About
Research Associate
University of Oxford, UK
- Website: https://alokssingh.github.io/
- Phone: +44-7400046063
- City: Oxford, UK
- Degree: PhD (NIT Silchar, India)
- Email: alok.rawat478@gmail.com
Hi!
Currently, I am working with Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford as a Research Associate in Machine Learning.
I received my PhD from National Institute of Technology, Silchar Assam, India. My research interests lie in multimodal machine learning, automatic video captioning, shot boundary detection and natural language processing. I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Thoudam Doren Singh and Prof. Sivaji Bandyopadhyay.
Before starting my PhD, I received my master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Silchar, India in 2019. During my master’s, I invested my valuable time by working on Shot Boundary Detection under the supervision of Dr. Dalton Meitei Thounaojam.
Technical Skills
Updates
-
[Sep 2025] Organising a Beyond English: Natural Language Processing for All Languages in an Era of Large Language Models (GlobalNLP2025) workshop in conjuction with RANLP2025. -
[Nov 2025] Organising a ClimateNLP2025 workshop in conjuction with ACL2025. -
[March 2024] I will be presenting a keynote talk in AMLD conference organised by EPFL at Lausanne, Switzerland. -
[Nov 2023] Organising a ClimateNLP2024 workshop in conjuction with ACL2024. [Nov 2022] Joined Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford as a Research Associate in Machine Learning.-
[Aug 2022] Defended my PhD Thesis titled "Visual Description Generation: Bridging a gap between vision and natural language". -
[March 2022] Ranked first in MSU Shot Boundary Detection Benchmark 2020 organised by Lomonosov MSU Graphics & Media Lab. Team name: NITS-CV-Lab-v1.0 -
[March 2021] Presented a tutorial on Visual Description Generation: Fusion of Vision and Natural Language in the Workshop Recent Advance in Machine Translation (RAMT-2021) at National Institute of Technology Silchar,India. [Online Presentation!] -
[Jan 2021] Serving as a program committee member in ALVR2021 (Advances in Language and Vision Research) 2nd Workshop in conjunction with the NAACL2021.
Publications
Journals
- Kushwaha, N., Singh, A., Sheikh, H.A.. FLAME: Farm-Level Asset Mapping for England. Nature Scientific Data (2025) DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05521-8.
click here to view
- Kushwaha, N., Singh, A., Sheikh, H.A.. NATUREKG: A Natural Language Interface to Cypher in Nature Finance.(PNAS 2025) DOI https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5309106.
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- Meetei, L. S., Singh, A., Singh, T. D., & Bandyopadhyay, S. Does cues in a video help in handling rare words in a machine translation system under a low-resource setting? Natural Language Processing Journal, 100016. 2023
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- Singh, A., Singh, T.D. & Bandyopadhyay, S. V2T: video to text framework
using a novel automatic shot boundary detection algorithm Multimed Tools Appl (2022).
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- Singh, A., Singh, T.D. & Bandyopadhyay, S. Attention based video captioning framework for Hind. Multimedia Systems (2021).
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- Singh, A., Singh, T.D. & Bandyopadhyay, S. An encoder-decoder based framework for Hindi image caption generation. Multimed Tools Appl (2021). (SCIE, IF- 3.9).
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- Chakraborty, S., Singh, A. & Thounaojam, D.M. A novel bifold-stage shot boundary detection algorithm: invariant to motion and illumination. Vis Comput (2021). (SCIE, IF- 3.5).
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- Singh, A., Thounaojam, D. M., & Chakraborty, S. A novel automatic shot boundary detection algorithm: roubust to illumination and motion effect. Signal, Image and Video Processing (SIViP) 14, 645–653 (2019).
click here to view
and [Code!]
Conferences
- A.Singh, N., Khuswaha, C. Christiaen,. Towards an Open Database of Data Centers: Extracting Structured Information from Technical Specification PDFs Using LLMs and RAG. Workshop on Fragile Earth: Innovative AI For Climate Risk Mitigation at KDD2025
- Stammbach, D., Ni, J., Schimanski, T., Dutia, K., Singh, A., Bingler, J., & Leippold, M. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024) inconjunction with ACL2024.
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- D. B., Kampmann, A.Singh, N., Khuswaha, C. Christiaen, B. Caldecott. The Spatial Finance Initiative Global Ethylene Production Database (2024).
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- Singh, A., Meetei, L. S., Singh, S.M., Das, R., Singh, T.D., & Bandyopadhyay, S. VATEX2020: pLSTM framework for video captioning Procedia Computer Science, 218, 1229-1237.
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- Meetei, L. S., Rahul, L., Singh, A., Singh, S.M., Singh, T.D., & Bandyopadhyay, S. Hindi to English Multimodal Machine Translation on News Dataset in Low Resource Setting
Procedia Computer Science, 218, 1229-1237.
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- Singh, A., Meetei, L. S., Singh, S.M., Singh, T.D.,
& Bandyopadhyay, S. An efficient keyframes selection based framework for video captioning.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing ICON-2022.
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- Meetei, L. S., Rahul, L., Singh, A., Singh, S.M., Singh, T.D., & Bandyopadhyay, S.
& Bandyopadhyay, S. An Experiment on Speech-to-Text Translation Systems for Manipuri to English on Low Resource Setting
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing ICON-2021.
click here to view
- Singh, S.M., Meetei, L. S., Singh, A., Singh, T.D., & Bandyopadhyay, S.
& Bandyopadhyay, S. On the Transferability of Massively Multilingual Pretrained Models in the Pretext of the Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman Languages.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Natural Language Processing ICON-2021.
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- Chakraborty, S., Thounaojam, D.M., Singh, A ., & Pal, G., ALO-SBD: A Hybrid Shot Boundary Detection Technique for video surveillance System. Book chapter in Edge Analytics (2022).
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- Singh, A., Meetei, L.S., Singh, T., & Bandyopadhyay, S. Generation and Evaluation of Hindi Image Captioning of Visual Genome. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computing and Communication Systems. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 170. Springer, Singapore.
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- De, P. K., Pankaj, & Singh, A. A Study of Propagation of Love Waves in an Anisotropic Porous Layer Under Initial Stress. Recent Trends in Applied Mathematics: Select Proceedings of AMSE 2019. Springer Singapore, 2021.
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Resume
Education
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD - Computer Sc. & Engg.)
2019 - 2022
National Institute of Technology Silchar, Assam, India (Institute website)
Master of Technology (M.Tech - Computer Sc. & Engg.)
2017 - 2019
CPI – 8.88/ 10 ( Equiv. to 88.8% )
National Institute of Technology Silchar, Assam, India (Institute website)
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech - Computer Sc. & Engg.)
2013 - 2017
Percentage – 73.35%
Uttarakhand Technical University, India
Industrial Training
Internship
June 2015 - July 2015
RWX Technology
Academic Activities
Workshop Organising
ClimateNLP2025 workshop in conjuction with ACL2024 and ACL2025
Workshop Reviewing
ALVR2020 (ACL2020), ALVR2021 (NAACL-2021), MMTLRL2021, (RANLP-2021)
Journals Reviewing
Multimedia Tools and Applications , Applied Intelligence, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Imaging Science Journal, Expert Systems With Applications, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing
Conference Reviewing
ICON-2021, ICICSA2023
Work Experience/Research Activitiese
AI Engineer
Oct. 2022 - Present
NatureMind AI, Oxford, UK
- KG-RAG + Text-to-Cypher for Nature Finance:Built and deployed a domain-specific Knowledge Graph on GCP for Nature Finance and a KG-RAG system using LangChain and neo4j for context-aware retrieval.
- Fine-tuned Instruct LLMs for Text-to-Cypher over the knowledge graph.
Research Associate
Oct. 2022 - Present
Sustainable Finance Group, SSEE University of Oxford, UK
Supervisors: Dr Ben Caldecott and Dr Steven Reece
- ML and NLP for building Asset-Level Spatial Finance Database - IKEA Project (2022- Present):
- Utilized Python Selenium for scraping structured and unstructured data from heterogeneous sources.
- Developed and deployed an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline with open-source LLMs for advanced information extraction and prompt engineering.
- Designed a s-BERT-based ranking system to optimize query-driven information retrieval, enhancing data extraction accuracy
- Satellite Imagery Object Detection and Segmentation for Asset Identification - IKEA Project (2022-Present):
- Developed deep learning models for object detection and segmentation in satellite imagery, aimed at accurately identifying and segmenting assets.
- ML for Decarbonizing Agriculture Sector - Barclay Project (Project Lead) (2022- Present)
- Built a comprehensive data wrangling pipeline for scraping, matching, preprocessing, and duplicate removal across diverse sources.
- Collaborated with project stakeholders to iteratively refine data extraction and retrieval models in an agile development cycle.
- Utilized geospatial data for unsupervised ML based mapping of farms with the owners, enabling precise farm-level carbon emission calculations and enhancing data-driven decision-making.
- Regularly interacted with external partner to gather requirements, adjust data mapping strategies, and align technical solutions with operational needs
Talks/Tutorials:
{ A .pdf version of Alok's resume can be downloaded by clicking here }
Contact
If you would like to reach out to me, please drop an e-mail....! :)
Location:
Oxford, UK
Email:
alok.rawat478@gmail.com
Call:
+44-7400046063
