KULKARNI, Pradnya

Degree

PhD Information Technology

Graduation year

2017

Current position

Computer Scientist/Assistant Professor

Employer

MIT World Peace University, Pune, India

Dr Pradnya Kulkarni is an Indian computer scientist who completed her PhD at Federation University in December 2017. Her research project developed a new image representation model, called ‘Pixel N-grams’, for the automated diagnosis of mammographic lesions that can be used as a second opinion by radiologists. For further information about her ground-breaking work, visit www.federation.edu.au/research/study-with-us/why-research-at-feduni/making-mammograms-more-accurate

Pradnya is currently working as an Assistant Professor at MIT World Peace University in Pune, India, where she teaches on courses including Human Computer Interaction, Cloud Computing and Data Structures. She is a reviewer for many international journals and has served as a session chair for international and national conferences. She was a member of the organising committee for the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Communication, held in Pune in 2017. In March 2018, she organised a special session on ‘Medical Image Processing and Machine Learning’ at the IEEE Biomedical and Health Informatics Conference in Las Vegas, USA. She has also organised a session on ‘Computational Intelligence for Medical Image Processing’, to be delivered at the IEEE SSCI-2018 conference in Bengaluru, India, in November 2018.

MIT World Peace University has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Centre for Informatics and Applied Optimization (CIAO) at Federation University Australia. Under this agreement, Pradnya is actively participating in collaborative research with researchers from Federation University. She has published research papers with Associate Professor Andrew Stranieri and Dr Julien Ugon and recently applied for IEEE SIGHT Funding (US $20,000) in collaboration with Stranieri (CIAO, Federation University, Australia), Professor Herbert Jelinek (Charles Sturt University, Australia), Dr. Michael Cree (Waikato University, New Zealand) and ophthalmologists in India, aiming to improve the early detection and treatment of diabetic retinopathy in rural Indian communities.

Pradnya’s research interests include medical image analysis, artificial intelligence and health informatics. She is a permanent resident of Australia and is currently working on various projects with researchers in Australia, New Zealand, USA, China and Sri Lanka. She is also involved in foreign collaborations with regard to student exchange and study tours for students of MIT-WPU. She visited Australia in December 2017 and had meetings with deans, HODs and researchers from Federation University, Charles Sturt University, Deakin University, RMIT University and Monash University regarding student exchange programs, joint supervision and research collaborations.