Curriculum Vitae

Rabimba Karanjai

Staff Agentic AI Researcher · PhD · Google Developer Expert

2010 – 2013

The Builder Awakens

Started as a Programmer Analyst at Cognizant, building automated mobile testing solutions with OpenCV. First taste of making machines see and decide.

OpenCV Mobile Testing Automation
2014 – 2015

Watson & The Research Lab

Joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab. Embedded cognitive computing and NLP into Watson solutions. Trained custom NLP models before "LLM" was a buzzword.

Watson NLP DeepQA
2015 – 2018

VR, Browsers & a Master's Degree

MS at Rice University. Research Assistant parallelizing JavaScript for VR headsets at Mozilla Research. Optimized WebGL and Three.js for wearable VR. Earned a Mozilla Research Fellowship.

WebVR WebGL Three.js Mozilla
2015 & 2017

Patents at IBM Almaden

Two summer internships at IBM Almaden Research Center. Invented a multi-factor authentication system using biometrics + blockchain — awarded US Patent US11025643B2. Built tamper-evident systems with ARM TrustZone.

Patent Blockchain Biometrics TrustZone
2020

The Startup Life

Machine Learning Lead at Fireflies.ai — built the on-premise ASR engine used by 10M+ users. Then Senior Engineer at Clearedin, designing phishing detection and URL scanning pipelines.

ASR DeepSpeech Phishing Detection
2020 – 2025

The PhD Quest: Teaching AI to Reason

PhD at University of Houston, advised by Prof. Weidong Shi. Dissertation: "Teaching AIs to Reason and Code, Confidentially." Won the Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award and UH Best Dissertation Award.

35+ papers. 3x Sui Foundation grants. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. Google Cloud Research Innovator.

LLM Reasoning Smart Contracts Code Generation Blockchain
2025 – Present

PayPal: Production AI at Scale

Staff Agentic AI Researcher at PayPal Research. Leading voice commerce systems with 120B parameter models. Filed 3 patents. Building multi-agent adversarial evaluation arenas.

Voice Commerce Agentic AI 120B LLMs Production
35+
Peer-Reviewed Papers
4
US Patents
50+
Invited Talks
3x
Sui Foundation Grants

Selected Awards

🏆 Dan E. Wells Outstanding Dissertation Award
🏅 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Google Developer Expert (Web & ML)
🌐 Google Cloud Research Innovator
🎓 UH Best Dissertation Award
🔥 NVIDIA Developer Champion

Service & Community

Associate Chair — ACM CSCW 2026
Scientific Advisory Committee — Texas Quantum Initiative
Google Developer Expert — Web Technologies (2018–present), Google Cloud (2024–present)
Reviewer — IEEE ICBC, ACM CSCW, BRAINS, CHI, AAAI, ICLR

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