Janavi Gupta
I am a fourth-year undergraduate studying computer science with a minor in human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. I am fortunate to be working with Professor Zackory Erikson on human-robot interaction and assistive robotics. I am passionate about building technologies that help people, especially at the intersection of caregiving/healthcare.
Email / LinkedIn / GitHub / Google Scholar

About Me
I am an undergraduate researcher at the Robotic Caregiving and Human Interaction Lab, working with Professor Zackory Erikson on software and hardware development and evaluation of assistive robotic interfaces for people with motor impairments. I've had the opportunity to co-author several papers, and one of them won a Best Paper Award at the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Conference 2024. You can access the rest of my publications below or on Google Scholar. I am also the Undergraduate Coordinator for the lab, leading community-building initiatives, managing social logistics, budgeting, and stakeholder engagement to support undergraduate integration and lab recruitment.
In addition to research, I was a Software Engineering Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs in 2025, where I worked on AI tools integrated into an internal Banker Copilot for Mergers and Acquisitions under their Investment Banking Engineering division. Before that, I was a Software Engineer Intern at Palo Alto Networks in 2024 on the AI Runtime Security team, where I worked on guardrails to ensure the safety of LLM-integrated applications.
I am also a trained Odissi (Indian classical) dancer and currently serve as Senior Advisor for CMU Abhinaya, Carnegie Mellon University's competitive Indian classical dance team. I was previously Captain and Assistant Captain.
I completed my Senior Honours Thesis in December 2025, which you can view here. Talk coming soon!
Publications
*authors contributed equally
WAFFLE: A Wearable Approach to Bite Timing Estimation in Robot-Assisted Feeding
Akhil Padmanabha*, Jessie Yuan*, Tanisha Mehta, Rajat Kumar Jenamani, Eric Hu, Victoria de Léon, Anthony Wertz, Janavi Gupta, Ben Dodson, Yunting Yan, Carmel Majidi, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, Zackory Erickson
Towards an LLM-Based Speech Interface for Robot-Assisted Feeding
Jessie Yuan, Janavi Gupta, Akhil Padmanabha, Zulekha Karachiwalla, Carmel Majidi, Henny Admoni, Zackory Erickson
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) Adjunct, 2024

VoicePilot: Harnessing LLMs as Speech Interfaces for Physically Assistive Robots
Akhil Padmanabha*, Jessie Yuan*, Janavi Gupta, Zulekha Karachiwalla, Carmel Majidi, Henny Admoni, Zackory Erickson
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), 2024
PDF / Website / Code / CMU News / The Tribune Review / LeadingAge Article
Akhil Padmanabha, Janavi Gupta, Chen Chen, Jehan Yang, Vy Nguyen, Douglas J. Weber, Carmel Majidi, Zackory Erickson
ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Conference, 2024
Best Systems Paper Award
PDF / Website / Code / IEEE Spectrum / CMU News / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette / Arduino / NY Times
Detecting Anaemia Using Machine Learning and Computer Vision
Janavi Gupta, Reetu Jain, Mohan Kshirsagar, Shekhar Jain
Journal for Software and Hardware Research in Engineering, 2021

Last Updated: December 2025