Curriculum Vitae

Research Areas

  • AI Safety, AI Planning, Interpretability, Robotics, Action-Model Learning, and Analysis of Abstractions.

Bio

Pulkit Verma is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Interactive Robotics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works with Prof. Julie Shah. His research focuses on the safe and reliable behavior of taskable AI agents. He investigates the minimal set of requirements in an AI system that would enable a user to assess and understand the limits of its safe operability. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, where he worked with Prof. Siddharth Srivastava. Before that, he completed his M.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati with Prof. Pradip K. Das. He was awarded the Graduate College Completion Fellowship at ASU in 2023, Post Graduation Scholarship from the Government of India in 2013 and 2014, and received the Best Demo Award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) in 2022.

Education

Work Experience

  • 2024-(now)
    Postdoctoral Associate
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • 2018-2024
    Graduate Research Associate
    Arizona State University.
    • Investigating the minimal set of interfaces in an AI system that would enable a user to assess and understand the limits of its safe operability.
    • Developed a framework which generates interrogation policies to derive the human interpretable model of an autonomous agent.
    • Reduced the STRIPS-model comparison to a planning problem which enabled identifying if two models are not same.
    • Modified FF-planner to take PDDL models, initial state, plan as input, and give the final state as output.
    • Co-designed the experiments showcasing possible use-case of an NSF project on training lay people to use adaptive AI systems which are safe, robust, and reliable.
  • 05-08 2023
    Research Scientist Intern - AI
    Meta.
    • Working on intersection of AI and Reality Labs.
    • Developed a proof of concept system for curriculum personalization using sequential decision making.
  • 2015-2018
    Storage Efficiency Developer
    NetApp Inc.
    • Workload Prediction: Predicted workload on a storage volume based on I/O patterns for All Flash systems. This helped in optimizing data storage and management while keeping the nature of data private to the users.
    • File and Volume Clones: Developed features and managed issues related to file and volume clones on UNIX-based NetApp proprietary WAFL file system so as to improve the storage efficiency of enterprise data servers.
    • Co-developed a file system component which prevented data loss if files and volumes are cloned or modified when cloud backup is offline.
  • 2012-2013
    iOS Applications Developer
    Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.
    • Portfolio Management Applications: Built applications for iPhone and iPad, and developed tools so as to analyze the user portfolio in an interactive way.
    • Cross-platform Applications: Cross-platform mobile application development of mobile applications supported on both Android and iOS.

Teaching Experience

  • Spring'22
    Teaching Assistant for a graduate-level Artificial Intelligence Course at Arizona State University.
    • CSE 571 Artificial Intelligence: Ongoing course.
    • Taught by Prof. Siddharth Srivastava.
    • Delivered hands-on problem solving sessions on Planning Graphs, Markov Decision Processes, Reinforcement Learning, and Neural Networks.
    • Co-created the software testbed used to support the course projects.
    • Created and graded homework assignments.
  • Fall'19
    Teaching Assistant for a graduate-level Artificial Intelligence Course at Arizona State University.
    • CSE 571 Artificial Intelligence.
    • Taught by Prof. Siddharth Srivastava.
    • Delivered tutorials on Constraint Satisfaction Problems, PDDL, First Order Logic, and Dynamic Bayesian Networks.
    • Co-created the software testbed used to support the course projects.
    • Created and graded homework assignments.
    • Mentored project groups working on class projects.
  • Fall'14
    Teaching Assistant for a graduate-level Speech Processing Course at IIT Guwahati, India.
    • CS 566 Speech Processing.
    • Taught by Prof. Pradip K. Das.
    • Mentored students working on class projects and homeworks.
    • Graded homework assignments and exams.
  • 2013-2015
    Teaching Assistant for several undergraduate-level Computer Science Lab-Courses at IIT Guwahati, India.

Service

Honors and Awards

Certifications and Training

  • IBM Certified Database Associate - DB2 Universal Database V9 Family.
  • Microsoft First Look Clinic Training - Microsoft Windows Server 2009.
  • Use Case Modeling and Analysis - IBM Center of Excellence.