Work

Case study 1

Find a photo by describing it.

Problem: People remember moments, not file names or tags. Keyword search cannot answer “the photo where we were all on the beach at sunset”.
My role: Team lead, architect and reporting manager. I coordinated three sites — Samsung Research in Seoul, the Mobile eXperience division in Suwon and our lab in Bangalore — to take the work from research to commercial release.
Approach: A vision-language model (VLM) for semantic image search in natural language, designed as a single unified backbone that also serves other Gallery features rather than one model per feature. We also built a machine-translation engine for Gallery search.
Outcome: Commercialised in Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series.
Recognition: Best Project award from Samsung Research, Seoul, for natural-language search using a VLM in Gallery on the Galaxy S25 series

New Valley Project of the Year (R&D), Samsung R&D Institute India – Bangalore (SRI-B) Annual Awards 2024

Super Tech Award (Development to Market), Q4 2024
Public write-up: Samsung’s own account of the feature

Samsung Newsroom: how Gallery search works on Galaxy S25

Case study 2

Personal context, built and kept on the device.

Problem: Personalised features need to understand a user’s own data, but that data is scattered across apps — and it is private.
My role: Led the team from research through commercialisation, in collaboration with Samsung’s Big Data Center.
Approach: A user-centric knowledge graph constructed on the phone from the phone’s own data. Published building blocks: on-device attribute extraction from unstructured text (ICON 2021), multi-hop relation-aware representations for inductive knowledge graphs (ICON 2023), and POP-VQA (WACV 2024) — an on‑device visual question answering system that personalises its answers with the user’s knowledge graph, improving accuracy by 36% absolute on KVQA 1‑hop questions.
Outcome: Commercialised starting with the Galaxy S21 series. A granted US patent (US11989193B2) covers rewriting search queries using the user’s context and personalised knowledge graph.
Recognition: Samsung-internal global Best Project award, Mobile Developer Conference 2021 (Mobile R&D Office, Korea).
Links: POP-VQA paper (WACV 2024)

ICON 2023 paper

ICON 2021 paper

Patent US11989193B2

Case study 3

From understanding the screen to acting on it.

My role: I lead the development of multimodal LLMs and Large Action Models to power agentic AI capabilities in mobile applications, including an on‑device multimodal LLM.
Related: Related generative-imaging work: a pending US patent application (US20260099969A1) on adding a missing person to an already-captured photo with a suitable pose and placement.
Links: Patent application US20260099969A1

Leadership

I manage the Advanced Technology Lab while staying hands-on as its architect and technical lead — I still design the systems my teams build.

Lab & people: Reporting manager for multiple teams and projects. I mentor engineers and researchers in adopting new ML methods, take part in recruitment, and serve on the People Task Force.
Direction: I set the lab’s technical direction from a close read of where the technology, our competitors and the market are heading, and I contribute to strategy for the wider research organisation. I also review global project proposals.
Cross-site delivery: Programmes run across Bangalore, Seoul and Suwon, with research, product and data organisations at the same table.
Growing the community: Organiser and mentor for Samsung Solve for Tomorrow, the sponsored M.Tech. programme, hackathons and trainings. Member of the Board of Studies, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, National Institute of Technology Meghalaya (2024 – present).