About
I am a Master’s student in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I work on multimodal models of human behavior, including gesture, affect, and personality, with a focus on whether these models represent people faithfully or only plausibly.
My current work is on semantic evaluation of co-speech gesture generation. Current systems produce motion that is realistic and rhythmically aligned while carrying almost none of the meaning of the speech that drove it, and standard metrics do not detect this. I am building measurements that do.
Research Interests
Semantic evaluation of gesture generation. Most gesture generation systems produce motion that looks right but ignores what the speech actually says. I am working on metrics that measure whether generated gesture reflects the meaning of the utterance, not just its rhythm.
Faithfulness in generative models. Generative models of human behavior often learn what outputs look like on average rather than conditioning properly on their input. I am interested in when and why this happens.
Language model evaluation. I have worked on safe-helpfulness alignment and on sycophancy, where a model’s behavior shifts under social pressure in ways its training objective did not intend.
Robustness and shortcut learning. I look at when a model’s good numbers come from spurious correlations in the data rather than the thing it is supposed to be measuring.
Fairness in personality and affect computing. Earlier work on bias mitigation in multimodal personality recognition across demographic groups.
Current Positions
Master of Science in Computer Science
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Aug 2025 – May 2027 (Expected)
Visiting Scholar
University of Texas at Austin
Jun 2026 – Present
Education
- M.S. in Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (GPA: 4.0/4.0), Aug 2025 – May 2027
- B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli (GPA: 3.9/4.0, Rank 9/150), May 2019 – May 2023
Recent News
Contact
Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in collaboration, have questions about my research, or would like to discuss opportunities. You can find my contact information in the sidebar or on my CV.