About
I’m Prajneya Kumar, a researcher and machine learning engineer based in Bengaluru, India.
I completed my B.Tech in Computer Science and M.S. by Research in Computational Linguistics at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H). There, I worked with Prof. Vishnu Sreekumar on human memory and cognition, and collaborated with Prof. Makarand Tapaswi on computational models of visual memorability.
My research has taken me across visual and linguistic domains. I’ve studied how neural networks attend to memorable videos compared with human gaze, and how the memorability of words varies across languages and semantic representations.
I currently work as a Machine Learning Engineer at Adobe, building systems that analyze multimodal advertising content and help make sense of its performance.
At the laptop at dusk, probably debugging something that worked yesterday.
How I think about research
I am interested in the difference between predicting a phenomenon and understanding why it happens. A computational model might reproduce human behavior remarkably well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it relies on the same processes. To me, this distinction is not a limitation of modeling, but a reason to ask better questions.
I am drawn to problems that require thinking across disciplines, where ideas from cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy can challenge one another. I see computational models not only as tools for explaining human cognition, but also as opportunities to test our assumptions about intelligence and explore how those insights might inform the artificial systems we build.
Outside research
Outside research, I enjoy making music, playing chess, and creating short-form videos exploring ideas from technology, human behavior, and culture. You can find those on Instagram as @prajplays.
I also enjoy building interactive projects, especially when they let people experience an idea rather than simply read about it. Those live in the Lab.