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
- Jun'26: Visited 35th country.✈️
- Dec'25: Joined IIT Ropar as Asst. Prof.🎓
- Dec'25: EDUCON'26 - Paper accepted.📄
- 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.🏛️
Research AreasUnder the Affective and Cognitive AI (ACAI) Lab, led by Dr. Puneet Kumar.
👥 See the Lab Members →
Affective Computing (Emotion AI)
Multimodal emotion recognition from facial expressions, speech, text and physiological signals.
Cognitive Neuro AI
Modelling attention, memory, perception and decision-making using EEG, fMRI and computational cognitive science.
Digital Health
AI-driven tools for mental health, wellbeing and remote physiological monitoring.
Hybrid Intelligence
Human-AI collaboration systems that combine human judgement with machine intelligence at scale.
Publications
[J-9] VISTANet: VIsual Spoken Textual Additive Net for Interpretable Multimodal Emotion Recognition
P. Kumar, S. Malik, B. Raman, X. Li
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (SCI, Q1, IF: 9.6)
[C-15] Context-Aware Multimodal Depression Detection via LLM-Derived PHQ-9 Personal Feature Injection
H. Yang, P. Kumar, X. Li
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2026), Tampere, Finland. [CORE B]
[C-12] Gaze-GZ: Generalized Gaze Estimation with Multi-scale Gaze Zone Prediction
Z. Gao, P. Kumar, H. Zou, X. Li
IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2025), Hyderabad, India. [CORE B | Qualis A1]
[C-11] Multimodal Interpretable Depression Analysis Using Visual, Physiological, Audio and Textual Data
P. Kumar, S. Misra, Z. Shao, B. Zhu, B. Raman, X. Li
IEEE/CVF Winter Conf. on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2025), Tucson, Arizona, USA. [CORE A]
[D-3] MMEmoRec dataset: 'IIT Roorkee Multimodal Emotion Recognition dataset'
Dataset access link: www.github.com/MIntelligence-Group/MMEmoRec
[B-3] Multimodal Engagement Detection Systems and the Unseen Threat To Learner Privacy
A. Singh, N. Verma, K. Goyal, P. Kumar, A. Singh
In "Smarter Education through AI Ethics", CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, 2025 (Accepted)
[P-1] Deep Neural Network Explainability Technique with Application in Multi-modal Emotion Recognition
P. Kumar, V. Kaushik, B. Raman
Copyright. Status: Registered, Registration No. L-106713/2021
Teaching
Affective Computing (Emotion AI)
University of Oulu, Finland · 2023 and 2025
Mathematical Fundamentals for AI and Data Engineering
sAIDE, IIT Ropar · 2025-II
Research Methodology and Ethics
sAIDE, IIT Ropar · 2025-II
AI and Data Engineering Essentials
sAIDE, IIT Ropar · 2026-I
HCI
&
Visualization
sAIDE, IIT Ropar · 2026-I
Collaborations
MSProf. Matthew D. Sacchet
Director, Meditation Research Program, MGH/Harvard, USA
GZProf. Guoying Zhao
Academy Professor, CMVS,
University of Oulu, Finland
BRProf. Balasubramanian Raman
Professor, Computer Science & Engineering Dept., IIT Roorkee, India
SMSarthak Malik
Data Data Scientist II,
Mastercard AI Garage
Datasets
CMFeed
Controllable Multimodal Feedback Synthesis (CMFeed) Dataset
MMFeed
IIT Roorkee Multimodal Feedback Synthesis Dataset
MMEmoRec
IIT Roorkee Multimodal Emotion Recognition Dataset
SanskritTSA
IIT Roorkee Sanskrit Text Sentiment Analysis Dataset
Projects
Details of past and ongoing projects.
Recognition
Awards, scholarships and feedback.
Outreach
Academic and social outreach.
