Dhiraj Srivastava

Dhiraj Srivastava

Pursuing MEng in Computer Science and MS in Life Science at Virginia Tech

About

Hello everyone! I am Dhiraj Srivastava, pursuing double master’s degree Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Master of Science in Life Science at the Virginia Tech, USA. My MS thesis research focuses on developing deep learning models for detecting weeds in crops and predicting yield from high-resolution aerial images under the supervision of Dr. Vijay Singh. I am Graduate Research Assistant at Eastern Shore Agricultural Research and Extension Center, Virginia Tech where I am involved in several agricultural projects and organizing and leading a weed science research team to build deep learning technologies for weed mapping operations.

In the summer of 2022, I worked as a machine learning summer research intern in precision agriculture and remote sensing under USDA-ARS Graduate Summer Research Program at High-Performance Computing Collaboratory, Mississippi State University under the guidance of Dr. Sathish Samiappan and Dr. Alessandro Matese.

I completed my Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India. At the end of my junior year in summer 2019, I did my summer research internship at the University of Leicester, England under the guidance of Prof. Eugene Yu-Dong Zhang where I worked on developing deep learning algorithms to identify brain diseases using MRI images.

Previously I worked at EXL, India as a Data Scientist in the field of sports analytics for NBA, MLB, and NFL clubs. I also spent a short stint at Augmenify, India as a deep learning researcher, and my work was focused on developing deep learning based optical character recognition systems.

My research interests lie at the interface of computer vision and machine learning because of my interdisciplinary background comprising life science, computer science, and mechanical engineering. In the past 3-4 years from my undergraduate to MS, my interest to work in ML+Life Science grew because of projects I completed in various domains from healthcare, sports analytics, agriculture science, mechanical engineering, and finance. I’m very passionate about using Artificial Intelligence to address life science problems.

My CV can be downloaded here.

Recognition

  • 63rd Annual Weed Science Society of America Conference (WSSA), 2023: Won first place award in the poster presentation.
  • Envisioning 2050 in the Southeast: AI-Driven Innovations in the Agriculture Conference 2022: Won outstanding research award and prize money of $2000 at the conference organized by the United States Department of Agriculture.
  • 75th Annual Southern Weed Science Society (SWSS) of America Conference, 2022: Won first place award in the poster presentation.
  • Qualified in Top-6 out of 700 participants for national final round in EXL EQ 2019 machine learning competition and received full-time job offer by EXL. Proposed machine learning based methodologies to minimize the insurance industry loss due to fraud claims along with minimizing False Negatives.
  • Qualified in Top-10 out of 92 teams for national finals in GE Healthcare Precision Hackathon Challenge 2020. Designed the computer vision model to solve case challenge Revolutionising Healthcare with AI and analytics.
  • Flipkart Online Machine Learning Challenge 2019. Qualified level-2 round.
  • Panasonic Scholarship 2016. I was awarded Panasonic Scholarship in 2016. This scholarship is given to 30 students of IITs by Panasonic India. I was one of the 30 students to get it. This scholarship is given for pursuing Bachelor’s education at IIT.