Concat Systems.

Collaborators

Dr. Sudeep Sarkar. University of South Florida
Dr. Anuj Srivastava. Florida State University
Dr. Akhilesh Ramachandran. OADDL, Oklahoma State University
Dr. Raghava Mutharaju. IIIT-Delhi, India
Dr. Biplav Srivastava. University of South Carolina
Dr. M. Suchetha. Vellore Institute of Technology, India
Dr. Sunil More. Oklahoma State University
Dr. Ruth Scimeca. Oklahoma State University

Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur

Open-ended Reasoning and Knowledge Acquisition (ORCA) Lab

People

ORCA Lab Member's Honors and Achievements

Alumni

Collaborators

Current Projects

Sponsors