Feb 2019 – Oct 2023 · 4 yrs 8 mos · Bangalore, India

Jul 2018 – Nov 2023 · 5 yrs 4 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• At Rephrase, we build generative AI tools to ease video creation. We are building a tool which can take any piece of text and create a video of any person speaking that text. This can be used by HR to create training videos, personalising videos for sales, making characters speak in AR/ VR, giving a face to digital assistants, A/B testing digital ads to increase marketing ROI amongst other applications.

Apr 2017 – Jun 2018 · 1 yr 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Jul 2015 – Jun 2018 · 2 yrs 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Major Achievements -
• Selected in Top 20 global startup (out of 2463) to be selected by the South Korean government to expand business in Korea (K-Startup Grand Challenge)
• Part of Platinum Rated startup accelerator, Alchemist Accelerator
• Runners-up in Eureka, Asia's biggest Business Model competition (out of over 6000 companies)
• Winner AIT Switzerland (http://www.swissnexindia.org/event/academia-industry-training-2016/)
• At SoundRex, we are creating wireless audio transmission technologies, for low latency, high-quality audio transmission.

Jul 2015 – Jun 2016 · 11 mos

• Worked on 3 different projects as part of my Masters thesis in Electrical Engineering.
• 1. Augmented Reality Aided Medical Surgery - Currently, a lot of planning of medical operations is done before doctors enter an operation theatre but while performing the operation, they hardly have any feedback. In this project, we built an augmented reality tool to assist doctors during a leg operation to visualise the entire bone structure using predetermined 3D scanned models. These 3D models were registered with the real world location of the bone using Leap motion. We used Oculus DK2 and converted the VR headset into a AR device for our use case.
• 2. Multi Person Virtual Reality - All the current use cases of VR are aimed at individual use of Virtual Reality. But what we don’t realise is that our spatial surroundings are very important and could be an important input to the game. Imagine that sitting on the leftmost row of a room. And imagine the virtual world is a roller coaster. What if based on your real world position, your position in the virtual world would be decided? We need position based virtual reality content in many other areas too. We created an event in IIT Bombay on 12th March, 2016 to test this idea. Beyond the basic premise of testing our experiment, so many people experiencing Virtual Reality for the first time in their life was a great promotion for VR in the institute. We used 200 Google cardboards for the demo. We developed an android application and installed it in people’s phones.
• 3. Heart Rate aided Virtual Reality - The goal of this project was to provide heart rate as an input to the Virtual Reality games/movies to use to enhance user experience. We built a horror game, and the ghost in the horror scene was triggered when a person was calm, his heart rate was low to enhance effectiveness of the VR film. We used Google cardboard as our VR platform and used Mio fuse as our heart rate measurement device.

May 2015 – Jul 2015 · 2 mos · Mumbai Area, India

• With a focus on global challenges and opportunities in Health Technology Innovation, we're building a strategic infrastructure to support a robust Co-Innovation Model through strong, multidisciplinary, corroborative partnerships.
• The focus is on finding solutions that help serve the "The Next 5 Billion" citizens by:
• ~Built the world's first preventive tool for TMJ issues(Temporomandibular Joint Disorders) using Image Processing and Machine learning techniques.
• ~Identifying community specific challenges that may have solutions that could also be applied to multiple locations.
• ~Providing mentorship, training and technical support from corporate partners, MIT and other leading institutions to assist innovators creating novel technical solutions.

Apr 2015 – Aug 2015 · 4 mos

• I implemented a technique called as Eulerian Motion Magnification. This technique involves magnifying minute motions in videos to be able to see them with naked eyes. The basic idea of the project is to magnify adjacent frame differences. The crux of the project is to “smartly” get those differences so as to not magnify noise along with the signal, how to magnify motions that lie in a certain frequency range.
• The workflow of the algorithm is as follows -
• We consider each of the frame independently.
• We convert each frame from RGB to YIQ/NTSC image domain.
• We create an image pyramid of each of the color channel independently.
• We perform some temporal filtering(like IIR, butterworth etc) on the input frames
• We magnify the difference that we get from the temporal filtering using spatial filtering techniques
• We do some chromatic aberration of each of the color channel to reduce the noise components
• We add the magnified difference back to the original image and convert the image back to RGB. This gives us the frame of the output video with magnified motion.
• To add the above functionality in the code, I have also implemented YIQ color domain in the VTK codebase. Also I have implemented image pyramid class since it did not exist in VTK.
• Please find the code in the link below.
• https://github.com/ashray/VTKCodes/tree/master/ImagePyramid
• An input video and magnified video is shown in the linked video below(or view it here https://youtu.be/hHwHAtGEbjs ).

Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 · 0 mo · Mumbai

• Built software and computer vision algorithms to automatically detect dental caries and other oral problems in a person's mouth.
• The entire software was combined into a neat GUI and and a working real time demo of the product was also demonstrated.

Aug 2014 – Nov 2014 · 3 mos

• My work involved moderating the forums, creating rules on how it should work, answering questions that people shall have and other administrative works.
• This is the first online course on EdX being offered by IIT Bombay.

May 2014 – Jul 2014 · 2 mos · Embassy Gold Links, Bangalore

• Developed a data feeds tracker and enabled automated escalations of Service Level Agreements breaches
• Improved task dependencies using predictive data feed timing

Dec 2012 – Feb 2014 · 1 yr 2 mos · Versailles Area, France

• Worked in an 80 member, 3-tier team to represent India for the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 to be held in France, an international competition by U.S. Dept. of Energy to design, construct and operate a life-size, net zero energy house
• First Indian team to participate and qualify in the competition, amongst 20 top universities across the world (http://teamshunya.in/)
• Designed the entire solar system for the house in coordination with IIT-B professors and professionals. Also supported the instrumentation team.

Jun 2012 – May 2013 · 11 mos · IIT Bombay

• Executed the 1st international association of the club by collaborating with Alliance Française, to conduct a French short film contest and a series of workshops in Mumbai
• Spearheaded the establishment of state-of-the-art Film Room
• Introduced 48 hour film making leagues
• Initiated Campus Box Office, facilitating screenings of box office releases in the campus at nominal cost. Negotiated pricing models with film distributors and confirmed deal worth INR 0.25 million. Generated remarkable public response, 1000+ registrations within 24 hours
• Achieved 2 fold increase in the number of short films made, due to procurement of new equipment
• 35+ International and National level awards and screenings in major film festivals
• Liaised with Recyclewala Films and Shamiana, a nationally acclaimed film club for exclusive screening of critically acclaimed feature film ‘Ship of Theseus’ and Oscar winning short films