Sireesh Gururaja

I’m a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, advised by Emma Strubell. I previously completed a masters degree here under the supervision of Carolyn Rose, and a BA in computer science at Columbia University. My work is supported by the Army Research Lab’s HTMDEC US Citizen Fellowship and the Mozilla Foundation.
My research focuses on NLP and AI tools that allows users in specialized domains to keep agency in their work. How can we empower people to customize and change their tools to reflect and be useful to how they see their own jobs, rather than how their boss or a tech company with a billion other users does? More concretely, I focus on user-customizable, on-device models that live in the browser, and how to effectively reason their limitations and update them. I’m also interested in the incentives that shape NLP research, whether funding, tooling, or culture.
Before coming to CMU, I spent six years in industry. I started at IBM Watson in 2015 on a team that did bespoke prototypes; I then moved to Kensho Technologies in 2018, where I spent three and a half years, first working as an ML engineer focused on NLP, then as the first lead of the ML Ops and Internal Tools team.
news
Apr 24, 2025 | I’m heading to NAACL 2025 next week, and presenting our work on data-driven materials design as a new benchmark for information extraction at the AI and Scientific Discovery Workshop. |
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Apr 04, 2025 | I’m going to be back in Boston for (some of) the summer, interning at Ikigai Labs. I’ll be working at the intersection of UX and ML, figuring out how to make user-controllable models for timeseries prediction. |