Hi! I'm Ruchira Ray. (she/they)
I'm a 1st Year Robotics + AI PhD Student @ University of Edinburgh.
My research interest lies in multimodal perception & robotics.
I have a Master's in CS from UT Austin with a focus on controlled data generation and image editing (advised by Dr. Amir Zamir & Dr. Philipp Krähenbühl).
I'm passionate about exploring the social impact of robotics (Dr. Roberto Martín-Martín & UT Good Systems).
Hi! I'm Ruchira Ray. (she/they)
I'm a 1st Year Robotics + AI PhD Student @ University of Edinburgh.
My research interest lies in multimodal perception & robotics.
I have a Master's in CS from UT Austin with a focus on controlled data generation and image editing (advised by Dr. Amir Zamir & Dr. Philipp Krähenbühl).
I'm passionate about exploring the social impact of robotics (Dr. Roberto Martín-Martín & UT Good Systems).
Publications & Posters
Autonomously build and exploit rich audiovisual representations through curiosity-driven interaction
Luca Macesanu*, Boueny Folefack*, Ruchira Ray†, Samik Singh†, Ben Abbatematteo, Roberto Martín-Martín
ICRA 2026
Paper
7th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop
BEST POSTER AWARD
Method to control text-to-image generation system using guided adversarial prompts for effective training data generation.
Teresa Yeo*, Andrei Atanov*, Harold Benoit†, Aleksandr Alekseev†, Ruchira Ray, Pooya Esmaeil Akhoondi, Amir Zamir
TMLR 2025
Paper
Queer in AI as a case study for community-led participatory design in AI.
Ruchira Ray, Organizers Of Queer in AI
Paper
ACM FAccT 2023
BEST PAPER AWARD
Exploring statistically what drives our desire for robot automation
Ruchira Ray, Leona Pang, Sanjana Srivastava, Li Fei-Fei, Samantha Shorey, Roberto Martín-Martín
IASEAI 2026
Paper
DEI Workshop HRI 2025
QAI @ IJCAI 2026
ORAL & PANEL
Connecting mixed-initiative dialog to real-world human-robot interaction
Albert Yu, Chengshu Li, Luca Macesanu, Arnav Balaji, Ruchira Ray, Raymond Mooney, Roberto Martín-Martín
Paper
ICRA 2026
2026 Texas regional NLP Symposium
ORAL
Squeeze-and-Excitation encoder decoder model for fake/spoofed audio detection.
Ruchira Ray, Sanka Karthik, Vinayak Mathur, Prashant Kumar, Maragatham G, Sourabh Tiwari, Rashmi T Shankarappa
ICCCNT 2021
Queer in AI ICML 2021
Paper
Deep Belief Network and Variational Autoencoder hybrid architecture for collaborative filtering.
Rabi Shaw, Ruchira Ray, Sharmistha Mandal, Bidyut Kr. Patra,
Poster
M2L School 2021
Summarizing and comparing different data augmentation strategies using S3PRL toolkits in speech-processing tasks.
Ruchira Ray*, Mina Huh*, Corey Karnei*
Paper
ArXiv 2023
Multiple prompting strategies to jailbreak LLMs' decision-making processes and help them balance refusing unsafe prompts without decreasing helpfulness.
Ruchira Ray*, Ruchi Bhalani*
Paper
ArXiv 2024
* = Equal Contribution
My Updates
Selected in Top 10 in the CSE Department for B.Tech Thesis
March, 2022
Cost-efficient Gait Recognition using 3D CNN
Won Best Paper Award at ACM FAccT23 for
June, 2023
Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI
Presented our work at 12th ICCCNT, 2021
July, 2021
Feature Genuinization based Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation for Audio Anti-Spoofing in Sound AI
Selected to attend
July, 2021
Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School
Selected to attend and present DBVAE poster at
January, 2021
Mediterranean Machine Learning (M2L) Summer School
Won a silver medal at
Feb, 2019
SRM University Research Day
Won and attended
July, 2021
Grace Hopper Scholarship
Won SRMJEE Merit Scholarship from SRM University
June, 2018
Waives 50 % of Tuition
Won Best Poster Award at The 7th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop for
January, 2026
CAVER: Curious Audiovisual Exploring Robot
Clubs & Societies
Foster awareness of LGBTQ+ issues, cultivate a dynamic community of LGBTQ+ researchers and illuminate the remarkable contributions of LGBTQ+ scientists in the field of robotics. Organised social for IROS'23. Currently organising for RLC 2024.
Founder & Organiser
2023
Actively working towards increasing the participation of LGBTQ+ individuals in AI and spreading awareness of diversity in STEM. Organised QAI Workshop for Neurips’21, Neurips'23, ICML'23. Currently organising Neurips'24
Organiser
2021
Spearhead a team of 45+ students to organize events, increase outreach and supervise projects. Outreach and number of events tripled in the year 2020-2021.
Chairperson and ML Lead
2020-2022
Worked on multidisciplinary pet-projects, incharge of mentoring associates, conducting interviews for new recruits , managing events etc.
Undergraduate Artificial Intelligence Researcher
2019-2022
THANKS FOR STOPPING BY!
THANKS FOR STOPPING BY!
Design Courtesy to Anoushka
Publications & Posters
Ruchira Ray, Organizers Of Queer in AI
ACM FAccT 2023
Best Paper
Feature Genuinization based Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation for Audio Anti-Spoofing in Sound AI
Ruchira Ray, Sanka Karthik, Vinayak Mathur, Prashant Kumar, Maragatham G, Sourabh Tiwari, Rashmi T Shankarappa
ICCCNT, 2021
QAI Workshop ICML 2021
DBVAE: Deep Belief Variational Autoencoder for top-N Recommender Systems
Rabi Shaw, Ruchira Ray, Sharmistha Mandal, Bidyut Kr. Patra
M2L School, 2021
A Comparison of Speech Data Augmentation Methods Using S3PRL Toolkit
Mina Huh*, Ruchira Ray*, Corey Karnei*
ArXiv, 2023
CAVER: Curious Audiovisual Exploring Robot
Luca Macesanu*, Boueny Folefack*, Ruchira Ray†, Samik Singh†, Ben Abbatematteo, Roberto Martín-Martín
Paper
ArXiv, 2024
Mitigating Exaggerated Safety in Large Language Models
Ruchira Ray*, Ruchi Bhalani*
ArXiv, 2024
Mixed-Initiative Dialog for Human-Robot Collaborative Manipulation
Albert Yu, Chengshu Li, Luca Macesanu, Arnav Balaji, Ruchira Ray, Raymond Mooney, Roberto Martín-Martín
TMLR 2025
Paper
Controlled Training Data Generation with Diffusion Models
Teresa Yeo*, Andrei Atanov*, Harold Benoit†, Aleksandr Alekseev†, Ruchira Ray, Pooya Esmaeil Akhoondi, Amir Zamir
TMLR 2025
Ruchira Ray, Leona Pang, Sanjana Srivastava, Li Fei-Fei, Samantha Shorey, Roberto Martín-Martín
DEI Workshop HRI 2025
IASEAI 2026
ORAL & PANEL
* = Equal Contribution
Albert Yu, Chengshu Li, Luca Macesanu, Arnav Balaji, Ruchira Ray, Raymond Mooney, Roberto Martín-Martín
ICRA 2026
ORAL
2026 Texas Regional
NLP Symposium
Luca Macesanu*, Boueny Folefack*, Ruchira Ray†, Samik Singh†, Ben Abbatematteo, Roberto Martín-Martín
ICRA 2026
Best Poster
7th UK Robot
Manipulation
Workshop
My Updates
Selected in Top 10 in the CSE Department for B.Tech Thesis
Mar, 2022
Cost-efficient Gait Recognition using 3D CNN
Won Best Paper Award at ACM FAccT23 for
Jun, 2023
Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI
Presented our work at 12th ICCCNT, 2021
Jul, 2021
Feature Genuinization based Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation for Audio Anti-Spoofing in Sound AI
Selected to attend
Jul, 2021
Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School
Selected to attend and present DBVAE poster at
Jan, 2021
Mediterranean Machine Learning (M2L) Summer School
Won a silver medal at
Feb, 2019
SRM University Research Day
Won and attended
Jul, 2021
Grace Hopper Scholarship
Won SRMJEE Merit Scholarship from SRM University
Jun, 2018
Waives 50 % of Tuition
Won Best Poster Award at The 7th UK Robot Manipulation Workshop for
Jan, 2026
CAVER: Curious Audiovisual Exploring Robot
Clubs & Societies
Queer in AI Robotics
Foster awareness of LGBTQ+ issues, cultivate a dynamic community of LGBTQ+ researchers and illuminate the remarkable contributions of LGBTQ+ scientists in the field of robotics. Organised social for IROS'23. Organising for HRI 2025.
Founder & Organiser
2023
Queer in AI
Actively working towards increasing the participation of LGBTQ+ individuals in AI and spreading awareness of diversity in STEM. Organised QAI Workshop for Neurips’21, Neurips'23, ICML'23. Currently organising Neurips'24
Organiser
2021
ACM Women SRM Student Chapter
Spearhead a team of 45+ students to organize events, increase outreach and supervise projects. Outreach and number of events tripled in the year 2020-2021.
Chairperson and ML Lead
2020-2022
Next Tech Lab
Worked on multidisciplinary pet-projects, incharge of mentoring associates, conducting interviews for new recruits , managing events etc.
Undergraduate Artificial Intelligence Researcher
2019-2022
THANKS FOR STOPPING BY!
Selected Work Experience
Developing end-to-end AI/CV systems for on-site waste detection and sorting based on multi object detection, tracking and classification. Worked on time optimization, deployment in pilot run, data managment pipeline
Applied AI Research Engineer
Developed Squeeze-and-Excitation + feature genuinization model for fake audio detection for Bixby. Evaluated on ASVSpoof 2019, outperforming other models using Mel Spectrogram features.
Supervisor: Sourabh Tiwari
ML Research Engineer
Developed a method to control text-to-image generation system using diffusion models & guided adversarial prompts for effective data generation. Achieved data-efficient generations, outperforming others in low-data regimes across various tasks & distribution shifts.
Supervisor: Prof. Amir Zamir & Dr. Teresa Yeo
Research Fellow & Master's Thesis
Investigating the motivation behind the desire for robot automation of different social groups using statistical modelling & analysis and finding correlations.
Building an audio-visual visual exploration system using Franka Panda arm on a tabletop environment for self supervised data collection
Supervisor: Dr. Roberto Martin-Martin & Dr. Sam Shorey
Graduate Research Assistant
University of Texas at Austin
RBT350 Gateway to Robotics: created & graded homework and exams, led hands-on review sessions, taught robot assembly (building the Stanford Pupper Robot from scratch) and control (PD control, forward and inverse kinematics), held office hours, and managed the course webpage.
Supervisor: Dr. Roberto Martin-Martin (Fall 2023), Dr. Mitchell Pryor (Spring 2024)
Graduate Teaching Assistant
MacEwan University
Developed mathematical equation recognition model for first-year calculus assignments and exams using YOLOR.
Supervisor: Prof. Jeffrey Davis
MITACS Globalink Intern
Selected Work Experience
Supervisor: Prof. Amir Zamir & Dr. Teresa Yeo
Research Fellow & Master's Thesis
Graduate Research Assistant
Supervisor: Dr. Roberto Martin-Martin & Dr. Sam Shorey
University of Texas at Austin
Supervisor: Dr. Roberto Martin-Martin (Fall 2023),
Dr. Mitchell Pryor (Spring 2024)
Graduate Teaching Assistant
MacEwan University
MITACS Globalink Intern
Supervisor: Prof. Jeffrey Davis