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Looking at the Trees and the Forest
Every journey, they say, is a collection of perspectives some near, some far, some intricate, some vast. My journey at IIIT Hyderabad was exactly that: eventful, to put it politely. Every semester introduced me to a completely new version of myself. There was the first-semester me, whose academic strategy could be summarized as “we’ll see when we get there.” Then there was the final-semester me, who somehow managed to worry about every possible future timeline. Somewhere between those two extremes, there was Precog-at-IIITH . And like most classic grand movies, it all started with a ….. “interview” (or a recommendation by Priyanshul Govil rather 😉😉) I still remember the panel…
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My Three Years at Precog: Questions, Detours, and a Lot of Memories
Joining a research lab is one of the most important decisions a dual-degree student makes at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH). Usually students have two years to figure out which lab they want to join and who they want to work with. As a lateral entry (LE) student, however, you don’t quite have the same luxury of time. When I first came to IIIT in July 2022, research was, in my mind, something I had to do to graduate. That was about it. I realised that most students start approaching professors in the first semester of their second year. My friends and I (a little too ambitiously) decided that the…
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Many hands make light work: My Journey with Precog
The Lucky Beginnings My journey with machine learning has been incredibly weird. Funnily enough, I was preparing for NEET (the infamous medical entrance examination) since class 10. IIIT itself was a stroke of luck, as the results for the DASA round came before NEET. I was glad to take the first escape I could, because I never really wanted to be a medical doctor (subtle foreshadowing: Precog sparked the interest in me to maybe become a different kind of a doctor, the PhD one). Okay, so now I am starting a computer science degree, but I have no clue about computer science. My first instinct is to go to YouTube,…
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What Stays After a PhD
Hello, I am Prashant Kodali. I completed my PhD at IIIT Hyderabad nearly a year ago, advised by Prof. Manish Shrivastava and Prof. PK. My thesis was broadly about code-mixed and multilingual natural language processing, and I am now continuing my research journey as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research India. There is a tradition of graduating students writing about their time at Precog. I have read many of these blogs over the years, occasionally wondering what I would write when my turn came. Now that it has, I find that I do not particularly want to reconstruct my PhD as a sequence of semesters, projects, papers, and milestones. Every…
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More than a lab: My Experience at Precog
Hello! I am Vaishnavi Shivkumar, a recent graduate of the UG2k22 ECE batch, who had the wonderful opportunity to work with Precog-at-IIITH. I’ll start this blog by saying that the experience of working with Precog has been nothing short of transformative. The conversations I have had, the work that I have iterated over, the people I have met – all of it affected me in a very distinct way, which has given me learnings for a lifetime. But I shall tell you that story slowly. This blog is going to be about my experience at Precog, and why joining this place is a canon event for me. Part 1: At…
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Yes, absolutely: A Portrait of a Wanderer as a Researcher
I never knew what I was good at. I still don’t. Coming to IIIT Hyderabad was a new beginning for me, a chance to delve into a field I had only heard of before. After all, the unwritten rule of JEE is that if you rank well, you study Computer Science, no questions asked. Anyways, I spent the initial years of college exploring different domains that appealed to me, many of which I discovered through coursework. (Shoutout to Queueing Theory.) When I was in my fourth semester, I realized what an amazing opportunity the college provided me in terms of research exposure. This is when I found out about Precog-at-IIITH…
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Sense and Serendipity, and Running with it
The second part of the title is easy to explain. The philosophy of “Running with it” is one of the most impactful pieces of advice I’ve received from PK. Funnily enough, this predates my entry into Precog or even my first interaction with PK. I consider this to be one of my most valuable skills, it was a cornerstone of my time at Precog. How does all of this tie in with the first part of the title? Allow me to explain.. Hi, I’m Ishwar, class of 2025. I’ve been associated with Precog since the summer of 2023. I remember the exact moment I knew I’d be in the lab.…
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Slow Starts, Strong Finishes: How Precog Shaped My Thinking
I (Harsha Vardhan Nemani) first interviewed for Precog at the start of my fourth semester—armed with little more than curiosity, some enthusiasm, and the vague sense that research might be worth exploring. The interview, to put it mildly, didn’t go particularly well. I walked out convinced I’d missed my chance. For months, I assumed that door had quietly closed. Then, unexpectedly, Prof. PK reached out. He had a project that happened to align closely with my personal interest in finance, and just like that, I found myself at Precog. What followed was not instant productivity. I spent nearly two years doing what could generously be described as “figuring things out”—switching…
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Driven by Curiosity, Shaped by Choices and People: My Precog Story
Ok so I (Raghav) haven’t written blogs per se before so please cut me some slack if something’s off here, but here goes, hope you find it interesting : ) My journey at Precog begins with me in H-105 (classroom in IIITH) at the annual Precog info session. I’m there with a few of my friends – Wait, but before we get to this, let’s talk a bit about why I landed up at that info session in the first place. So this was around the end of second year, there’s a lot of chatter going around about BTPs or research and which lab you want to choose. This is…
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Exploring the frontiers of knowledge at Precog
I am Shashwat Singh, I was a CLD at IIIT. I am about to join NYU CDS as a PhD student to research the science of foundational models. This is a very exciting time to be in the space of foundational models, no-one knows what they’re doing and any work to shed light on how to best model intelligence has a chance to be very useful and impactful for the foreseeable future. Precog is one of the best places in India to do foundational work in AI because PK has designed the lab culture to be one where wild ideas and motivated people flourish. Joining One of the first conversations…