IIIT-H students get MIT entry

HYDERABAD: Two students, Bipasha Sen and Aditya Agarwal, from the International Institute of Information and Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H) have earned admission into the coveted electrical engineering and computer science programme at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a pioneer in many areas of technology.

According to a statement, Sen began with a part-time collaboration at the IIITH Speech Lab with Prof. Anil Kumar Vuppala as her adviser in 2020. She then joined Prof. C.V. Jawahar’s work in computer vision and was co-advised by Prof. Vinay Namboodiri, the statement said.

When she published her first computer vision paper in 2021 at the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), she decided to convert to an MS as a research student. Opting for a course on mobile robotics taught by Prof. Madhav Krishna, Sen pursued an independent study towards the end of 2021.

Many more collaborations with Prof. Krishna followed leading to paper presentations at the ICRA 2023, International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, and others. By the 2022 application cycle, she had developed a research inclination that lay at the intersection of perception and robotics, the statement said.

She has been accepted under doctoral adviser Prof. Pulkit Agarwal of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT’s EECS department.

Aditya Agarwal, who has been accepted for a PhD at CSAIL, will be working in the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group led by Professors Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez. The group is part of Robotics@MIT and the Embodied Intelligence groups whose focus is on interdisciplinary research to discover the underlying design of artificially intelligent robots, according to the statement.

“Specifically my work will be at the intersection of perception and task and motion planning, with the overarching goal of building general purpose and autonomous robots that can seamlessly integrate with the human world,” he said.