Dear Diary: I’m glad I joined Precog

Hey! I’m Vamshi, a recent Dual Degree (CLD, 2020-2025) graduate from Precog. I’ve always been the ambitious kind (I think this is the one common trait you’ll find among every Precogger). The ambition was to invent or discover something cool, and so I started exploring research.

Finding My Way to Precog

I joined IIIT Hyderabad because I’d heard they had early exposure to research. As I was in my second year, still full of ambition, I was searching for the right lab to foster my growth and feed my curiosity. During my search, I ended up connecting with Anmol Goel and Shashwat Goel (no, I don’t have a Goel bias) – two extremely passionate people trying to navigate the unknown and do something great. These people ended up influencing me a lot (they still do !). Anmol has been a close friend ever since, and I still get the same excitement talking to him any day!

Early Days: Exploring around

Precog has an amazing culture where people work across a diverse set of areas (ML, Graphs, AI Safety, NLP, you name it) that change with student interests. Since I’m naturally indecisive, I would keep hopping between projects, unsure about what to work on, but excited to work on most things.

My first work in Precog with Prashant and Monojit Chowdhury (about codemix-acceptability) ended up as a journal paper at TALLIP. I quickly moved on to work with Anmol Agarwal on the Information Disguise paper, which turned out to be a quick hit with a publication in ECIR. What I loved about Precog was how these collaborations happened naturally – you could literally talk to anyone in the lab and get insightful discussions that often led to exciting projects.

My Research Adventure

Then came my time of independence, and a period of uncertainty when the project I was working on got scrapped because of the release of ChatGPT. I’m sure a lot of other projects did too. That didn’t stop me, though. This is when I started investigating AI Safety, which later emerged as a main theme in the lab.

One thing that makes Precog special is how PK encourages collaborations that push boundaries. Throughout my time at Precog, I got to work with some incredible people – Stuart Russell (yes, the person who wrote the most influential book on AI), Benjamin Plaut and Khanh Nguyen from UC Berkeley, Monojit Choudhury and Tanuja Ganu from MSR, Manas Gaur at UMBC, and Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan from Wright State University, Joseph Reagle from Northeastern University. These weren’t just token collaborations; they were deep, meaningful partnerships where I learned from world-class researchers (Spoiler: I even ended up with one of them as my PhD advisor).

Manas even invited me to work with him in the US for the whole semester plus summer. This was an experience of a lifetime. I don’t think many people (who are not precoggers) get to have this experience of traveling to another country and conducting research there. I got a lot of time to explore AI Safety on my own and found a unique problem to solve: Consistency (Which is still largely unsolved, by the way). I worked hard, made headway on it, and published the paper: “SAGE: Evaluating Moral Consistency in Language Models”. I later got to present it as an oral at LREC-COLING 2024, Italy. I also got to attend EMNLP 2023 as I published a workshop paper (BlackBoxNLP) there and received a grant to attend it. Even when I attended the conference, I knew for sure that I wanted to pursue research.

The Rough Patch: When Things Got Tough

When I came back to India, reconnecting with friends and looking for my next problem to solve proved challenging. As the research landscape in ML was changing heavily, and my ambition grew larger, it took me a lot of time to find my next direction. We would keep exploring one project and move on to the next one without finishing the initial project. This was frustrating, and I went through a really difficult period where I wasn’t making progress in my research, with the only bottleneck being myself. I thought research wasn’t for me and felt quite lost.

In order to explore the industry, I went on to do an internship at Sprinklr the following summer. I was mostly spending time getting back on track and doing the internship. I successfully finished the internship and got a PPO, then came back to campus.

PK’s Support: More Than Just an Advisor

I was back, still having a rough time in general, when something unexpected happened. I took the courage to tell him about my situation, and it turns out PK had actually noticed long ago! To my pleasant surprise, he was incredibly supportive. He let me take a break from research and get better, and this helped me so much more than I thought it would. He would also notice small changes and sometimes tell me how it’s nice that I’m smiling a lot more, and that made me feel very cared. It felt like support from family, not just an advisor. It was unimaginable and helped me tremendously. This is something unique about PK, he genuinely cares about his students’ well-being. It’s very obvious if you think about it, the way he checks up on his students regularly, asking them to eat healthy or get enough sleep, the way he celebrates his students’ success stories, and the way his wallpapers are about him with his students, you don’t get that kind of care easily. 

“Everyone goes through tough times; what’s important is to build systems to quickly get out of them.” – PK

The Lab Culture

What I love about Precog is how it feels like a family. On a normal day, you would find people having discussions, ranting, or laughing together in the vibrant lab space we have. We have these regular meetings that can sometimes be surprisingly fun – sometimes they’re productive research discussions, other times they turn into animated debates about random topics. We sometimes play a sport like badminton together, celebrate the lab’s birthday and new semesters via a precog dinner, and get some pizza and chill together after a long season of recruitment. These might seem like small things, but they create this environment where people genuinely enjoy spending time together.

My daily interactions with people at Precog allowed me to grow intellectually to a huge level (Shashwat Singh, Shashwat Goel, Anmol Goel, etc.), and I also ended up making some really good friends along the way (Anmol, Ishwar, Sreeram, Prashant, Vaishnavi, etc.), some of whom I am glad to call family. It’s amazing how spread out and successful Precog students are. I ended up meeting Shashwat Goel in Los Angeles, Arvind in San Francisco, Pooja Desur in New York, Jushaan in Singapore, etc. I’m sure I will keep meeting Precog people again, no matter how spread out they are, and I’m hopeful that these connections will last.

Back on Track: MSR, CHAI and Beyond

Meanwhile, I got to build a part of the Responsible and Safe AI course and serve as a TA for it at IIIT Hyderabad and IIT Madras (summer version). Later, I got to visit Microsoft Research Bangalore for a while to work on Cross-Modal Adversarial attacks. Finally, I got my internship admission to the Center for Human Compatible AI (CHAI) at UC Berkeley! This was pretty much a dream come true, and I was very happy. Once again, I ended up leaving my loving campus for a change, chasing bigger dreams at CHAI, where I had a wonderful time meeting the brightest minds in the world who inspired me even more. 

The fact that I could do these things wasn’t just luck – it was the result of the research foundation and network that Precog provided. The collaborations, the projects, the conferences, and most importantly, the confidence I’d built working in such a supportive yet challenging environment all contributed to this opportunity.

The Transformation: From Uncertain to Confident

I eventually decided I love research (I had opportunities from all sides – Job, Startup, PhD), and I am now ready for a PhD at MBZUAI. Interestingly, PK had predicted this years before, and he was right! Looking back, I am still fundamentally the same person – uncertain but ambitious – BUT I definitely grew a lot. The transformation wasn’t just academic; it was personal. I learned to build systems for handling setbacks, to collaborate effectively with diverse groups, and to pursue ambitious goals with persistence. Choosing to do a PhD is a big decision, and if the theory is that I am indecisive, this action contradicts it. I think I could have only reached this decision because of the tremendous growth I experienced at Precog. 

What Makes Precog Special

I often wonder how Precog does so well, and then I realize – it’s a bunch of ambitious people put together, of course it’ll do well! PK helps them steer it by providing ample support and freedom, but the magic happens because of the culture he’s created. The cool thing about Precog is that we as a group also strive to improve instead of focusing only on ourselves. I remember people often taking initiatives on their own, and PK was like “if you think it’ll work, do it!”

People take responsibility for the group and work on things to improve the group as a whole. Whether it’s organizing events, mentoring junior members, making a new website, or just creating a positive environment, everyone contributes. This is why we’re able to successfully collaborate despite being such a huge group spanning so many different research areas.

The diversity of research is another strength. You have people working on fundamental ML, others on social computing, some on NLP, others on graphs – this cross-pollination of ideas creates unexpected collaborations and insights. Plus, PK’s network enables collaborations with top researchers and industries worldwide, giving students exposure to different perspectives and methodologies.

Looking Back: The Best Decision I Made

If I could go back in time, there are a lot of things I’d want to do differently, but I would definitely choose Precog again and again. Thinking back, this was the best decision I had taken, and it put me on the best path forward. It fostered my growth and fed my ambition, just as I wanted. Unfortunately, I also did not get to spend as much time as other people in the lab since I was mostly traveling around the world, but the time I did spend was amazing.

For Future Precoggers

If you’re considering joining Precog, know that you’re not just joining a research lab – you’re joining a family. It’s a place where ambitious people come together to push boundaries, support each other through tough times, and celebrate successes together. You’ll work on cutting-edge research, collaborate with world-class researchers, and most importantly, grow as both a researcher and a person.

The lab will challenge you, support you, and help you discover possibilities you never knew existed. It’s been an incredible journey, and I’m grateful for every moment of it – the breakthroughs, the setbacks, the late-night discussions, the fun times, and the friendships that will last a lifetime.