Purnima is a postdoctoral researcher at NYU MARL. She completed her Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and is passionate about building intelligent interactive tools for creativity. Her research focuses on developing generative AI models for synthesizing environmental sounds, enabling the generation of sounds using fine-grained semantic control. The ultimate goal of her research is to uncover novel avenues for creative sound exploration and discover novel sound elements within a model’s latent space.
Purnima's research has led to publications in journals and conference venues such as IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (TASLP), IEEE International Conference on Acoustic, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and ACM Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). She is also the recipient of the SPH Media award for the top graduate in research programs, a university-level award at NUS.
In addition to her academic credentials, she has nearly 15 years of experience in the industry, working in various software engineering and consulting roles. She was also involved in building the Women Who Code network in Singapore, as well as building software developer communities in the city.