Shravan Nayak

Hi! I’m Shravan Nayak. I am currently pursuing my research master’s (and soon a PhD) in computer science at Mila and the University of Montreal supervised by Prof. Aishwarya Agrawal. My research focuses on cultural understanding in AI systems—how AI can recognize, respect, and adapt to different cultural perspectives. I believe this is crucial not only for creating AI that is inclusive, safe, and fair but also for tackling broader challenges such as pluralistic alignment and improving its ability to handle complex real-world scenarios (robustness).

Currently, I am particularly interested in:

1. Understanding how diverse human perspectives shape AI systems and developing methods to integrate these perspectives effectively while ensuring robust evaluation in real-world scenarios.
2. Exploring how cultural understanding can serve as a framework to tackle key challenges like pluralistic alignment, multilingualism, and long-tailed robustness.

I also spend part of my time at ServiceNow Research, working on Multimodal Agents for Desktop Understanding. My work involves creating benchmarks to comprehensively evaluate AI agents’ ability to perform tasks in desktop environments and developing methods to improve their adaptability.

Prior to starting my graduate studies, I spent two years at Microsoft, contributing to the PowerPoint mobile team. If you’ve ever used PowerPoint on your iPad or mobile phone, chances are you’ve encountered my work, even if unknowingly! Alongside this, I’ve been deeply involved in artificial intelligence research for over six years. I have worked on reinforcement learning for energy management in microgrid networks at IISc, dubbing at LT Lab in Hamburg, and machine translation for low-resource languages at the University of Toronto.

In my free time, I love to cook and share my experiences on my blog. I also have a deep interest in history, culture, and archaeology, as I find it fascinating to explore the diverse ways of life and the events that have shaped our world. Currently, I am reading Early Indians by Tony Joseph and The Golden Road by William Dalrymple. One day, I hope to study the history of the entire world in depth.