I am an Applied Researcher I at Capital One, where I work on Generative AI for efficient customer support interactions. I recently graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. I was advised by Gale Lucas and Jonathan Gratch. I was also guided by Jonathan May. Broadly, I have been interested in the design and innovation of AI-driven systems that comprehend, participate in, and prepare us for our everyday social interactions. This includes conversational AI assistants and tools for practitioners such as customer support agents, therapists, lawyers, and educators.

This has led to exposure to a variety of research challenges and responsibilities, encompassing complex dialogue data collection, data annotation and analysis, RL for dialogue, as well as a new workshop series in *ACL conferences (SICon - 1st Edition @ ACL 2023, 2nd Edition @ EMNLP 2024).

In addition, my experiences in the industry have exposed me to key challenges that must be handled for translating the latest research into useful, scalable products. Before Capital One, I have worked at Adobe, Amazon, and Google. I completed my Undergraduate in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) in 2017.

Updates:

  • June 2024: I joined Capital One New York as an Applied Researcher I (Manager).
  • May 2024: I graduated from USC with a PhD in Computer Science. Please find a freely available copy of my dissertation here.
  • February 2024: New Paper: We systematically evaluate SOTA LLMs in strategic negotiations on Comprehension, Annotation, Theory-of-Mind, and Generation abilities. Paper
  • January 2024: New Paper: Our work from my summer internship at Google in knowledge-grounded dialogue has been accepted at EACL 2024 (Main). Paper
  • October 2023: New Paper: Our work in RL-based dialogue agents for strategic mixed-motive interactions has been accepted at EMNLP 2023 (Main). Paper
  • October 2023: Excited to share that The Second Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon 2024) has been accepted and will be co-located with EMNLP 2024 in December next year.
  • April 2023: I was a finalist for the 2023 Meta Research PhD Fellowship.
  • January 2023: Our survey on social influence dialogue systems got accepted at EACL 2023 Paper
  • January 2023: Journal Paper: Our work on analyzing subjective negotiation outcomes will soon be published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. Paper
  • January 2023: The First Call for SICon 2023 is now out! Follow @SIConWorkshop on Twitter for latest updates!
  • December 2022: Our proposal for the First Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon 2023) has been accepted. SICon 2023 will be a one-day event, co-located with ACL 2023 in Toronto, Canada in July'23.
  • October 2022: We conducted a survey on social influence dialogue systems - a new emerging category of tasks that capture numerous realistic social influence interactions. Preprint
  • April 2022: Our work on opponent modeling in negotiation dialogues got accepted at Findings of NAACL 2021. Preprint Code
  • February 2022: I will be interning at Google, New York for Summer'22.
  • February 2022: Our abstract on emotion-aware negotiation agents was accepted at ISRE 2022.
  • November 2021: I gave a talk on our CaSiNo dataset at Adobe Research.
  • October 2021: Very happy to add that our work on CaSiNo negotiation dataset was nominated for Best Paper Award at WeCNLP 2021 Summit.
  • October 2021: Our work on CaSiNo negotiation dataset was accepted at WeCNLP 2021 symposium.
  • July 2021: Our work on predicting outcome satisfaction and partner perception in negotiation dialogues was accepted at ACII 2021 conference. Preprint
  • July 2021: I gave a talk on our CaSiNo dataset at Google's NLP Reading Group.
  • May 2021: I joined Amazon Alexa AI as an Applied Scientist Intern for Summer 2021.
  • May 2021: Our work on the CaSiNo negotiation dataset was covered by TechXplore.
  • April 2021: Our team Viola for the multi-million dollar Alexa Prize challenge reached the semi-final stage in the competition.
  • March 2021: Our work on the CaSiNo dataset consisting over a thousand negotiation dialogues got accepted at NAACL 2021. Preprint Dataset
  • January 2021: Our agent won the First Prize at the ANAC negotiation challenge at IJCAI 2020. Find the presentation here.
  • November 2020: I joined the first-ever team from USC that is participating in the multi-million dollar Alexa Prize challenge for the development of social chatbots. More details here.
  • October 2020: We collected a dataset of over a thousand negotiation dialogues in English. The abstract was presented at the WeCNLP 2020 Summit. Here is the link to the abstract and the video.
  • October 2020: My work on a negotiation agent for ANAC challenge at IJCAI was covered by TechXplore.