Welcome

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Tamal K. Dey. My research bridges Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and Machine Learning by developing novel frameworks to capture and analyze topological structures in complex data. This work includes creating differentiable topological frameworks (like D-GRIL) for end-to-end integration with machine learning models and proposing new methods (like Quasi-Zigzag Persistence) to capture information in evolving spatiotemporal data. Most recently, I am applying this approach to analyze the topology of evolving attention matrices in LLMs to characterize and detect model hallucinations.

I received my BS-MS Dual Degree with a major in Mathematics (Gold Medalist) from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal in 2020. I spent a semester at The Ohio State University before transferring to Purdue in August 2021. I have been fortunate to gain experience through several research and industry internships, including at Amazon, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Adobe, Ethereum Foundation, Institut de recherche mathématique avancée (as a Charpak Scholar), and Technische Universität Dresden (as a DAAD WISE Scholar).

Please find my CV and resume.

Outside of academia, I have interests in sports and music. I play Tennis, Table Tennis, Squash, and Badminton. I have also practised Taekwondo for 8 years and hold a black belt. I am interested in Indian Classical Music and play the Tabla, an Indian percussion instrument.

I serve as a reviewer for ICLR, NeurIPS (top reviewer 2024, 2025), AISTATS, ICML and LoG.

My Erdős number is 3. Paul Erdős -> János Pach -> Tamal Dey -> Shreyas Samaga.