Honors & Awards

  • Outstanding TA Award, CS, UCSB (2025)

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2028 (expected)

    University of California, Santa Barbara

  • BTech (Bachelors of Technology) in Computer Science, 2020

    Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Goa

Project Lead

Rather than aiming to one day restore natural vision, we might be better off thinking about how to create practical and useful artificial vision now.

Visual Prosthesis Computer Vision Immersive Technology (VR/AR/MR)

This research explores the integration of computer vision into various assistive devices, aiming to enhance urban navigation and environmental interaction for individuals who are blind or visually impaired.

Assistive Technology Computer Vision Immersive Technology (VR/AR/MR)

BionicVisionXR is an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational model to allow sighted participants to “see through the eyes” of a bionic eye recipient.

Software Engineering Visual Prosthesis Immersive Technology (VR/AR/MR)

Project Affiliate

pulse2percept is an open-source Python simulation framework used to predict the perceptual experience of retinal prosthesis patients across a wide range of implant configurations.

Publications

We compared three common guidance techniques for immersive VR wayfinding: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass.

We examine whether stress exposure during environmental learning fosters resilience to stress in subsequent navigation or impairs learning.

We compare two complementary approaches to semantic preprocessing in immersive virtual reality: SemanticEdges, which highlights all relevant objects at once, and SemanticRaster, which staggers object categories over time to reduce visual clutter.

Using an immersive VR system, we systematically evaluated two behavioral tasks under four raster patterns (horizontal, vertical, checkerboard, and random) and found checkerboard raster to be the most effective.

We introduce a computational virtual patient (CVP) pipeline that integrates anatomically grounded phosphene simulation with task-optimized deep neural networks to forecast patient perceptual capabilities across diverse prosthetic designs and tasks.

We evaluate head- and cane-mounted cameras for blind navigation and show that combining both yields superior spatial perception, guiding the design of hybrid, user-aligned assistive systems.

We used immersive virtual reality to develop a novel behavioral paradigm to examine navigation under dynamically changing, high-stress situations.