- Camera Culture
Kushagra (Kush) is a Ph.D. student in Camera Culture at the MIT Media Lab, MIT advised by Ramesh Raskar.
North Star: His north star is to build cameras that can co-design themselves for a given task. He draws inspiration from the complexity and vastness of eyes and corresponding visual systems found in the animal kingdom- which have co-evolved for millions of years to exploit the faintest of cues, perform complex analysis, and ultra-fast decision-making from limited sensory input.
Quick Links:
https://web.media.mit.edu/~ktiwary/KushagraTiwaryCV.pdf
Email: ktiwary@mit.edu
Writings: https://perceptive.substack.com/
Research: Kushagra's research lies at the intersection of Sensing, Imaging, Vision, and their downstream applications. His Master's Thesis, "Discovering, Learning, and Exploiting Visual Cues", explores visual cues, such as shadows, reflections, triangulation, and polarization, in the modern context of data-driven imaging techniques. His work has led to multiple patents, has been published in major computer vision and computational imaging conferences such as ECCV, ICCP, CVPR, and ICCV, and has received press coverage.
Background: Kushagra's background is in Perception (Robotics), Computer Vision, and MultiTask Learning. Before MIT, he worked at Optimus Ride (acquired in 2022) where he led the design and deployment of a fleet-wide MultiTasking Computer Vision System for next-generation autonomous vehicles. In addition, he also led the dataset generation for Vision and Lidars modalities and designed the Active Learning Framework to solve the long tail problem across modalities. He graduated from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign in 2019 with a Bachelor's in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
As a kid, Kushagra moved around a lot, living in India, Yemen, Spain, and the United States by age 16. He is trilingual and speaks fluent Spanish and Hindi. He loves to play in USTA leagues around the Boston area in addition to golf and soccer.