Roboticist and artist — builds autonomous systems that study dynamic worlds, and mythological ones that get reborn in the desert.
Field
Robots that decide where to look, inside questions people pose. Adaptive sampling, digital twins, and the mathematics of how perceiving systems change what they can perceive.
→ researchFire
A nine-animal god from Odisha, built twice at Burning Man with master artisans in India and engineers in Arizona — and documented as an experiment in whether a pattern survives its re-instantiation.
→ artthe two rails make one claim — identity persists through documented re-instantiation.
One tests it in simulation; the other in cane, metal, and fire.
Now · October 2026
- Writing Engineering Mythology II — reincarnation as a design pattern for ephemeral public art.
- Extending spectral kernel dynamics to planetary surface graphs at the DREAMS Lab.
- Calibrating twins against the world — the balanced-rock experiments say how far a simulation can be trusted.
- Holding form: the Navagunjara temporary importation bond closes July 2027.
Recent writing
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The kernel-dynamics framework applied to terrain: how a planetary surface's representable distinctions evolve, and what is conserved when they do.
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How an 18-foot composite god was designed in Arizona, crafted in Odisha, and assembled once, without rehearsal, in the Black Rock Desert — and why the result is a maximum-entropy form.
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If what an agent can distinguish is itself a dynamical variable, Maximum Caliber says which trajectories through distinction-space are most probable — and what they cost.