Hi, I'm Soham Poddar!

Portrait of Soham Poddar

Note: This site is being migrated from prior homepage. If you spot a mismatch, please refer to the CV linked above.

About Me

I am currently a PhD Research Intern at Hewlett Packard Labs, Bangalore, India.

Earlier I was a PMRF Research Scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in the department of Computer Science and Engineering, where I worked on the areas of "Optimizing LLMs to improve sustainability" and "Social Media Analytics for mitigating Disasters and Epidemics" under the guidance of Dr. Saptarshi Ghosh.

Research Interests

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) Optimization
  • Social Media Analytics
  • Sustainable AI and Green Computing
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Machine Learning and Deep Learning
  • Disaster and Epidemic Management using Social Data

Recent Work

At HPE Labs I have been developing and benchmarking AI agentic systems for data and memory management, for several tasks such as conversational memory management (memory read/write performance) and context-aware data retrieval (multi-document QA).

My other research at IIT Kharagpur focuses on developing efficient and sustainable AI systems. We analysed the different factors that contribute to energy use in large language models and proposed optimization techniques to reduce their environmental impact. We also highlighted the trade-offs in model output lengths involved in balancing user satisfaction with energy consumption.

Through my doctoral research at IIT Kharagpur, I have been exploring how social media data can be leveraged to better understand and respond to disasters and epidemics, contributing to improved public safety and crisis management. This involves developing automated classifiers for understanding specific concerns people have towards vaccines, as well as large scale analysis of social media trends around COVID-19.