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Dr. Hrishav Bakul Barua

Dr. Hrishav Bakul Barua

Dr. Hrishav Bakul Barua

Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, Jio Institute

Hrishav Bakul Barua is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence & Data Science in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Jio Institute. Prior to joining Jio Institute, he worked for more than a decade at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), including several years as a researcher and scientist at TCS Research. He has also been associated with Monash University as a researcher and teaching associate and has served as Guest Faculty for a short stint at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bodh Gaya. He has recieved doctoral fellowships from countries including USA, UK, Ireland, Australia, and Malaysia.

His research spans Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Cognitive and Social Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Machine Learning, Data Science, Big Data Analytics, and Approximate Computing. His recent work also includes high dynamic range imaging, 3D reconstruction and digital humans, sign language technologies, autonomous driving, and multimodal perception. His research has resulted in publications at venues including IEEE/CVF WACV, IEEE ICIP, IEEE ICASSP, IEEE/RSJ IROS, IEEE RO-MAN, ICPR, ACM Transactions, Elsevier, and Springer journals. He is an author of more than 30 publications in refereed international journals and conferences including patents. His research has contributed to multiple granted US and Europe (i.e., France, UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Netherlands) patents. He has submitted his Ph.D. thesis at Monash University, where his doctoral research investigated deep learning methods and datasets for low dynamic range to high dynamic range image reconstruction. His work has also extended to 3D Australian sign language generation, autonomous driving, dark video action recognition, and embodied AI. 

He actively contributes to the international research community as a reviewer and programme committee member for leading conferences and journals in artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. These include CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, ICRA, IROS, ACM Multimedia, ICMI, and RO-MAN, as well as journals including IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, International Journal of Computer Vision, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He has delivered more than 40 invited talks across India (including IITs/NITs/IIMs) as well as abroad (including New York University, Abu Dhabi) on AI, Big data, and Robotics. He also served as a BoS member for the Dept. of AI and Data Science at SMIT, Sikkim. His work has found international acclaim as a part of the course material at the University of Florida, USA.

Research Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine/Deep Learning
  • Computer/Robot Vision and 3D Vision
  • Cognitive and Social Robotics
  • Human-Robot Interaction
  • Autonomous Systems 
  • Generative AI and Multimodal Learning
  • High Dynamic Range Imaging
  • Digital Humans and Embodied AI
  • Approximate and Green Computing
  • Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Vision, Monash University, Australia & Malaysia, 2026 (Thesis submitted)
  • Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) in Information Technology (Software Engineering), Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, 2018
    (2nd position in the batch)
  • Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Information Technology, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim Manipal University, India, 2012
  • Scientist, TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Kolkata, India, 2023–2026
  • Teaching Associate/Research Associate, Monash University, 2023–2026
  • Scientist, TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services, Kolkata, India, 2022–2023
  • Guest Faculty, IT, Analytics and Decision Science, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bodh Gaya, India, 2023
  • Researcher/Research Consultant, TCS Research, Tata Consultancy Services, Kolkata, India, 2017–2022
  • Developer/Software Engineer, Tata Consultancy Services, Kolkata, India, 2012–2017
  • Best Paper Award Finalist, IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2026, for DexAvatar: 3D Sign Language Reconstruction with Hand and Body Pose Priors. The work was selected among the award finalists at WACV 2026 (top 1.5% of the accepted papers).
  • Young IT Professional Award 2020 for Science and Technology, awarded by the Computer Society of India (CSI) and Software Technology Parks of India, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
  • Best Demo Paper Award, 21st ACM International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN 2020), for work on a telepresence robot.
  • Distinguished Alumnus and SMIT Global Alumni Award 2022 in Professional Achievement, Technology and Innovation, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology.
  • Received a Letter of Commendation for teaching at Monash University for FIT5047: Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence in 2026.
  • Received Very High rating in teaching at Monash University for the unit “FIT1045 - Introduction to programming;  2025; ON-Campus” as rated by the students. 
  • Awarded the Global Excellence and Mobility Scholarship (GEMS) for doctoral research at Monash University and the Monash Graduate Scholarship.
  • Awarded the Best Research Team Award 2021 for Cognitive Robotics by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS Research). 
  • Recieved Technical Excellence Award 2015 from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
  • Received Academic Interface Program (AIP) Anchor Award from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for delivering effective talks and lectures in Academic Institutions 2020-22. 
  • Received TCS Citation Award from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for publishing paper in top robotics conferences 2020-21.
  • Best Process Improvement (PI) Award from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for my technical contributions to database process automation and saving revenue of about 88K USD 2015.
  • Secured 3rd Rank in Jadavpur University’s PG program entrance exam, 2015.
  • Recipient of  IEEE ICIP Progress Travel Grant Award by IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), USA amounting to 1000 USD (95K INR) to attend IEEE ICIP 2024 in Abu Dhabi, UAE (about 15% acceptance rate). 
  • Recipient of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), USA Student grant to attend IEEE ICIP 2023, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
  • Received Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) full Sponsorship (amounting to 1.2 Lakhs INR to Pursue Master of Engineering in Software Engineering from Jadavpur University, India, 2018. 
  • His research and inventions have contributed to patents in social robotics, conversational and telepresence robotics, 3D scene reconstruction, and 3D human shape and motion estimation, with patents granted in jurisdictions including the United States, Europe (France, UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Netherlands), and India.

Publications:

  • Ruturaj Reddy, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Junn Yong Loo, Thanh Thi Nguyen, and Ganesh Krishnasamy, “Seeing Roads Through Words: A Language-Guided Framework for RGB-T Driving Scene Segmentation,” IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP),  Tempere, Finland, 2026. (DOI: 10.1109/ICIP61757.2026.11630245)
  • Kaustubh Kundu, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Lucy Robertson-Bell, Zhixi Cai, and Kalin Stefanov, “DexAvatar: 3D Sign Language Reconstruction with Hand and Body Pose Priors,” IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Arizona, USA, 2026, pp. 5842–5852. [Best Paper Award Finalist at WACV’26, USA; top 1.5% of the accepted papers] (DOI : 10.1109/WACV61042.2026.00566) [project page: https://github.com/kaustesseract/DexAvatar]
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua, Kalin Stefanov, Ganesh Krishnasamy, KokSheik Wong, and Abhinav Dhall, “PhysHDR: When Lighting Meets Materials and Scene Geometry in HDR Reconstruction,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Barcelona, Spain, 2026. (DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP55912.2026.11461001)
  • Sharana Dharshikgan Dass, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Ganesh Krishnasamy, Raveendran Paramesran, and Raphael C.-W. Phan, “Seeing in the Dark: A Teacher–Student Framework for Dark Video Action Recognition via Knowledge Distillation and Contrastive Learning,” APSIPA ASC, 2026. [Accepted] [project page: https://github.com/HrishavBakulBarua/ActLumos]
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua, Kalin Stefanov, KokSheik Wong, Abhinav Dhall, and Ganesh Krishnasamy, “GTA-HDR: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for HDR Image Reconstruction,” IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Arizona, USA, 2025. (DOI: 10.1109/WACV61041.2025.00765) [project page: https://github.com/HrishavBakulBarua/GTA-HDR]
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua, Ganesh Krishnasamy, KokSheik Wong, Abhinav Dhall, and Kalin Stefanov, “HistoHDR-Net: Histogram Equalization for Single LDR to HDR Image Translation,” IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2024. (DOI: 10.1109/ICIP51287.2024.10648020)
  • Sharana Dharshikgan Suresh Dass, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Ganesh Krishnasamy, Raveendran Paramesran, and Raphael C.-W. Phan, “ActNetFormer: Transformer-ResNet Hybrid Method for Semi-Supervised Action Recognition in Videos,” International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2024. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78354-8_22) [project page: https://github.com/rana2149/ActNetFormer]
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua, Theint Haythi Mg, Pradip Pramanick, and Chayan Sarkar, “Detecting Socially Interacting Groups Using F-Formation: A Survey of Taxonomy, Methods, Datasets, Applications, Challenges, and Future Research Directions,” ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3682072) [Impact Factor: 7] [project page: https://github.com/HrishavBakulBarua/Social-Robots-F-formation]
  • Swapna Agarwal, Soumyadip Maity, Hrishav Bakul Barua, and Brojeshwar Bhoumick. “Robo-vision! 3D Mesh Generation of a Scene for a Robot for Planer and Non-Planer Complex Objects.” Multimedia Tools & Applications (MTA), Springer, Netherlands, 2023. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15111-8) [Impact Factor: 3.6]
  • Debojyoti Chakraborty, Jayeeta Mondal, Hrishav Bakul Barua, and Ankur Bhattacharjee, “Computational Solar Energy - Ensemble Learning Methods for Prediction of Solar Power Generation based on Meteorological Parameters in Eastern India.” Renewable Energy Focus, Elsevier, 2023. (DOI: 10.1016/j.ref.2023.01.006) [Impact Factor- 10.8] [project page: https://github.com/Debojyoti7/Solar_Energy_Prediction_SRRA]
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua, Pradip Pramanick, Chayan Sarkar, and Theint Haythi Mg, “Let Me Join You! Real-Time F-Formation Recognition by a Socially Aware Robot,” IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN),  Naples, Italy, 2020. (DOI: 10.1109/RO-MAN47096.2020.9223469)
  • Pradip Pramanick, Hrishav Bakul Barua, and Chayan Sarkar, “DeComplex: Task Planning from Complex Natural Instructions by a Collocating Robot,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Las Vegas, USA, 2020. (DOI: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341289)
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua, Himadri Sekhar Paul, Chayan Sarkar, and Ansuman Banerjee, “A Study of Approximation in a Collaborative Multi-Agent System,” ACM International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN), 2020. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3369740.337301)
  • Sau, Ashis, Ruddra Dev Roychoudhury, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Chayan Sarkar, Sayan Paul, Brojeshwar Bhowmick, and Arpan Pal. “Edge-centric telepresence avatar robot for geographically distributed environment.” The 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, ICDCN (ACM), 2020. [Best Demo Paper Award]
  • Hrishav Bakul Barua and Kartick Chandra Mondal, “A Comprehensive Survey on Cloud Data Mining (CDM) Frameworks and Algorithms,” ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 52, no. 5, 2019. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3349265) [Impact Factor: 30.4] 

Patents:

  • “Attention Shifting of a Robot in a Group Conversation Using Audio-Visual Perception Based Speaker Localization.” Chayan Sarkar, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Arpan Pal, Balamuralidhar Purushothaman, and Achanna Anil Kumar. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States, Europe, and India. U.S. Patent No. 11,127,401, issued September 21, 2021.
  • “Knowledge Partitioning for Task Execution by Conversational Tele-Presence Robots in a Geographically Separated Environment.” Chayan Sarkar, Snehasis Banerjee, Pradip Pramanick, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Soumyadip Maity, Dipanjan Das, Brojeshwar Bhowmick, et al. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States. U.S. Patent Application No. 17/015,238.
  • “Robotic Task Planning for Complex Task Instructions in Natural Language.” Pradip Pramanick, Hrishav Bakul Barua, and Chayan Sarkar. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States and India. U.S. Patent Application No. 17/007,391.
  • “Edge-Centric Communication Protocol for Remotely Maneuvering a Tele-Presence Robot in a Geographically Distributed Environment.” Abhijan Bhattacharyya, Ashis Sau, Ruddra Dev Roychoudhury, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Chayan Sarkar, Sayan Paul, Brojeshwar Bhowmick, Arpan Pal, and Balamuralidhar Purushothaman. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States, Europe, and India.
    U.S. Patent Application No. 16/988,453.
  • “System and Method for Enabling Robot to Perceive and Detect Socially Interacting Groups.” Hrishav Bakul Barua, Pradip Pramanick, and Chayan Sarkar. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States and Europe. U.S. Patent Application No. 17/138,224.
  • “Method and System for Generating 3D Mesh of a Scene Using RGBD Image Sequence.” Swapna Agarwal, Soumyadip Maity, Hrishav Bakul Barua, and Brojeshwar Bhowmick. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States and Europe.
  • “System and Method for Determining an Optimal and Cost-Effective Vaccine Distribution Chain Network.” Jayeeta Mondal, Jeet Dutta, and Hrishav Bakul Barua. Filed and granted in India.
  • “Method and System for Estimating Temporally Consistent 3D Human Shape and Motion from Monocular Video.” T. Lokender, S. Avinash, C. Sushovan, Hrishav Bakul Barua, A. Tiwari, and B. Bhowmick. Filed in the United States, Europe, and India. Granted in the United States.

Copyrights: 

  • Brojeshwar Bhowmick, Abhijan Bhattacharyya, Ashis Sau, Ruddra Dev Roychoudhury, Hrishav Bakul Barua, Chayan Sarkar, Sayan Paul, Arpan Pal, Balamuralidhar Purushothaman. Title: Teledrive, Copyright Document ID: CGPO006861, Status: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Approved Copyrighted, January 2021, This is mobile robotics Telepresence PoC using Double 2 robot. This helps to communicate with person at a distance in a mobile video conference type and have the ability to feel like distant presence of a person using the robot. It is also useful for tele-inspection, tele-healthcare, tele-education etc.