Hi! I build AI systems that solve real-world problems. Over years I've moved from speech and audio research into applied AI leadership, and now into building a company from the ground up.

I'm currently the co-founder of UPRIO, an AI tutoring platform for school students, where I lead product and technology — diagnosing where a student is actually struggling, grading handwritten math and science in real classroom conditions, and building a voice-based learning companion.

Before UPRIO, I was Director of Applied AI at Ola Krutrim, building and deploying multilingual GenAI systems (STT, TTS, MT, LLMs) across Indian languages and growing the applied AI org from scratch. Earlier, at Freshworks, I led the evolution of Freddy AI into a GenAI-first product suite, where we built solutions for humanized conversational employee support, improved agent productivity, and actionable insights for business leaders. And at ZAPR (acquired by Samsung), I led a team building award-winning Indian-language speech tech for call center automation — including first-place finishes in the national Hindi STT and TTS challenges (NLTM, MeitY 2020).

All of that is built on a foundation of research. I earned my PhD from Tampere University, Finland, supervised by Prof. Tuomas Virtanen, working on sound event localization, detection, and tracking with deep learning — work that became the DCASE SELD challenge I've organized every year since 2019. Along the way: internships at Adobe Research and Facebook Reality Labs, 3000+ citations, and 2 patents.

The through-line: the interesting problems aren't in getting AI to work — they're in getting it to work in the real world, for real people.

A note on this site: I originally built it during my PhD as a home for my research, and maintained it for a few years afterward. The pages beyond this one — Publications, Research, Open Science, and Demos — are a fairly complete archive of my doctoral and pre-PhD work in audio, speech, and machine learning. For my more recent work, LinkedIn is the best place to look.