Welcome! I'm Nikhil, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at
Colorado State University.
I direct the SIGNAL (Situated Grounding and Natural Language) Lab at CSU, where we study the understanding of linguistic and situational context using computational, formal, and simulation methods. My research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, ARPA-H, and the Army Research Office. I or my research has been featured in outlets such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal.
Research
My major research projects are listed below. Broadly, I use simulation and multimodal methods to research human language understanding, communication, and cognition in a computational context, and have applied these methods to questions in HCI/HRI, linguistics, spatial reasoning, and data exploration, among others.
Current Funded Projects
Platform Accelerating Rural Access to Distributed Integrated Medical Care
Friction for Accountability in Conversational Transactions
Institute for Student-AI Teaming
Selected Past Funded Projects
Embodied Computational Metacognition
BabyBAW
Active Interpretation of Disparate Alternatives
Communicating With Computers
About Me
I got my Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 2017, followed by a three-year postdoc leading lab research on the DARPA-funded Communicating With Computers program. I also have an M.A. in Computational Linguistics from Brandeis (2013) and a B.S. in Computer Games Development from DePaul University (2010). I've worked in various aspects of AI, linguistics, defense, gaming, and education for a number of years.
As an academic, my research focuses on human-AI collaboration and how humans and AI syste can use their complementary strengths to address novel, challenging problems. I study language by building computational systems that use language and studying how people interact with them, and by studying the ways that computational conceptual representations align (or fail to align) with human conceptual representations.
I've lived in Maryland, New Mexico, Chicago, Ohio, and most recently, Boston, MA, where I began my academic career. I currently live in Fort Collins, CO, with my wife, Heather, and our kids, Ananya and Rohan. When not practicing computational shamanism, I run long distances, play heavy metal guitar, and enjoy pretending to be an author and a chef. Here are my two cats.
If you are interested in collaborating, drop me a line below!
Contact
Before you send your message, please read the Frequently Asked Questions.
If that page doesn't answer your question, please use the form below. I regret that I may not be able to respond to every properly conducted query, but I will try.
If you are an aspiring student or researcher, please do not cold e-mail my @colostate.edu address!
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