Ashish Papanai

Curriculum Vitae

Education

Degree Institution Duration GPA/Details
MSc Machine Learning University of Tübingen, Germany 2025 - 2027 ELIZA research-based Master’s Scholarship
• Deep Learning, Data Literacy, Science of Machine Learning Benchmarks, AI for Brain Health
• Probabilistic & Statistical Machine Learning, Video Analytics
• Advancements in Multimodal Systems, AI and Business, Massively Parallel Processing
• Research focus: Spatial audio, multimodal systems, Spatial-AVQA, world models (CVML Lab)
B.Tech Computer Science and Engineering Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi 2019 - 2023 GPA: 9.6/10

Professional Experience

Position Organization Duration Key Responsibilities
Associate ML Scientist - 2 Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Delhi Jan 2025 - Sep 2025 • Developed computer vision models for crop monitoring using Joint Positional Embedding models
• Applied MAE (Masked Autoencoder)-style pretraining strategies for region-specific pest recognition
• Evaluated and fine-tuned open-source Vision Language Models (VLMs) for agricultural applications
• Led pest monitoring projects with teams of ML analysts and interns
Associate ML Scientist - 1 Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Delhi Jul 2023 - Jan 2025 • Automated image classification model development, reducing development time from 5 hours to under 1 hour
• Streamlined ML deployment pipeline, accelerating releases from 5 days to under 1 day
• Enhanced model reliability using dataset cartography techniques and Class Activation Maps (CAMs)
• Developed and deployed Crop Yield Estimation solution with agronomist-validated feature importance
• Advanced CottonAce project with synthetic image generation for national deployment
ML Intern Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Delhi Feb 2023 - Jul 2023 • Developed and evaluated novel model distillation techniques for object detection and counting models
• Optimized model performance and efficiency through various distillation strategies
• Analyzed and improved cascade models including OOD detectors for edge devices
Research Intern Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Aug 2022 - Feb 2023 • Worked under Prof. Chetan Arora and Prof. M. Balakrishnan on MAVI project
• Research on gall bladder cancer detection from ultrasonography images
• Focus on Vision Transformers explainability, Weakly supervised object detection, and Multiple instance learning
Summer Research Fellow Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Jun 2022 - Aug 2022 • Optimized deep learning models for scene-text recognition using edge devices
• Refactored and upgraded existing models to latest firmware versions (OpenVINO 2022, PyCam 2.0)
• Converted and tested VisionLAN to ONNX and OpenVINO IR formats

Technical Skills

Category Skills
Programming Languages Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, C
Machine Learning & Deep Learning PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, TensorFlow.js
Computer Vision OpenCV, YOLO, Object Detection, Image Classification
Web Technologies Flask, HTML/CSS, Git, AWS, GCP, Azure
Databases MySQL, PostgreSQL, LaTeX, Scikit Learn
Specialized Areas Agricultural AI, Medical Image Analysis, Edge Computing, Model Explainability

Awards and Honors

Year Award Organization
2025 ELIZA Research-based Master’s Scholarship University of Tübingen, Germany
2023 Finalist, Singapore India Hackathon 2023 Nanyang Technological University and Ministry of Education India
2022 Winner, UNESCO India Africa Hackathon 2022 Ministry of Education of India
2022 Winner, Smart India Hackathon 2022 (Software Edition) Ministry of Education of India
2022 Selected as UG Summer Research Fellow IIT Delhi

Service and Leadership

Role Organization Duration Description
Project Lead Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence 2023 - 2025 Led teams of ML analysts and interns in agricultural AI projects
National Deployment Contributor Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare 2023 - 2024 Contributed to national deployment of CottonAce project within National Pest Surveillance System