Sumit Srivastava

Researcher · Engineer · Curious Human

The LinkedIn version of me is not a lie, but it is a highlight reel. It does not show what I love, what I cannot stand, what keeps me up at night, or what made me the person I am today. Not one thing. Not one person. A long, messy, beautiful chain of moments. Here are some of them.

The Cats That Changed Me

I used to hate animals. I am not proud of it, but it is the truth. Then in 2015, I got married, and my wife started bringing home stray kittens and cats, whether I liked it or not. One of them, a kitten named Dharmu, bonded with me when I rescued her. More cats followed. Five were born to Dharmu in our living room.

Slowly, something shifted. I started noticing their innocence, their instincts, the quiet intelligence in how they navigated the world. I began seeing them as living beings, not lesser, just different. And then the word animal, used casually to describe a bad human, started to sting. Why are we so ignorant? So arrogant? Every life is precious. After all, everything is relative. So question everything, and be compassionate, and passionate.

The School That Opened My Eyes

In 2018, I visited children from lower socio-economic homes at a school and spent time learning about their dreams and passions. It broke something open in me. I realised how privileged I was, not in some abstract way, but in the very specific sense that my father could take a loan to fund my education. Yes, even being able to take and pay back a loan is a privilege.

I was never a great student, yet I had enough chances to course-correct my life. And I did. But these children, bright, hungry to learn, did not even have enough to live their dream of going to high school. That was the turning point. I left my industry job and moved to research, determined to do something useful in AI for education.

What Research Taught Me

Did I change the world? Honestly, no, not in any grand way. But my PhD changed me. I fell in love with language research, the sheer depth of it. How language shaped civilisations, cultures, food, relationships, world views. How it sits at the core of evolution. How it connects to game theory, to power, to identity.

Research also taught me the value of perspective. Everyone carries a different world view, and so everything is relative. We do not need to go to war over our differences, we just need to sit around a table, eat food, and talk. With respect. With an open mind. Peace is possible. We do not always choose it, and some of what I see in the world makes that hard to hold onto. But I would rather keep believing it, and keep questioning, than give up on it.

There is so much more to talk about. It will come sooner than later.

And Yes, Food

I love food. Everyone should. It is such a beautiful thing, to make it, smell it, share it. Some of my happiest moments are in the kitchen, experimenting with recipes that are kind to the body and generous to the soul. You will find some of that here too.

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The Professional Me

I'm a computer scientist working across AI research and engineering. My doctoral research at the University of Twente (defence 2026) studies personalisation in human–AI dialogue: how a conversational agent's choice of words shapes user trust, comprehension, persuasion, and cognitive load. It combines controlled user studies with computational dialogue modelling, grounded in psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and is funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship under the EU NL4XAI project. I have published at ACM IUI, ACM UMAP, and Computer Speech & Language, with further work under review at SigDial 2026 and in revision for Cognitive Science, and I have supervised eight MSc and BSc students.

Alongside research, I bring over a decade of industry experience building and leading large-scale software. I'm currently a Senior Backend Engineer at Tibo Energy, and previously served as part-time CTO at BrainBite, setting the technical direction for AI-powered content generation. Earlier, at MiQ Digital, I led a team of seven engineers and re-architected a real-time ad-bidding platform handling 1.5M requests per second at sub-2ms p99 latency.

Recent Publications & Activities