Chirag Raman

As an Assistant Professor within the Pattern Recognition and Bioinformatics Group at TUDelft (Delft University of Technology), my research focuses on developing computational techniques and tools to anticipate, analyze, record, and synthesize multimodal social human behavior—especially in physically-situated or virtually-embodied interactions in the wild. My broader motivation is to foster smoother social interactions beyond geographic and linguistic boundaries through machine-mediated interactions. To achieve this, I work on enabling machines to sense, perceive, and reason about the spatio-temporal social dynamics guiding such exchanges. Consequently, my skills and expertise span different disciplines, including generative multimodal machine learning, computer vision/graphics, distributed systems, and affective computing. Currently, I am particularly interested in problems surrounding the socially-aware synthesis of behavioral cues for virtual humans, and causal discovery in multimodal time series. 

My driving passion lies in crafting experiences that engage, delight, or intrigue. Following this passion, in past incarnations, I’ve been an engineer, game developer, machine learning researcher, and UX designer. I obtained my Ph.D. from the Socially Perceptive Computing and Pattern Recognition Labs at TUDelft, during which I also spent time at Microsoft Research Cambridge within the Mixed Reality & AI Lab.  Prior to commencing my Ph.D., I worked as a Senior Research Engineer in the Multimodal Machine Learning lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Before then, I worked as a lead iOS dev and UX designer at ProductionPro, building a collaborative platform for TV, Film, and Theater, and as a research associate at Disney Research working on object recognition and detecting giraffe feeding behavior. I received a Masters in Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon in 2013, and a Bachelors in Information Technology from the University of Mumbai in 2010. Outside work, I enjoy riding bikes (powered by ass, not gas), and everything involving design and story-telling.  

You can find out more about my work through my website or Google Scholar