Karnav Popat

I recently graduated with an undergraduate degree and post-graduate diploma from Ashoka University, where I studied Computer Science (and Economics). I wrote my undergraduate thesis on climate modelling and flood forecasting using foundational AI models under Prof. Sandeep Juneja.

I'm currently working on research under Prof. Joyojeet Pal. I am affiliated with Ashoka's Centre for Digitalisation, AI & Society.

My research interests are in digital public infrastructure, computational social science, AI safety & interpretability, and satellite imaging. I've previously worked with Lightspeed VC, Amuse Labs, and Samagra. In my free time, I write, rollerblade, and support Chelsea FC.

Projects

I've worked on several research or side projects in the broader areas of digital public infrastructure or the social sciences. Some of the projects or research I am interested in at the moment:

Bhunaksha

Detailed and historical land records are rarely available easily, especially in India. This restricts many at-scale solutions that depend on quality data being available.

Under the DILRMP project, the government has been working on digitizing Indian land records. I've been able to scrape and process this data for several states and am working towards releasing an open-source dataset.

Open Link
De-anonymizing EHRs

Under the Ayushman Bharat program, the government has been rapidly digitizing healthcare records across the country. A vast set of stakeholders have different levels of access to this data.

Much of this data is "anonymized" by removing identifiers like names and addresses. I demonstrate in an upcoming manuscript that this data can be easily de-anonymized, posing grave privacy concerns.

Open Link
Better xG

In football, the probability of scoring goals is measured by a metric called expected goals (xG). One of the leading providers of xG, Statsbomb, makes a small amount of data open-source.

Using this data, I was able to recreate the industry-leading xG model and add some bells and whistles (interpretability, form-adjustment, etc.)

Open Link

Web games

From time to time, I've made small games and quizzes for fun and profit, either in vanilla Javascript or frameworks. If you're interested in something like this, get in touch!

Bagi Munda's CD

A small web game based on the Chrome Dino that I made for the deluxe release of Bagi Munda's Player No. 1 over the summer of 2025. Funnily enough, the guy who commissioned it (Jai Kher of 5.5 Records) never paid me, but it was a good learning curve.

Open Link
AMaze

One of the first projects I made when I was still learning to code. Mostly interesting because I coded the maze generation and solving (A*) algorithms from scratch. First time I realized how tough the sprite business is.

Open Link