Puneet Kumar
A Mortal Ambivert Vegan-ish, Researcher, Teacher, Traveller and Theravada Buddhism & Art of Living's breath-work practitioner.
An Assistant Professor (AI and Data Engineering) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar and an 'Affiliated Scientist' at the Meditation Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, directed by Prof Matthew D. Sacchet.
Prior to this, was a Postdoctoral Researcher' at the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS), University of Oulu, Finland advised by Prof. Xiaobai Li and did Ph.D. at the Machine Intelligence Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India, advised by Prof. R. Balasubramanian. Also worked at Georgia Institute of Technology USA, Osaka Metropolitan University Japan, Oracle IDC, Samsung R&D and PaiByTwo Pvt. Ltd. in various positions.
Research areas include Affective Computing (Emotion AI), Machine Learning, Interpretable AI, Mental Health and Cognitive Neuroscience. Please find further details in the CV.
Education
Ph.D. (Computer Science)
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India, 2022
M.E. (Computer Science)
Thapar University, India, 2018
B.E. (Computer Science)
Manipal University, India, 2014
Work Experience
- 'Assistant Professor' at IIT Ropar, India (Dec'25 – Present)
- 'Affiliated Scientist' at Harvard Univ. & Mass General Hospital, USA (Apr'24 – Present)
- 'Postdoctoral Researcher' at Univ. of Oulu, Finland (Jan'23 – Nov'25)
- 'Co-founder, Director & CTO' at PaiByTwo Pvt. Ltd. (Nov'21 – Dec'22)
- 'Applications Engineer' at Oracle IDC (May'14 – May'16)
News
- Dec'25: Joined IIT Ropar as Asst. Prof.🎓
- Dec'25: EDUCON'26 - Paper accepted.📄
- Jul'25: Visited 31st country.✈️
- May'25: IEEE TAFFC - Paper accepted.📄
- Apr'25: CNS'25 - Paper accepted.📄
- Dec'24: ICASSP'25 - Paper accepted.📄
- Sep'24: WACV'25 - Paper accepted.📄
- Aug-Nov'2024: Visited MIT, HarvardU, StanfordU, UCLA, UCB & GeorgiaTech.🏛️
Projects
Details of past and ongoing projects.
Publications
Journals, Conferences, Datasets, Book-chapters and Copyright publications.
Teaching
Details of the subjects and courses taught.
Outreach
Academic and social outreach.
Collaborations
Collaborations and future openings.
Recognition
Awards, scholarships and feedback.
Personal Activities
I am a programmable (learn from experiences) program, programmed to program (build software applications). The experiences that have programmed me are to travel, click photos, read/listen books/audio-books/podcasts, meditate, sing & play guitar, work out and know about psychology, physiology, philosophy, buddhism, health & nutrition, personal finance, neuroscience, mental health, cosmology, veganism, and climate change.
