I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Deoartment at Auburn University. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater.
I received my PhD from University of South Florida, where I worked with Dr. Sudeep Sarkar in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Group and with Dr. Kenneth Malmberg. I received my Master's degree in Management Information Systems from the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida and my undergraduate degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Velammal Engineering College, Anna University, India.
In my research, I study open-world learning under limited supervision, with the goal of building intelligent agents that understand and reason about the visual world beyond labels or captions. Rather than relying on large amounts of annotated data, my work focuses on leveraging prior knowledge, structure, and interaction to enable robust perception and generalization. This includes developing methods for event-centric and embodied visual understanding, such as self-supervised predictive learning for video, commonsense-guided grounding of perception, and generative models for acquiring knowledge from unstructured data. My group’s work is evaluated across diverse, data-scarce domains, including active vision, event understanding, genomics, agriculture, and security, to stress-test learning under real-world uncertainty.