PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Krishna Somandepalli

Krishna Somandepalli is a Staff Research Engineer at Google DeepMind in New York City who works on multimodal AI, from audio and facial expression to generative video. He earned a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara in 2012, worked on brain connectomes with functional MRI at NYU Langone Medical Center until 2015, and began a PhD at the University of Southern California in 2015 under Shri Narayanan. At USC's Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, he led the MICA group, collaborated with the Geena Davis Institute on Project SeeJane, and interned at Google from 2018 to 2020. The 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History recognised his research on Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor narratives, and VideoPoet, a language model for zero-shot video generation that he co-authored, won an ICML 2024 Best Paper award. He contributes to the Gemini 2.5 family of models, with a focus on understanding audio and human expression.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2007–2012

    Engineering degrees in India and California

    He earns a B.E. in electronics and communication engineering at University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering in 2011. In 2012, he completes an M.S. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Matthew Turk.

  2. 2012–2015

    Brain imaging at NYU Langone

    From 2012 to 2015, he works as a junior research scientist at NYU Langone Medical Center. There he quantifies subcortical brain connectomes with functional MRI in children with autism.

  3. 2015

    A PhD at USC

    In 2015, he begins a PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California, advised by Shri Narayanan in the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory. His thesis is titled Learning Shared Subspaces across Multiple Views and Modalities.

  4. By 2020

    Media intelligence at SAIL

    By 2020, he leads the MICA group at SAIL, helps create the Center for Computational Media Intelligence, and builds three large-scale open-source datasets. With the Geena Davis Institute, he works on Project SeeJane, which analyzes over 600 movies from 2014 to 2019.

  5. 2018–2020

    Three Google research internships

    He interns at Google in 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2020, he demonstrates federated learning for classifying 42 emotion labels at scale in a privacy-preserving manner.

  6. 2023

    Deswarte Prize in Digital History

    He receives the 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History for research developing computational methods to analyze Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor narratives.

  7. 2024

    VideoPoet wins ICML Best Paper

    He is a co-author of VideoPoet, a decoder-only transformer language model that learns across video, image, audio and text and synthesizes video with matching audio. The paper receives a Best Paper award at ICML 2024.

  8. As of October 2026

    Staff Research Engineer at DeepMind

    He is a Staff Research Engineer at Google DeepMind in New York City, after earlier work at Google Research. He contributes to the Gemini 2.5 family, with a focus on multimodal capabilities, particularly understanding audio and human expression.

Career

  1. NowGoogle DeepMindStaff Research Engineer
  2. 2018–2020GoogleIntern
  3. 2012–2015NYU Langone Medical CenterJunior Research Scientist
  4. University of Southern CaliforniaMICA Group Leader

Education

  1. From 2015University of Southern CaliforniaPhD
  2. 2012University of California, Santa BarbaraM.S.
  3. 2011University Visvesvaraya College of EngineeringB.E.

From the biography.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  3. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Google. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Krishna Somandepalli yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Resume | Krishna Somandepalli sail.usc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. About Me | Krishna Somandepalli sail.usc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Krishna Somandepalli | Staff Research Engineer, Google DeepMind krishnasomandepalli.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation (arXiv) arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. VideoPoet: A large language model for zero-shot video generation research.google. Checked 21 October 2026.