Media Analytics | Kausik Sivakumar

Kausik Sivakumar is an Associate Researcher in the Media Analytics Department at NEC Laboratories America, currently based in San Jose, CA. His research focuses on Embodied AI and Autonomous Driving, with an emphasis on long-horizon skill learning for mobile manipulation and language-based open-world driving.

At NEC Labs, Kausik works on building intelligent agents that bridge perception, language, and action. His current projects involve integrating generative AI, and vision-language models to enable robots and autonomous vehicles to reason over dynamic tasks, environments, and user intent. He is particularly interested in grounding behavior in both physical context and natural language to create adaptable and generalizable systems for real-world deployment.

Kausik received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, and his MSE in Robotics from the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he was part of the GRASP Lab, where he worked on projects involving reinforcement learning, motion planning, and computer vision. Before joining NEC Labs, he contributed to real-time robotic manipulation and visual perception systems at  Tutor Intelligence, helping build deployable solutions for complex, unstructured environments.