Jay Gala

Research Associate @ MBZUAI • Previously: AI4Bharat / UCSD / TCS / Stratzy

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Hey, thanks for stopping by! 👋

I am a Research Associate at MBZUAI supervised by Yova Kementchedjhieva and Alham Fikri Aji working on multimodal learning. My broad interests span the areas of multimodal and multilingual learning, specifically in the context of data-efficient learning, training dynamics, reasoning and generalization.

I also collaborate with Zeerak Talat on hate speech detection using federated learning. Previously, I was an AI Resident at AI4Bharat (IIT Madras) under the supervision of Mitesh Khapra, Anoop Kunchukuttan and Raj Dabre, where I worked on building open-source datasets and models for Indian languages. Before that, I was a research intern at University of California San Diego under the supervision of Pengtao Xie, where I worked on neural architecture search and generative models.

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from University of Mumbai, India. In the past, I was a machine learning intern at Tata Consultancy Services where I worked on understanding customer behavior using natural language processing. Before that, I collaborated with Prof. Pratik Kanani on an industry project focusing on anomaly detection in heart rate (pulse) using IoT and machine learning.

I also served as a mentor at DJ Unicode, a student organization that aims to inspire sophomores and juniors to contribute to open-source projects. Additionally, I led a team that developed a platform for conducting C programming examinations in college for over 500 students (demo).

I co-founded the research division of Unicode (a.k.a. Unicode Research) with Swapneel Mehta from NYU CSMaP group. We were fortunate to be joined by Akash Srivastava from MIT-IBM AI Lab for foundational lectures on deep generative models and probabilistic machine learning. I also worked as a teaching assistant for the Unicode Machine Learning Summer Course 2021 supported by Google Research India. Additionally, I was a founding research engineer at SimPPL where I collaborated with The Sunday Times and Ippen Digital to develop tools (parrot.report) that help policymakers and journalists audit online disinformation on social media.

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