About
Nikhil Varma Keetha

CV | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google Scholar
Hello! I am a senior at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad, pursuing a major in engineering physics. I have an innate passion for understanding how human perception and navigation works and how we can build real-world deployable autonomous systems with a positive societal impact. In pursuit of this passion, I am very interested in research on Localization & Mapping, Computer Vision/Graphics, Cognitive Neuroscience (Intuitive Physics), and their applications to downstream robotic tasks.

I'm grateful to have wonderful mentors and collaborators including Sebastian Scherer, Liam Paull, Michael Milford, Sourav Garg, Krishna Murthy, Chen Wang, the GradSLAM community and other awesome researchers!

I’m looking forward to pursuing graduate studies in robotics & computer vision. Apart from research, I'm a huge movie buff and find recreation in cooking, music, anime, and gaming.
Updates
Research
I'm interested in Localization & Mapping, Computer Vision/Graphics, Cognitive Neuroscience (Intuitive Physics), and their applications to downstream robotic tasks such as embodied navigation, autonomous driving. Prior to my current interests I have also worked on Medical Image Analysis and Natural Language Processing.
Publications
A Hierarchical Dual Model of Environment- and Place-Specific Utility for Visual Place Recognition
Nikhil Varma Keetha, Michael Milford, Sourav Garg
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) & IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2021
[paper] / [IROS Digest] / [IROS Video] / [code]
AirObject: A Temporally Evolving Graph Embedding for Object Identification
Nikhil Varma Keetha, Chen Wang, Yuheng Qiu, Kuan Xu, Sebastian Scherer
Robotics Institute Summer Scholar’ Working Papers Journal 2021
[paper] / [poster] / [video]
U-Det: A Modified U-Net architecture with bidirectional feature network for lung nodule segmentation
Nikhil Varma Keetha, Samson Anosh Babu P, ACS Rao
Under Review
[paper] / [code]
Projects
GradSLAM-RGB-D-Completion
  • Leveraged Multi-view gradients from GradSLAM to optimize RGB-D Images
  • Performed extensive initialization experiments and gained insights on the potential of the gradslam framework for differentiable rendering and representation learning
[Github]
COVID-19 Twitter Sentiment Analysis India (IBM Hackathon 2020)
  • Developed a Visualization Dashboard for COVID-19 Twitter Sentiment Analysis & Extraction using a modified Roberta & Roberta-CNN model
[Github] / [YouTube Demo]
Twitter Sentiment Extraction (Kaggle Competition)
  • Developed a modified Roberta base model with CNN head for Twitter Sentiment Extraction & Implemented Teacher Student learning and Ensembling for improvement of Model Performance
  • Placed 58/2,227 (Top 3%) - Silver Medal
Reddit Flair Predictor
  • Developed an XLNet language model based on Transfer Learning & a Web Application based on Flask API for Reddit Flair Classification
[Github]
Events and Service
Organizer: Tartan SLAM Series at CMU Robotics
Reviewer: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Nikhil Varma Keetha
Email | CV | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter
Thanks to Akash Sharma for the source code!