I am currently a Research Scientist at MIT working with Prof. Nancy Kanwisher and Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum. Previously, I was a graduate researcher with Prof. SP Arun at the Indian Institute of Science.
I study how we perceive, predict, and plan in the physical world. From a brief glance at a scene, we not only see the objects but also instantly recognize the relations between them. Moreover, we go beyond recognizing what is where, to make inferences about the how, the when, and the why of the physical world. This rich understanding and reasoning about our physical environment, or ‘intuitive physics’, develops early in infancy and is a core component of human cognition. While we find it easy to perceive, predict and plan in many situations we have never encountered before, current machine learning systems are still far from achieving human-like performance on tasks even after being fed with mountains of labeled data. This underscores the enormous complexity of the problem our brain must solve to facilitate successful interactions with the world.
In the short term, I aim to uncover the neural and computational basis of Intuitive Physics in humans through a synergistic combination of behavioral experiments, neuroimaging (fMRI & MEG/EEG), and state-of-the-art computational modeling
In the long term, my research aims to build a neuro-computational understanding of how we perceive, predict and plan in both the physical and the social world, and how these core facets of cognition (intuitive physics and psychology) interface and interact with other domains of cognition (like casual reasoning, tool use, collaborative problem solving) to bring about the vast range of human behaviors.