Ankit Kumar

Ankit Kumar is an AI/ML Engineer and researcher working across the technology, research, and digital initiatives of IIT Kharagpur’s Centre of Excellence for Unified AI-Enabled Craft Ecosystem Platform. His work spans multiple facets of the Centre’s mandate—from the development of its digital ecosystem and AI-enabled platforms to computational research into the science behind traditional crafts, multimodal knowledge systems, and intelligent tools designed to connect research, artisans, craft knowledge, and technology.

He has led the development of digital portals, applications, and AI-driven systems associated with the Centre and its broader institutional initiatives, working across the complete technology lifecycle—from system architecture and backend infrastructure to artificial intelligence, data pipelines, user-facing applications, deployment, and continued technical evolution. His work focuses particularly on building systems that can organize, preserve, interpret, and make accessible complex multimodal knowledge spanning text, imagery, cultural context, craft processes, materials, techniques, and scientific information.

A significant part of his research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and Indian craft and cultural heritage. At IIT Kharagpur, he has worked on computational approaches to culturally grounded visual generation and analysis, including multimodal learning, retrieval-augmented methods, domain-specific datasets, and generative models for Ragamala imagery. His work has involved techniques such as Stable Diffusion XL, LoRA/QLoRA, visual-textual retrieval, and computational evaluation of culturally and aesthetically grounded outputs.

Beyond individual AI models, his work emphasizes the development of integrated intelligent systems. His expertise encompasses Generative AI, Large Language Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic AI, multimodal systems, recommendation systems, knowledge retrieval, computer vision, and scalable backend engineering. He works across technologies including Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, FastAPI, LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, vector databases, cloud infrastructure, and modern web technologies.

Within the Centre, his role bridges research and engineering: translating interdisciplinary ideas into deployable technology, developing the digital infrastructure through which the Centre’s work can be documented and accessed, and contributing computational approaches to understanding the relationship between traditional knowledge, craft practice, materials, aesthetics, and contemporary technology. Through this work, he contributes across the Centre’s interconnected efforts in portal development, the science behind craft, AI-enabled knowledge systems, digital preservation, and technology-driven applications for India’s craft ecosystem.