– Paromita Sengupta (Bengaluru)

Abu Dhabi (UAE)-based Gokul Karthik Kumar (24) is bent on leveraging the power of AI (artificial intelligence) to create positive social impact in the world. Among his innovations are a

GOKUL KUMAR

methodology to detect hate speech in social media memes, an AI-human interactive dubbing platform and deep learning-based text-to-speech systems in 13 Indian languages.

An engineering and computer vision alum of Anna University, Chennai and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi (MBZUAI, estb.2019), Gokul has won several hackathon tournaments including the IEEE SLT 2022 international hackathon in Qatar, and eight national hackathons in the UAE and India. Currently, he holds a US patent for sales forecasting using an N-gram model.

While at MBZUAI, Gokul’s research projects focused on multilingual Q&A and multimodal hateful meme recognition. According to him, what started as academic assignments resulted in research publications with breakthrough findings presented at highly regarded international conferences and workshops, the latest being the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023 staged in Greece in June.

Moreover, he is also jointly developing the award-winning Autodub, a human-in-the-loop AI dubbing platform that eliminates language barriers in educational video content to disseminate online learning to all corners of the globe.

Gokul relies on publicly available datasets specific to each project and primarily utilises the GPU (graphics processing unit) computational resources of MBZUAI and other organisations. “These resources help me train and test machine learning models effectively. Also, although MBZUAI is a relatively new university, being part of its focused AI group has motivated me to push my limits,” he says.

Gokul has recently signed up with G42’s Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi as an applied scientist. “In my current role, I am working collaboratively with a team to develop LLMs (large language models) specifically tailored for UAE-focused applications. In the future, I intend to continue to engage with AI research and development,” he says