Nikhil Churamani

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Senior AI Scientist
Medtronic Digital Surgery

Visiting Researcher
Department of Computer Science and Technology
University of Cambridge


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230 City Rd

London EC1V 2QY, UK

I work as a Senior AI Scientist at Medtronic Digital Surgery working on Medical Image analyses and Digital Surgery solutions.

Previously, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, working with Prof Hatice Gunes at the Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) Lab. My research focussed on Continual Learning for Social and Affective Robots, aimed towards enabling lifelong adaptability in robots operating in real and open-world settings. In particular, my work focused on embedding robots with a personalised and continually adaptive understanding of human behaviour, allowing them to learn socially and contextually appropriate behaviours in human-centred environments.

My post-doctoral work, funded by Google under the GIG Grant, focused on Federated Continual Learning of Socially Appropriate Robot Behaviours where I was exploring how social robots can adapt to differences in social norms, learning from each others’ experience, in a federated manner.

I completed my PhD at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. My doctoral work titled, Continual Learning for Affective Robotics was funded by the EPSRC International Doctoral Scholarship and the Premium Research Studentship of the Computer Lab, University of Cambridge. My other research interests include Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Neuro-inspired AI, and Human-Robot Interaction.

I completed my MSc in Intelligent Adaptive Systems from Universität Hamburg where I was supervised by Prof Dr Stefan Wermter. My MSc dissertation titled, Modelling Affective Cores for Behaviour Modulation in Social Robots, advised by Dr Pablo Barros, focused on embedding intrisic affective motivations in social robots as an Affective Core that enables different personalities in their behaviour modelling in Human-Robot collaborative tasks.

news

Mar 1, 2025 Happy to announce the Dungeons, Neurons and Dialogues: Second Edition Workshop to be held at ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2025.
Mar 1, 2025 Happy to announce the Leap-HRI Workshop to be held at ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2025.
Feb 17, 2025 New preprint on Continual Learning Should Move Beyond Incremental Classification .
Jan 28, 2025 Paper accepted at the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interection (T-HRI): Participant Perceptions of a Robotic Coach Conducting Positive Psychology Exercises: A Qualitative Analysis.
Mar 11, 2024 Two papers at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2024: Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI): Open-World Learning and Causal-HRI: Causal Learning for Human-Robot Interaction.

selected publications

  1. Churamani2020CL4AR.png
    Continual Learning for Affective Robotics: Why, What and How?
    Nikhil Churamani, Sinan Kalkan, and Hatice Gunes
    In 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2020
  2. McQuillin2022RoboWaiter.png
    Learning Socially Appropriate Robo-Waiter Behaviours through Real-Time User Feedback
    Emily McQuillin, Nikhil Churamani, and Hatice Gunes
    In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2022
  3. Churamani2022DICL4Bias.png
    Domain-Incremental Continual Learning for Mitigating Bias in Facial Expression and Action Unit Recognition
    Nikhil Churamani, Ozgur Kara, and Hatice Gunes
    IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2022
  4. Stoychev2023LGR.png
    Latent Generative Replay for Resource-Efficient Continual Learning of Facial Expressions
    Samuil Stoychev, Nikhil Churamani, and Hatice Gunes
    In 2023 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 2023
  5. Churamani2023ContinualCausality.png
    Towards Causal Replay for Knowledge Rehearsal in Continual Learning
    Nikhil Churamani, Jiaee Cheong, Sinan Kalkan, and Hatice Gunes
    In Proceedings of The First AAAI Bridge Program on Continual Causality, 2023
  6. Churamani2023ConFER.png
    Continual Facial Expression Recognition: A Benchmark
    Nikhil Churamani, Tolga Dimlioglu, German I. Parisi, and Hatice Gunes
    2023
  7. fedlgr.png
    Feature Aggregation with Latent Generative Replay for Federated Continual Learning of Socially Appropriate Robot Behaviours
    Nikhil Churamani, Saksham Checker, Fethiye Irmak Dogan, Hao-Tien Lewis Chiang, and 1 more author
    2025
  8. Churamani2022DICL4Bias.png
    Participant Perceptions of a Robotic Coach Conducting Positive Psychology Exercises: A Systematic Analysis
    Minja Axelsson, Nikhil Churamani, Atahan Caldir, and Hatice Gunes
    ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions, 2025
  9. Mitchel2025CL.png
    Continual Learning Should Move Beyond Incremental Classification
    2025