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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…
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When the Stars Aligned
A TLDR? The best decision of my life – personally and academically. And I am thankful to every single person who made it so. The Beginning The first question that most people asked me when I joined PreCog as a Research Assistant was how I found out about PreCog. It was a funny story. I was looking through CSRankings in September 2023, trying to shortlist universities for MS in fall 2024. I was half-minded about it- join MS immediately or get more research experience before I apply. During this process, a random thought of checking the university rankings in India occurred to me. Then I proceeded to check (read: stalk)…
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My PhD Journey: From Cryptography Dreams to NLP Discoveries
Every PhD story is unique, shaped by choices, circumstances, mentors, and serendipity. Looking back, I realize mine has been a winding yet rewarding journey—one that began with an interest in cryptography and evolved into a deep fascination with natural language processing (NLP). From Codes to Languages My research aspirations were first sparked after watching the biopic of Alan Turing. The elegance of cryptography fascinated me, and I initially hoped to pursue it further. However, when I joined JNU for my master’s, my preferred professor in cryptography had no available slots. That’s when I stumbled upon the thought: human languages are very much like cryptic messages—unintelligible until you know how to…
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The P in Precog Stands For People
I usually don’t remember a lot of things, but what PK said to me on my first day at Precog has stuck with me. “I am on my own journey, it’s your decision whether you want to join me or not”. It might not seem a lot, but to me, that was a challenge. Can I really maximise this opportunity I have been given? Two A* first-author papers, two workshop papers and one best paper award later, as I prepare to join the University of Cambridge, I can confidently say I maximised my opportunity to the limit. Throughout my two years at Precog, I learnt many things, but the most…