Sree Bhattacharyya

About Me

I am a rising 4th year Ph.D. student in Informatics at Penn State, advised by Dr. James Z. Wang. I am also a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Reality Labs Research for the Summer and Fall of ‘26, working with Dr. Michael Proulx. My research lies at the intersection of human-centered and human-inspired AI, with a particular focus on affect and cognition. I study how AI can develop a richer understanding of the subjective world that humans inhabit, and how computational models can help us understand the cognitive and affective processes underlying human experience.

I study how well AI systems capture human emotions and its inherent subjectivity, including nuanced nonverbal expression and the individually and culturally distinct ways in which people experience and interpret affect. I also use insights and principles from human cognition to enrich AI systems, with a specific focus on safety and reliability. I see these two directions as a closed loop for studying intelligence: we can use what we learn about humans to build better AI, and use AI to better understand intelligence itself. Ultimately, I hope to use this loop to understand the foundations of subjective intelligence and build richer artificial counterparts of the same.

Prior to joining my PhD, I was a Software Engineer at Microsoft, India, working with Azure storage. I graduated with a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIEST Shibpur in 2022.

As an undergraduate student, I was fortunate to have been advised by Prof. Chris Biemann and Dr. Abhik Jana at the University of Hamburg, for my internship as a DAAD WISE Scholar. I worked on improving lexical resources for low-resource languages during this internship. For my undergraduate thesis at IIEST, I worked on applications of graph learning, and explored areas like medical diagnosis using GNNs, and social network analysis.

Besides academics, I love music in any and every form. I trained in Indian classical and folk music vocals for almost 2 decades, often performing professionally in India. I also enjoy theatre, and was part of a professional group for over 6 years. I also love reading and writing (without AI, in an inefifficient manner). I have also come to believe that I love struggling at new activities (especially sports), and that this as a general habit has a positive payoff when doing open-ended research!

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