Pranav Balaji

Pranav Balaji

Co Founder of Verbalia

Inria Startup Studio

About me

Hi! I’m Pranav Balaji, an entrepreneur at Inria Startup Studio. This site is a work in progress :)

I’ve worked on many Deep Learning projects in the past as part of my internship, course-work and my own interest - Video Sign Language Translation, Paraphrase Generation and Recommender systems are a few not mentioned above. What started off as a simple exploration of the field, when I did the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng, has slowly grown into my professional interest.

I’m also interested in Computer Graphics with one of my favourite projects being Ray-tracing implemented in OpenGL.

For fun, I love to do Origami, Speedcubing, and go Scuba diving - having the Advanced Open Water Diver certification. As of the past 5 years, I’ve also been learning Japanese intermittently and have a deep fascination with the language.

Interests
  • Computer Vison
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Deep Learning
Education
  • Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering, 2019 - 2023

    BITS Pilani

Extra Interests

hiragana
Japanese

Language

scuba-2
Scuba diving

PADI Advanced Open water certified

origami
Origami

The art of paper folding

cube
Speedcubing

Mostly the 3x3

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Inria Startup Studio
Co-Founder of Verbalia
Oct 2023 – Present France
Details coming soon!
 
 
 
 
 
Inria, Sophia Antipolis
Research Intern
Feb 2023 – May 2023 France
Undergraduate thesis on Generalizable Deepfake Detection, Supervised by Dr. Abhijt Das and Dr. Antitza Dantcheva.
 
 
 
 
 
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
Aug 2022 – Dec 2022 India

Teaching assisstant for the course Natural Language Processing.

  • Conducted a 1 hour demo on PyTorch for NLP: Code
  • Prepared lecture notes to summarize key concepts
 
 
 
 
 
Wadhwani AI
Machine Learning Intern
Apr 2022 – Jul 2022 India
AI for Social good. Worked on the Tuberculosis Adherence project.
Involved lots of experimental research on a wide array of topics.

Accomplish­ments

 
 
 
 
 
Amazon ML Challenge
2nd  Position Nationwide
Apr 2023 – Apr 2023 India

A 3 day ML Hackathon conducted by Amazon with 26000+ participants from top universities. The task was to predict the product length in mm given the product title, description, and bullet points as text.

 
 
 
 
 
HackOn with Amazon
1st  Position Nationwide
Apr 2021 – Jun 2021 India

A nationwide Hackathon conducted by Amazon with 2000+ participants from top universities. Took part under the theme Covid-19 and Technology and won. Pitch:

  • An online game-ified Virtual Fitness application designed for lockdown times
  • Real-time Machine Learning on the webcam feed for posture identification
  • Video call system with live ranking against a friend
  • GitHub Repository and related links: vFit