AKSHAY JINDAL
PhD | University of Cambridge

  • Name: Akshay Jindal

  • Job: Research Scientist | Intel

  • Location: Bellevue, USA

  • Email: akshayjin@gmail.com

About Me

I'm a Research Scientist in Intel's Graphics Research Org., based in Bellevue, Washington. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge in 2022, under the supervision of Prof. Rafał Mantiuk. Previously, I was a research intern at NVIDIA Research (2022) and a Software Engineer at WalmartLabs R&D (2017-2018). I received an integrated master’s in Information Technology from IIIT-Bangalore in 2017.

My research interests lie at the intersection of real-time graphics and visual perception, with my research encompassing visual quality metrics for video games, perceptually optimized low bandwidth rendering, novel scene representations, rendering for 3D displays, and gloss appearance. I've also worked on computer graphics applications in retail at WalmartLabs and structural classification of LiDAR point clouds during my Master's.

My Research Interests

Computer Graphics

Rendering; Neural scene representations; Display Algorithms

AI and Analytics

Deep Learning; Adverserial training; Multi-agent systems

Computer Vision

Image-based rendering; In-painting; Light fields

Visual Perception

Psychophysics; Virtual reality; Augmented Reality

Resume

  • Working History

  • Research Scientist — Intel Graphics Research, USA

    April 2023 - Present

    Working on video game quality evaluation, novel scene representations, and perceptually-optimised rendering.

  • Postdoc — University of Cambridge, UK

    Oct 2022 - Feb 2022

    Ran user studies to model inconsistencies in gloss presentation on displays.

  • Research Intern — NVIDIA Research, UK

    Feb 2022 - Sep 2022

    Developed a new metric for video game quality assessment. I was part of the Human Performance and Experience research group.

  • Early Stage Researcher — University of Cambridge, UK

    Jan 2019 - Jan 2022

    Ran psychophysical studies and modelled perception of image artifacts under motion, developed a perceptually-optimised VRS rendering algorithm, and built a hyper-realistic display.

  • Software Engineer II — @WalmartLabs, IN

    Aug 2017 - Dec 2018

    Developed and integrated an Augmented Reality product visualization feature with the existing Sam’s club iOS App, and a backend capable of serving millions of 3D models.

    Built various VR, AR and Diminished Reality prototypes for retail applications.

  • Engineering Intern — @WalmartLabs, IN

    Jan 2017 - Aug 2017

    Developed a help center web application for Sam’s Club using AngularJS as frontend and Java Spring/Cassandra as backend.

    Developed a VR shopping experience deployable on all major VR headsets and travelled to US HQ to showcase it to Walmart’s senior leadership.

  • Intern (Mobile Apps) - Hilti, Malaysia

    May 2016 - July 2016

    Developed an intelligent chatbot for handling all company’s products and services related queries with support for computer vision. Responsibilities included Facebook and Google APIs integration, build system management and cloud deployment.

  • Intern (Parallel Systems) - Siemens Tech. IN

    May 2015 - July 2015

    Worked on the scalability of one of their binary instrumentation tool. Responsibilities included performance evaluation, bottlenecks identification and program optimisation.

  • Education History

  • University of Cambridge, Cambridge

    Jan 2019 - Oct 2022

    Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science

  • International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

    July 2012 - July 2017

    Integrated Masters of Technology

    CGPA: 3.5/4

  • Aklank Public School, Kota

    July 2010 - July 2012

    Senior Secondary

    Board: Central Board of Secondary Education, New Delhi

    Percentage: 87%

  • St. Paul’s Sr. Sec. School, Udaipur

    July 1998 - July 2010

    Secondary

    Board: Central Board of Secondary Education, New Delhi

    CGPA: 9.4/10

Tools Skills

  • Unity 3D

  • OpenGL

  • PyTorch

  • OpenCL

Coding Skills

  • Python

  • MATLAB

  • Java

  • C#

  • C++

Language Skills

  • English

  • Hindi

  • German

Portfolio

All
Computer Graphics
Computer Vision
Artificial Intelligence
Visualization
Displays & Perception
Rendering for Hyper-Realistic Displays: A Benchmark Study
Lightfield, Lumigraph, and NeX-MPI rendering methods are benchmarked on high-resolution HDR images.
Perceptual Model for Adaptive Local Shading and Refresh Rate
Variable Rate Shading (VRS) and refresh rate are optimized using perceptual motion-quality model to maximize rendering quality for a given rendering budget.
Reproducing Reality with a High-Dynamic-Range Multi-Focal Stereo Display
A novel high-dynamic-range multi-focal stereo display that can reproduce 3D objects with high fidelity so that they are confused with real 3D objects.
Motion-adaptive refresh rate and resolution
A perceptually optimised rendering method exploiting modern displays adaptive-sync capabilities.
Voxelizer: Unity Asset
An easy to use real-time voxelization engine capable of converting any mesh or even entire unity scene into a voxel model with just one click.
See it in your space
An augmented reality native iOS app to visualize furniture in your space with features including variable lighting, progressive textures and baked shadows. [Demo on request]
VR Shopping
A virtual Walmart shopping experience. [Demo on request]
Lightfield Renderer
An OpenCL+Qt5 based lightfield renderer developed for teaching Advanced Graphics and Image Processing.
Diminished Reality
Realistically deleting objects from images
Structural Classification & 3D reconstruction of LiDAR point cloud
A tool for feature extraction, visualization and roof plane reconstruction from airborne LiDAR data and .
Texture Mapping Progressive Meshes
Constructing a progressive mesh from an arbitrary mesh such that all meshes in the PM sequence share a common texture parameterization.
Particle-based Simulation of Sand and Sparks
A simple physics engine with support for inter-particle interactions and efficient memory management to realistically simulate weidling sparks and sand.
Ramayana
A 2D RPG built using libgdx library and deployed on desktop and mobile platform.
Scientific Visualization
Implemented various data visualization techniques to visualize Indian ocean salinity and geostrophic current data using OpenGL.
Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation of Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmissions
A tool built on GAMA platform to create a data driven simulation of an epidemic.

Publications

    Image-GS: Content-Adaptive Image Representation via 2D Gaussians.
    Zhang, Y., Kuznetsov, A., Jindal, A., Chen, K., Sochenov, A., Kaplanyan, A., & Sun, Q. arXiv preprint. (www)
    The effect of display capabilities on the gloss consistency between real and virtual objects
    Jindal, A.*, Chen, B.*., Piovarči, M., Wang, C., Seidel, H.P., Didyk, P., Myszkowski, Karol., Serrano, A., & Mantiuk, R. K. SIGGRAPH Asia, 2023. (www)
    Rendering for Hyper-Realistic Displays: A Benchmark Study
    Jindal, A. & Mantiuk, R. K. Short Paper Track, European Conference on Visual Media Production, 2022. (pdf)
    How bright should a virtual object be to appear opaque in optical see-through AR?
    Liu, J., Jindal, A., Mantel, C., Forchhammer, S. & Mantiuk, R. K. International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 2022. (pdf)
    Perceptual Model for Adaptive Local Shading and Refresh Rate
    Jindal, A., Wolski, K., Myszkowski, K. & Mantiuk, R. K. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (SIGGRAPH Asia, 2021). (www)
    Reproducing Reality with a High-Dynamic-Range Multi-Focal Stereo Display
    Zhong, F., Jindal, A., Yöntem, A.O., Hanji, P., Watt, S.J. & Mantiuk, R. K. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (SIGGRAPH Asia, 2021). (www)
    A perceptual model of motion quality for rendering with adaptive refresh-rate and resolution
    Denes, G., Jindal, A., Mikhailiuk, A., & Mantiuk, R. K. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) (SIGGRAPH, 2020). (www)
    Contour Extraction in Buildings in Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Local Geometric Descriptors and Visual Analytics
    J. Sreevalsan-Nair, A. Jindal, and B. Kumari. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (2018). (www)
    Using Gradients and Tensor Voting in 3D Local Geometric Descriptors for Feature Detection in Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds in Urban Regions
    J.Sreevalsan-Nair, and A. Jindal. in the Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, July 2017. (www)
    Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation of Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmissions
    Akshay Jindal and Shrisha Rao. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS '17). (www)

Patents

    Texture opacity optimizations for optical see-through AR displays.
    A Jindal; Intel Corp. US Patent App. 18/432,970., 2024. (www)
    Methods and systems for generating a planogram at a retail facility
    MNK Wadhonkar, A Jindal and N Agarwal; Walmart Apollo LLC. US Patent App. 16/920,085, 2021. (www)
    System and method for assessing quality of produce
    MNK Wadhonkar, P Aggarwal, A Setia, A Jindal, R Kumar, A Jhunjhunwala, AA Grochala; Walmart Apollo LLC. US Patent App. 16/745,195, 2020. (www)

Invited Talks

Perceptually motivated variable rate shading
July 8, 2021
Huawei Computer Graphics and GPU Architecture Seminar

Presented a framework for perceptually optimising adaptive graphics hardware such VRS and G-Sync.

Evolution of Foveated Rendering Techniques
June 4, 2021
Rainbow Lab Machine Learning Reading Club

Presented a review of all foveated rendering techniques proposed in the last three decades and the future direction of the field.

Open-problems in Computer Graphics
April 19, 2018
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

Talked about state-of-the-art algorithms and the top unsolved problems in computer graphics.

Quick Realization of AR/VR Design in Unity3D
March 6, 2018
National Institute of Design, Bangalore

Covered the basic concepts of AR and VR and gave a tutorial on how to develop such apps using Unity 3D

Investigating Epidemics using Agent-Based Models
April 11, 2017
Fields of View, Bangalore

Talked about how Agent-based Modeling can be used to overcome the limitations of prior mathematical models for epidemiology

Awards & Honors

  • Competitions

  • Runner-up of HPG Student Competition

    July 2022

    High‑Performance Graphics, Real-time Path Tracing Challenge

  • Best Pitch Award

    July 2019

    Entrepreneurship in Technical Science Summer School, Denmark

  • Runner-up of Walmart Hackday

    Feb 2018

  • Runner-up of MakeMyTrip Hackathon

    Dec 2016

  • Winner of DigitalOcean Cloud Hack

    Oct 2016

  • Finalist, DreamWorks Animation Challenge

    Sep 2016

  • Second Runner-up of HackforIndia: The Appfest 2016

    May 2016

    A 12 City Wide Hackathon across India.

  • Runner-up of Steer Quest

    Apr 2016

    Animation/ VFX/ Gaming Hackathon.

  • Finalist in IndiaHacks Travel and Transport

    Mar 2016

    India’s largest Hackathon.

  • Winner of The 2016 Hilti Mobile App Competition

    Feb 2016

    An International Hackathon by Hilti Asia IT Services.

  • Second Runner-up of Applift Datathon

    July 2015

    A data analytics hackathon by Applift India.

  • Winner of HackIndia (Bluemix category)

    July 2015

  • Winner of Hackathon - Code the future

    July 2015

    National Hackathon by AceHacker and Wipro Digital.

  • Winner of Informatica Codathon

    July 2014

    A national coding competition organised by Informatica.

  • Scholarships

  • Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Research Fellowship.

    Jan 2019

  • Travel grant from Google India, 2017.

    March 2017

  • ACM-India/IARCS Travel Grant

    March 2017

  • Google-TATA-Udacity Android Nanodegree Scholarship

    Jan 2016
Contact me for more information on any of my projects. Looking forward to hearing from you.