About Me

I'm Ujjwal. I was born and grew up in New Delhi, India, and those early years instilled in me a deep curiosity about how things work and how they could work better.

In 2012, I moved to southern India to study Electronics and Communication Engineering at VIT University, Vellore. Those four years left me with an intense love for building new and better things from scratch, which ultimately led me to artificial intelligence.

In 2016, I moved to Amsterdam to pursue a Master's in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam. My master's thesis explored how machines interpret decision-making in interactive visual dialogue, working with Dr. Dieuwke Hupkes and Dr. Elia Bruni in the i-machine-think group at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation.

From 2018 to 2025, I completed my PhD at the Amsterdam Business School, where I worked on a question that fascinated me: how can AI systems detect subjective, abstract concepts in the messy, unstructured world of online social media? Things like atmosphere, sustainability messaging, or brand identity. Under the guidance of Dr. Stevan Rudinac, Prof. Willemijn van Dolen, Prof. Marcel Worring and Dr. Joris Demmers, I explored how we can teach machines to understand what humans mean, not just what they say.

Throughout my PhD, I was fortunate to be part of two vibrant research communities: the multimedia analytics group MultiX at the Informatics Institute and the MIR4Business Lab at the Amsterdam Business School. These communities shaped not just my research, but how I think about the practical impact of AI in real-world business contexts.

Today, I continue this work as a postdoctoral researcher, building AI systems that bridge the gap between abstract human concepts and concrete computational methods. The most interesting problems are rarely the ones that fit neatly into predefined categories.