Curriculum Vitae

Jun 12, 2026 · 13 min read

Rabimba Karanjai

Staff Agentic AI Researcher at PayPal Research
PhD in Computer Science, University of Houston
Google Developer Expert (Web Technologies & Machine Learning)
NVIDIA Developer Champion | Google TPU Builders Champion

📧 rabimba@gmail.com / rkaranjai@uh.edu | 🌐 rabimba.me | 📞 (469) 438-2410
📍 San Jose, CA 95112

Research Interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of blockchain technology, programming languages, and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on code generation, repair, and AI Reasoning. I am specifically interested in exploring novel applications of large language models (LLMs) to enhance the security and reliability of smart contracts and low-resource domain-specific codes, including vulnerability detection, code analysis, and automated program repair.

I also investigate applying these learnings to other areas of science such as biomedical data and financial data. I am interested in broader topics related to decentralized systems, formal verification, and software engineering.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Houston, Houston, TX (2020 – 2025)
    • Dissertation: “Teaching AI’s to reason and Code, Confidentially”
    • Award: Winner of the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award & UH Best Dissertation Award
    • Advisor: Prof. Weidong (Larry) Shi
    • Defended: July 2025
  • M.S. in Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX (2015 – 2018)
    • Thesis: “Optimizing Virtual Reality”

Work Experience

Staff Agentic AI Researcher

PayPal Research | San Jose, CA | Sep 2025 – Present

  • Lead the design and deployment of production-scale voice commerce systems enabling real-time, multi-turn conversational AI for financial applications.
  • Developed a novel preference optimization framework (CM-DPO) for improving LLM planning under real-world constraints, submitted to ACL Rolling Review (2026).
  • Fine-tune and deploy frontier large language models with up to 120 billion parameters for agentic reasoning and voice applications.
  • Designed a multi-agent adversarial evaluation arena to benchmark robustness of AI systems against coordinated attacks.
  • Filed two U.S. patents in emerging AI technologies at PayPal with a third in progress.

Senior Software Engineer

Clearedin | Dec 2020 – Aug 2021

  • Designed and implemented advanced policy and threat detection engines within the email scanning pipeline, ensuring robust email security.
  • Spearheaded the development of innovative solutions, including URL scanning, phishing detection algorithms, and machine learning pipelines for malicious email classification.

Machine Learning Lead

Fireflies.ai | Aug 2020 – Dec 2020

  • Developed and deployed an on-premise Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) engine, leveraging DeepSpeech and customized models to enhance performance (currently used by over 10 million users worldwide).
  • Built the first Machine Learning team at Fireflies.

Programmer Analyst

Cognizant Technology Solutions | Dec 2010 – Aug 2013

  • Contributed to the Innovation team by spearheading the development of automated mobile hardware and software testing solutions.
  • Leveraged OpenCV and vision-based technologies to design advanced testing frameworks, enabling efficient and reliable validation of mobile devices.

Research Experience

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Houston | Houston, TX | Sep 2021 – 2025

  • AI & Software Engineering: Explored AI in Code Generation, Low-Resource Code Translation, and Reasoning. Investigated healthcare AI by developing analysis systems for histopathology images to enhance vascular disease diagnosis and mitigated hallucinations in AI-driven medical diagnosis. Examined LLM irrationality to identify open research questions.
  • Decentralization: Investigated decentralized infrastructure as code (IaC) using blockchain, developing DIaC for secure infrastructure management. Designed and implemented a decentralized Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) framework over multi-clouds. Researched Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for critical infrastructure protection.

Research Assistant

Rice University | Houston, TX | Jan 2015 – Aug 2018

  • High Performance Computing: Worked on JavaScript parallelization on Mozilla Firefox and other web browser engines to enable running on wearable VR headsets.

Research Associate

Mozilla Research | Sep 2017 – Jan 2018

  • Conducted in-depth research to optimize parallelism and performance in Web Virtual Reality and WebGL, focusing on enhancing the efficiency of three.js (which became the MS thesis).
  • Developed techniques to offload resource-intensive computations to the GPU using WebAssembly, parallelizing object loading and texture rendering.

Summer Research Intern

IBM Almaden Research Center | May 2017 – Aug 2017

  • Developed and was awarded a patented multi-factor authentication system (US Patent US11025643B2) integrating biometric features and blockchain technology.
  • Designed identity specifications for Hyperledger Fabric and innovated Android-based multi-party fingerprint authentication and iris recognition.

Summer Research Intern

IBM Almaden Research Center | May 2015 – Aug 2015

  • Developed a tamper-evident mobile application solution capable of provably verifying application integrity on rooted or jailbroken devices.
  • Designed a tamper-evident data structure and logging system leveraging ARM TrustZone and blockchain.

Researcher

IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab | May 2014 – Nov 2014

  • Embedded cognitive computing and NLP into Watson solutions. Designed document parsing using OCR and DeepQA.
  • Engineered scalable storage/processing for massive datasets and trained customized NLP models and evidence-scoring systems.

Academic Honors & Selected Awards

  • ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, 2025
  • Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award, University of Houston, Fall 2025
  • UH CS Best Dissertation Award, University of Houston, 2025
  • Outstanding PhD Student, University of Houston, 2022–2023, 2023–2024
  • Graduate Tuition Fellowship, University of Houston, 2021–2025
  • Google Cloud Research Innovator, 2023, 2024
  • Cullen Travel Fellowship, 2023
  • Google Research CS Research Mentorship Program, 2023
  • HPE DSI Artificial Intelligence Summer Student Showcase (3rd Place), 2023–2024
  • Sui Foundation Academic Research Award, 2023, 2024, 2025
  • Distinguished Paper Candidate, IEEE ICBC 2022
  • Mozilla Research Fellowship, 2018
  • Graduate Tuition Fellowship, Rice University, 2015–2018

Publications

Journal & Conference Papers

  1. Context Contamination in LLM Analysis of Network Security Logs: Poison with Passive Prompt Injection and Mitigation Evaluation
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Hemanth Hegadehalli Madhavarao, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. USENIX Security 2026 (To Appear).
  2. CausalGraphX: A Counterfactual Graph Neural Network Framework for Explainable Systemic Risk Assessment
    Rabimba Karanjai, Hemanth Hegadehalli Madhavarao, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. AAAI AI4Finance 2026.
  3. QuCoWE: Quantum Contrastive Word Embeddings with Variational Circuits for Near-Term Quantum Devices
    Rabimba Karanjai, Hemanth Madhavarao, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. AAAI QC+AI 2026.
  4. Securing the Multi-Chain Ecosystem: A Unified, Agent-Based Framework for Vulnerability Repair in Solidity and Move
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. ACM AIWare 2025 (Winner of the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award).
  5. Teaching AIs to Reason and Code, Confidentially
    Rabimba Karanjai. PhD Thesis, University of Houston (Best Dissertation Award).
  6. HPCAgentTester: A Multi-Agent LLM Approach for Enhanced HPC Unit Test Generation
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. ACM AIWare 2025.
  7. Evaluating the Quality of Randomness and Entropy in Tasks Supported by Large Language Models
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Ranjith Chodavarapu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. KDD Agentic & GenAI Evaluation 2025.
  8. Collaboration is all you need: LLM Assisted Safe Code Translation
    Rabimba Karanjai, Sam Blackshear, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. FSE 2025.
  9. Synthesizing Public Opinions with LLMs: Role Creation, Impacts, and the Future to eDemocracy
    Rabimba Karanjai, Boris Shor, Amanda Austin, Ryan Kennedy, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. ICEDEG 2025.
  10. LogBabylon: A Unified Framework for Cross-Log File Integration and Analysis
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Dana Alsagheer, Keshav Kasichainula, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi, Stephen Huang. ACM SAC 2025.
  11. AI-Based Target for Personalized Interventions of Atherosclerosis from Gut Microbiota Signature
    Suravi Majumder, Koushik Sen, Rabimba Karanjai. SynBio 2025.
  12. Smart Contract Code Translation based on Concepts
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. ACM Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2024.
  13. TPU as Cryptographic Accelerator
    Rabimba Karanjai, Sangwon Shin, Wujie Xiong, Xinxin Fan, Lin Chen, Tianwei Zhang, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi, Veronika Kuchta, Francesco Sica, Lei Xu. MICRO 2024.
  14. Adding All Flavors: A Hybrid Random Number Generator for dApps and Web3
    Ranjith Chodavarapu, Rabimba Karanjai, Xinxin Fan, Larry Shi, Lei Xu. International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS) 2024.
  15. Trusted LLM Inference on the Edge with Smart Contracts
    Rabimba Karanjai, Weidong Shi. IEEE ICBC 2024.
  16. Decentralized FaaS over Multi-Clouds
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Nour Diallo, Weidong Shi. ACM SAC 2024.
  17. All We Need is Voter Feedback
    Nour Diallo, Dana Alsagheer, Lei Xu, Yang Lu, Rabimba Karanjai, Weidong Shi, Mohammad Kamal. IEEE ICEDEG 2024.
  18. DIaC: Re-imagining Decentralized Infrastructure As Code using Blockchain
    Rabimba Karanjai, Keshav Kasichainula, Lei Xu, Nour Diallo, Lin Chen, Weidong Shi. IEEE TNSM 2023.
  19. Who is Smarter? An Empirical Study of AI-based Smart Contract Creation
    Rabimba Karanjai, E Li, L Xu, W Shi. BRAINS 2023.
  20. Supporting Heterogeneous TEE for Critical Infrastructure Protection
    Rabimba Karanjai, Rowan Collier, Zhimin Gao, Lin Chen, Xinxin Fan, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi, Lei Xu. ACM AsiaCCS 2023.
  21. Decentralized Application Infrastructures as Smart Contract Codes
    Rabimba Karanjai, Keshav Kasichainula, Nour Diallo, Mudabbir Kaleem, Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Weidong Shi. IEEE ICBC 2022 (Distinguished Paper Award).
  22. Privacy preserving event based transaction system in a decentralized environment
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Lin Chen, Mudabbir Kaleem, Weidong Shi. ACM Middleware 2021.
  23. On Conditional Cryptocurrency With Privacy
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Lin Chen, Mudabbir Kaleem, Weidong Shi. IEEE ICBC 2021.
  24. Lessons Learned from Blockchain Applications of Trusted Execution Environments and Implications
    Rabimba Karanjai, L Xu, L Chen, F Zhang, Z Gao, W Shi. ACM HASP 2021.
  25. An event driven framework for smart contract execution
    Mudabbir Kaleem, Keshav Kasichainula, Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Lin Chen, Weidong Shi. ACM DEBS 2021.
  26. Optimizing Web Virtual Reality
    Rabimba Karanjai. Masters Thesis, Rice University, 2018.

Short Papers

  1. Empowering Smart Contracts with Real-time On-Chain AI Inferences
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong (Larry) Shi. IEEE ICBC 2026.
  2. Unlocking On-Chain Intelligence: A Practical Framework for GenAI-Powered Smart Contracts
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong (Larry) Shi. BRAINS 2025.
  3. Ransomware 3.0: Enhancing Risk Management and Mitigation Options with Proof-of-Decryptability and Smart Contracts
    Xinyu Hou, Yang Lu, Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. IEEE ICBC 2025.
  4. DeFaaS: Decentralized Function-as-a-Service for Emerging dApps and Web
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Nour Diallo, Lin Chen, Weidong Shi. IEEE ICBC 2023.
  5. DHTee: Decentralized Infrastructure for Heterogeneous TEE
    Rabimba Karanjai, Zhimin Gao, Lin Chen, Xinxin Fan, Taeweon Suh, Weidong Shi, Lei Xu. IEEE ICBC 2023.
  6. Decentralized Machine Learning Governance: Overview, Opportunities, and Research Challenges
    Dana R. Alsagheer, Nour Diallo, Lei Xu, Rabimba Karanjai, Weidong Shi. IEEE ICBC 2023.

Workshop Papers

  1. Mitigating Hallucinations in AI-Driven Medical Diagnosis
    Rabimba Karanjai, Suravi Majumder. 3rd Annual AI in Health Conference, Rice University, Ken Kennedy, 2024.
  2. Enhancing Vascular Disease Diagnosis through AI-Driven Analysis of Histopathology Images
    Rabimba Karanjai, Suravi Majumder. 3rd Annual AI in Health Conference, Rice University, Ken Kennedy, 2024.
  3. Evaluating Irrationality in Large Language Models and Open Research Questions
    Dana R. Alsagheer, Rabimba Karanjai, Weidong Shi, Nour Diallo, Yang Lu, Suha Beydoun, Qiaoning Zhang. ACM CHI HEAL 2024.

Papers Under Review / Preprints

  1. Allocation Before Ranking: Decoupled Token Compression for OmniLLMs
    Zhenghui Guo, Yilin Yang, Yuanbin Man, Miao Yin, Weidong Shi, Rabimba Karanjai, Omprakash Gnawali, Chengming Zhang. NeurIPS 2026 (Under Review).
  2. Specialists Hold, Generalists Discount: Asymmetric Equilibrium in LLM Routing Auctions
    Xinyu Hou, Yang Lu, Rabimba Karanjai, Pei-Chi Pan, Sen Lin, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. NeurIPS 2026 (Under Review).
  3. Closing the Cost Gap in Verifier-Guided RL: A Smart Contract Case Study
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. NeurIPS 2026 (Under Review).
  4. CM-DPO: Constraint-Margin Direct Preference Optimization for LLM Planning
    Rabimba Karanjai, Qun Gu, Hemanth Hegadehalli Madhavarao, Wenhuan Sun, Xiaojiao Yu, Suryabhan Singh Hada, Libin N. George, Uma Kona, Richard Williamson, Linsey Pang, Prakhar Mehrotra. NeurIPS 2026 (Under Review).
  5. Rules That Govern: A Per-Property Analysis of Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation
    Yang Lu, Rabimba Karanjai, Dana Alsagheer, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. EMNLP 2026 (Under Review).
  6. Profiler: Per-Question Persona Conditioning of Frozen LLMs via Retrieval and Fusion of Synthesized Profiles
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. EMNLP 2026 (Under Review).
  7. VerifyGen-X: Secure Cross-Chain Smart Contract Generation via Scalable Reinforcement Learning from Formal Verification Feedback
    Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Yang Lu, Weidong Shi. NeurIPS 2026 (Under Review).
  8. Aligning Vision Language Models via anchor
    Yilin Yang, Yuke Wang, Rabimba Karanjai, Weidong Shi, Chengming Zhang. NeurIPS 2026 (Under Review).
  9. Unlocking On-Chain Intelligence: A Practical Framework for GenAI-Powered Smart Contracts
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. Middleware 2026 (Under Review).
  10. Bridging Confidentiality and Reliability: Open-Weight Agents for Legal Reasoning
    Dana Alsagheer, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi, Rabimba Karanjai. ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law 2026 (Under Review).
  11. Hype or Hope? Training LLMs on Decentralized GPU Clouds
    Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi. Middleware 2026 (Under Review).

Patents

  • US Patent US11025643B2: Mobile Multi-Party Digitally Signed Documents and Techniques for Using These Allowing Detection of Tamper.
  • Severity-Aware Preference Training Framework for Constraint-Satisfying AI Planners with Minimal-Edit Supervision (Patent Pending - PayPal).
  • Thread-Based Conversational Commerce System with Multi-Modal Ordering and Real-Time Fulfillment Tracking in Messaging Platforms (Patent Pending - PayPal).
  • Latency-Optimized Cascaded Voice Agent Pipeline (Patent Pending - PayPal).

Invited & Conference Talks

  1. “Beyond the Chatbot: A Blueprint for Trustable AI”, Google DeepMind, 2026.
  2. “United in Defense: Architecting Safe and Trustworthy AI Agents”, BSides Seattle, 2026.
  3. “Unmasking the Shadows: AI Red Teaming in the Age of Gemini and VertexAI, fortified by SAIF”, KCDC 2025.
  4. “From Whiteboard to Users: Making Research Accessible”, Google I/O GDE Summit, 2025.
  5. “Unmasking the Shadows: AI Red Teaming in the Age of Gemini and VertexAI, fortified by SAIF”, Drexel University, 2025.
  6. “LLM, Reasoning and Agentic Gemma”, Google Korea, 2024.
  7. “Supercharging GenAI: Ray, Kubernetes, and TPUs for Lightning-Fast Inference”, KubeCon 2024.
  8. “LLMinABox: On Device Personalized Diary & Concierge using your voice and Gemma”, Google Mountain View, 2024.
  9. “Mitigating Hallucinations in AI-Driven Medical Diagnosis”, Rice University, 2024.
  10. “SolMover: Smart Contract Code Translation Based on Concepts”, Berkeley RDI, 2024.
  11. “Privacy aware Zero Knowledge Login using Oauth2 and Passkey”, Columbia University, 2024.
  12. “LLM Applications components and design patterns Hands on Workshop”, University of Washington, 2024.
  13. “Give your web apps superpower with Generative AI and Mediapipe”, University of Missouri - Kansas City, 2024.
  14. “An Empirical Study of AI-based Smart Contract Creation”, Berkeley RDI, 2023.
  15. “On Device Generative AI: Building your own Dall-E in the browser, welcome WebGPU”, Google San Jose, 2023.
  16. “DeepSpeech: A Journey to <10% Word Error Rate”, Google Mountain View, 2023 / DevFest NC Chapel Hill, 2023.
  17. “Visualize your Data in a 3D VR world using A-Frame in WebVR”, OpenVis Conf, 2018.
  18. “Turning sensors into signals”, MIT, 2017.
  19. “Hardening Your IoT Endpoints: A Preventive Toolkit”, LinuxCon ContainerCon, 2017.
  20. “Optimizing Web Virtual Reality”, Web3d, 2017.
  21. “SecurityPI: IronClad your Raspberry PI”, Linux Foundation Open IoT & ELC, 2017.
  22. “State of WebVR & A-Frame: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow Beyond Horizon”, Open Networking Summit, 2017.

Research Grants

  • Sui Academic Research Award (2025) – Primary Investigator, $25,000.
  • Sui Academic Research Award (2024) – Primary Investigator, $25,000.
  • Sui Academic Research Award (2023) – Primary Investigator, $25,000.
  • Grant for Web – Primary Investigator, $15,000.

Professional Activities & Service

  • NVIDIA Developer Champion, 2026
  • Google TPU Builders Champion, 2026
  • Scientific Advisory Committee Member, Texas Quantum Initiative (from University of Houston), 2025
  • Google Cloud Research Innovator, Google Research, 2024
  • Google Cloud Champions Innovator - AI & ML, 2023–2025
  • Google Developer Expert (GDE) – AI (Google Cloud) 2024–2025, Web Technologies (Chrome Team) 2018–2024
  • Certificate of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, University of Houston
  • Mozilla Tech Speaker, Emerging Technologies, 2019
  • Mentor, Google Solutions Challenge (2024) & Women Developer Academy (2024)
  • Judge, MIT Solve, 2020

Academic Service & Reviewing

  • Associate Chair (AC): The 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW)
  • Track Chair: ICEDEG 2026
  • Reviewer (Journals): PLOS One, Frontiers in Blockchain, ACM Distributed Ledger Technologies: Research and Practice, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, Connection Science, ACM Transactions on the Web
  • Reviewer (Conferences): CHI 2026, IEEE VR 2026, AAAI 2025, ICLR 2024, IEEE ICEDEG 2025

Languages

  • Proficient in English, Bengali, and Hindi.

References

Academic References

  • Dr. Weidong Shi
    Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Houston
    📧 wshi3@uh.edu
  • Dr. Lei Xu
    Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Kent State University
    📧 lxu12@kent.edu | 📞 (330) 672-9037
  • Dr. Amin Alipour
    Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Houston
    📧 maalipou@central.uh.edu | 📞 (713) 743-7462

Industry References

  • Dr. Davide Pasetto
    Managing Director - Modeling Engineering, Two Sigma
    📧 davide@twosigma.com
  • Dr. Lars Bergstrom
    Director of Engineering, Android Platform Tools & Libraries, Google
    📧 lars@lars.com