Pritam Sarkar
Ph.D. Candidate at Queen's University
Affiliate at Vector Institute
pritam[dot]sarkar[at]queensu[dot]ca

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Currently, I am a PhD candidate at Queen’s University and affiliated with the Vector Institute. Earlier, I interned at Google Cloud AI Research and Borealis AI. I joined Queen’s University in 2018 and completed my master’s degree in 2020. Prior to that, I worked as a Software Engineer for a total of approximately 3 years at Infosys and Tech Mahindra. I completed my bachelor’s degree in 2015 from West Bengal University of Technology, India. Other than research, I am passionate about photography and film-making.

I am on the job market for industrial roles, internship (allows conversion) or full-time. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have a suitable opportunity. Contact me!

Research

I am interested in self/un-supervised learning, computer vision, video understanding, multimodal learning, out-of-distribution generalization, large-scale pretraining of foundational models in vision and multimodal domains, and multimodal LLMs, among a few others. Please find more about my research here.

News

  • [Dec 23] 2 papers got accepted in AAAI 2024.
  • [Nov 23] I have won the first prize in IEEE Research Excellence Award (PhD).
  • [Sep 23] Our paper got accepted in NeurIPS as a Spotlight.
  • [Aug 23] Accepted an offer from Google to join as a Student Researcher.
  • [Nov 22] 2 papers got accepted in AAAI 2023.
  • [Oct 22] We are organizing AAAI 2023 Workshop on R2HCAI.
  • [Oct 22] Honourable Mention in poster competitions (1.) Robotics and AI Symposium 2022 and (2.) FEAS Research Symposium 2022.
  • [Jun 22] Accepted an offer from Borealis AI for a fall internship as a Machine Learning Research Intern.
  • [Oct 21] Best poster award at Robotics and AI Symposium, Ingenuity Labs, 2021.
  • [Aug 21] We are organizing AAAI 2022 Workshop on HC-SSL.
  • [Aug 21] One paper that I supervised got accepted into HAI 2021.
  • [Mar 21] I received postgraduate affiliation award from Vector Institute.
  • [Dec 20] Our paper CardioGAN got accepted in AAAI 2021.
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  • [Aug 20] My first journal/transaction as a first author got accepted in IEEE Trans. of Affective Computing.
  • [Apr 20] Successfully defended my M.A.Sc. thesis. picture
  • [Jan 20] Conference paper on ECG-based SSL got accepted in IEEE ICASSP 2020 for oral presentation.
  • [Sep 19] It was a great experience to visit the University of Cambridge and meet Rosalind Picard. picture
  • [Jun 19] My first paper got accepted for oral presentation in IEEE ACII 2019.
  • [Sep 18] Joined Queen's for master's degree.
  • [Dec 17] Joined Infosys as a Sr. System Engineer.
  • [Nov 15] Joined Tech Mahindra as an Associate Software Engineer.
  • [Jun 15] Completed graduation!

Education

  • PhD at Queen’s University, Canada, 2020 - Present.
  • MASc at Queen’s University, Canada, 2018 - 2020. Link to MASc Thesis.
  • B.Tech at West Bengal University of Technology, India, 2011 - 2015.

Employment

  • Student Researcher at Google, Sunnyvale, USA, Oct 2023 - Jan 2024.
  • Research Assistant at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, 2018 - Present.
  • Machine Learning Research Intern at Borealis AI, Toronto, Canada, Fall 2022.
  • Sr. System Engineer at Infosys Ltd., Bangalore, India, 2017 - 2018.
  • Software Engineer at Tech Mahindra Ltd., Hyderabad, India, 2015 - 2017.
  • Teaching Assistant/Guest Lecturer at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, 2018 - Present.

Mentorship

  • Vishal Narnaware, Visiting Student at University of Cambridge, co-mentored with Nikhil Churamani, 2023-Present.
  • Debaditya Shome, MASc at ECE, Queen’s University, 2022-2023.
  • Jordan Posen, ECE at Queen’s, undergrad final year project, 2021-2022.
  • Rachel Phinnemore, CS at Queen’s, undergrad final year project, 2020-2021.

Reviewing

  • NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICASSP, ACII, ACM MM
  • IEEE Transactions on - PAMI, Affective Computing, Artificial Intelligence