Jishnu Jaykumar Padalunkal

I am a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. I work at Intelligent Robotics and Vision Lab(IRVL) under Dr. Yu Xiang. Before this, I was an MSCS (Master’s in Computer Science) student at the same school from Fall 2021-Spring 2022.

Before I joined UTD, I worked as a Research Intern under the supervision of Dr. Saptarshi Ghosh at CNeRG, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Previously, I was a Research Intern at NVIDIA, Bengaluru. Before this, I spent two wonderful years as a Research { Intern, Assistant, Associate } at RBCCPS, Indian Institute of Science. Before this, I was a Research Assistant at IIIT Vadodara. I graduated from the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT, an institute of national importance under the Act of Parliament) Vadodara in 2017. For my Baccalaureate thesis, I worked with Dr. Bhargab Chattopadhyay and Dr. Pradipta Ray on developing a sequential approach for noninferiority or equivalence of linear contrast under cost constraints.

My research centers on robot perception and few-shot learning for object recognition and manipulation. I focus on enabling robots to learn from vision-language inputs and human demonstrations, with an emphasis on building efficient, generalizable representations. I’m especially interested in developing and applying foundation models for real-world embodied tasks.