Aishik Mandal

I am an ELLIS PhD student at UKP Lab, TU Darmstadt. I am supervised by Prof. Iryna Gurevych and co-supervised by Prof. Aurélien Bellet. I completed my Master's in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and applications and my Bachelor's in Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering at IIT Kharagpur. I also recieved the Silver Medal from the department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering for the best academic performance among graduating students in the program.

At IIT Kharagpur, I worked at Centre of Excellence in AI with Prof. Jiaul Hoque Paik for my Master's Thesis. Prior to that, I was part of Complex Network Research Group and worked with Prof. Niloy Ganguly and Prof. Pawan Goyal, under whom I completed my Bachelor's Thesis. I did my summer internships at the Theoretical Foundations of AI group at Technical University of Munich under Prof. Debarghya Ghoshdastidar and at Articulabo, Cognitive Machine Learning Group at INRIA Paris under Prof. Justine Cassell. I recieved the DAAD WISE scholarship for my internship at TU Munich and the Charpak Lab scholarship and GKF International Internship scholarship for my internship at INRIA Paris.

Email / CV / LinkedIn / Google Scholar / Twitter / GitHub

Research

I'm interested in Dialogue Systems, Multimodality and Language Representation Learning. The projects I was part of are presented here.

	Universal Transformer for Multimodal Self-supervised Learning Aishik Mandal, Jiaul Hoque Paik Master's Thesis, 2023 Developed a novel loss function to train an universal transformer encoder network for mapping both images and text in a common embedding space such that images and text conveying similar meaning are close to one another.
	A Revenue Function for Comparison-Based Hierarchical Clustering Aishik Mandal, Michael Perrot, Debarghya Ghoshdastidar TMLR, 2023 codebase / paper[pdf] Developed a revenue function to determine the goodness of a dendrogram obtained from hierarchical clustering algorithm in comparison-based settings.
	Multimodal Turn Taking in Conversational Agents Aishik Mandal, Biswesh Mahapatra, Justine Cassell Summer Internship, 2022 Used multimodal data to improve turn taking of conversational agents in conversation with a human.
	Discourse Mutual Information for Dialogue Understanding and Response Generation Aishik Mandal, Bishal Santra, Pawan Goyal Bachelor's Thesis, 2022 Developed a pretrained encoder for dialogues using a structure-aware Mutual Information based loss-function DMI (Discourse Mutual Information) and predicting response from only context encodings.
	Representation Learning for Conversational Data using Discourse Mutual Information Maximization Bishal Santra,Sumegh Roychowdhury,Aishik Mandal, Vasu Gurram,Atharva Naik,Manish Gupta,Pawan Goyal NAACL, 2022 project page / paper[pdf] Developed a pretrained encoder for dialogues using a structure-aware Mutual Information based loss-function DMI (Discourse Mutual Information).
	Knowledge-Aware Neural Networks for Medical Forum Question Classification Soumyadeep Roy,Sudip Chakraborty,Aishik Mandal,Gunjan Balde,Prakhar Sharma,Anandhavelu Natarajan,Megha Khosla,Shamik Sural,Niloy Ganguly CKIM, 2021 codebase / paper[pdf] Developed a knowledge aware BERT based model for improved medical text classification.