Puneet Kumar

'A Vegan Ambivert Mortal, Affective Computing Researcher, AI & Data Science Teacher, Traveller, and Theravada Buddhism & Art of Living's breath-work practitioner in this lifetime.'

A 'Postdoctoral Researcher' at the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS), University of Oulu, Finland advised by Prof. Xiaobai Li 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, 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

  • 'Affiliated Scientist' at Meditation Research Program, Harvard Univ. & MGH, USA (April24 – Present)
  • 'Postdoctoral Researcher' at Univ. of Oulu, Finland (Jan'23 – Present)
  • 'Co-founder, Director & CTO' at PaiByTwo Pvt. Ltd. (Nov'21 – Dec'22)
  • 'Applications Engineer' at Oracle IDC (May'14 – May'16)

News

  • May'25: Paper 'VISTANet: VIsual Spoken Textual Additive Net for Interpretable Multimodal Emotion Recognition' accepted in TAFFC.
  • Apr'25: Paper 'Network vs ROI Perspectives: Brain Connectivity Analysis using Complex PCA' accepted in CNS*2025 at Florence.
  • Aug'24 & Nov'24: Visited the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Univ. & Massachusetts Gen. Hospital, USA.

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.