Gunnika Batra

Gunnika Batra

Research and Development Engineer

Qualcomm Institute - Sonic Arts

About me

Hi!

I am a Research and Development Engineer at the Qualcomm Institute, specializing in Deep Learning for Spatial Audio and Generative AI for Music. With a Master’s degree in Computer Science from UC San Diego, my journey spans diverse AI domains, including Deep Generative Networks, Statistical NLP, Distributed Systems, and Recommender Systems.

With 2+ years of professional ML experience (beyond internships), I have worked across the ML lifecycle—data wrangling, feature engineering, model development, hyperparameter tuning, and deploying models to production. My work has brought me to Health-tech, where I built multimodal ML pipelines, to retail operations at Ernst & Young leveraging AWS and databases, and to a Data Science startup shaping Ed-tech and hiring solutions.

As a Founding Team Member at DPhi, I’ve been part of a mission to democratize Data Science education—leading AI bootcamps, creating intuitive courses, and fostering a global data culture through open innovation.

Research excites me as much as hands-on impact. At DRDO, I explored Neuroscience and AI, dynamically allocating aircraft controls using EEG data to monitor pilot workload. At Qualcomm, I delve into cutting-edge technologies that transform how we experience music and audio.

Beyond work, I thrive in community building, blogging, and hackathons—always seeking to connect, learn, and create.

Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Neuroscience
  • Computer Vision
  • Deep Generative Networks

Education

  • Masters of Science in Computer Science, 2022-2024

    University of California, San Diego

  • B.Tech in Information Technology, 2017-2021

    Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Research and Development Engineer

Qualcomm Institute: Sonic Arts

Aug 2024 – Present California, USA
  • Advancing audio generation techniques through deep networks and diffusion models for realistic music synthesis.
  • Creating a ”Shazam for the brain” — using time-series biosignal data to recognize and generate music.
 
 
 
 
 

Machine Learning Researcher

UC San Diego Health

Jan 2023 – Jul 2024 California, USA
  • Explored predictive models to determine overnight sleep quality from the initial two hours of physiological sensor data across datasets with over 6,000 participants.
  • Attained 92% accuracy in forecasting sleep cycle interruptions using an optimized XGBoost model and multi-modal deep learning architectures.
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Analyst - Technology Consulting

Ernst & Young LLP

Jan 2022 – Jul 2022 Gurgaon, India
Analyzed data and identified critical pain points in the merchandising process; implemented targeted solutions that eliminated 80% of recurrent transaction errors, optimizing operational efficiency.
 
 
 
 
 

Analyst - Technology Consulting

Ernst & Young LLP

Jul 2021 – Dec 2021 Gurgaon, India
  • Worked with Oracle Retail Merchandising System tools and processes like RMS, SIM, and RIM.
  • Improved project efficiency by implementing streamlined processes, reducing daily RIB module integration issues by 63%
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

INMAS, Defence Research and Development Organisation

Jul 2020 – Mar 2021 Remote
  • Estimated the cognitive workload of an individual in real-time using EEG signals.
  • Built an evaluator of the real-time mental state of an individual.
  • It uses descriptive analysis of EEG signals to detect mental states like attention, stress, fatigue, and workload.
 
 
 
 
 

Data Scientist | Founding Team

AI Planet (previously DPhi)

May 2020 – Jul 2021 Remote
  • A Belgium-based startup where we worked towards building data culture and democratizing Data Science learning.
  • I formulated 12 courses, organized AI challenges, hosted live sessions, and conducted 4 large-scale bootcamps on topics ranging from Data Visualization 101 to Explainable AI.
  • Impacted 30K+ Data Science aspirants from 150+ countries and personally mentored over 1000 learners.
  • Empowered Software Development firms with Assessment PaaS & facilitated AI hiring by open-innovation challenges.
 
 
 
 
 

Data Analytics Intern

SHEROES

Jun 2019 – Jul 2019 New Delhi
Created and analyzed metrics of the SHEROES platform and developed computer vision models to understand the user behaviour.

Honors and Awards

Scholarship Recipient

Awarded a scholarship to attend and repreresent Graduate Women in Computing (GradWIC) UC San Diego at the CMD-IT/ACM Richard Tapia Conference. The goal of the Tapia Conferences is to bring together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities to celebrate the diversity that exists in computing.

Best Outgoing Student Award

Honored with the Best Outgoing Student Award from the Information Technology Department of my college.

Alpha Testing team,featured on the website

Was a part of the alpha testing team of GitHub Copilot - the flagship effort on generative AI tools by Open AI and GitHub, built a project using it and demonstrated it to the OpenAI core team. My testimony was also featured on the Copilot website.

AI Summer School

Got accepted into the first-ever Google Research India AI Summer School in the Computer Vision track.

Secured 6th position worldwide at Facebook AI Hackathon

Secured 6th place in Facebook AI Hackathon, competing with more than 2100 participants internationally.

Winner of Amity Cyber Cup

Winner of the Amity Cyber Cup hackathon held at Amity University.

Facebook Developer Circles Scholarship

Selected as one of the 235 developers worldwide to receive a scholarship for a 12-month Machine Learning training by DataCamp and 4-month Deep Learning Nanodegree by Udacity

Winner of Paytm Build for India Hackathon

Winner of the Paytm Build for India hackathon held at IIT Delhi, qualifying amongst 93 teams.

First Runner Up at WIEHack'18

First runner up in WIEHack’18 - an ‘All Women Hackathon’ organized by BVPIEEE and funded by Paytm under the Build for India scheme.

Projects

Reddit Flair Detector

A Flask web application to predict flair (tag) of any post on India Subreddit using Machine Learning Algorithms.

Dog Breed Classifier

A PyTorch implementation of Dog Breed Classification.

Dynamic Automation Allocation

Dynamically allocating the aircraft control by detecting the level of pilot’s cognitive workload.

Sleep Quality Assessment

Multi-modal ML and DL architectures to forecast overnight sleep quality from the first 60 minutes of sleep data. We’re testing out various predictors of sleep quality such as duration, number of durations, and number of slow waves.

User Sign-Up Source Identification

Summer internship project to identify the source of a user’s profile picture on the SHEROES platform.

Visual Question Answering

Answering questions posed in natural language about the contents of an image - in the form of short text.

VoiceBox- A Sign Language Translator

Recognition of hand gestures in 3D space using a single low resolution camera for converting American Sign Language into any spoken language.

Positions of Responsibilities

 
 
 
 
 

GitHub Field Expert

GitHub

Feb 2021 – Feb 2022
 
 
 
 
 

Mentor - Tensorflow

Google Code-in

Nov 2019 – Jan 2020
 
 
 
 
 

GitHub Campus Expert

GitHub

May 2019 – Feb 2022
 
 
 
 
 

Lead

Women Techmakers BVP

May 2019 – Jul 2020
 
 
 
 
 

Web Executive

Developer Student Clubs BVP by Google Developers

May 2019 – May 2018
 
 
 
 
 

SHEROES Campus Lead

SHEROES

Dec 2018 – Jul 2020

Let's Connect