Lavanya Sharan

Senior Data Scientist
Streaming Science & Algorithms Group, Netflix, Inc.
Email: lavanya@csail.mit.edu

I was a research scientist in Ruth Rosenholtz's group in the Dept. of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT from 2012 to 2015. I received my PhD in Computer Science with Edward Adelson at MIT in 2009, and from 2009 to 2012, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Jessica Hodgins's group at Disney Research, Pittsburgh.

As an academic, I studied visual perception from behavioral and computational perspectives. In my work, I used psychophysical methods to measure specific visual abilities, and I built computational models to understand how the human visual system might support those abilities. My research focused on explaining visual perception in real-world conditions rather than simplified, abstract settings, and utilized techniques from computer science, specifically, computer vision and computer graphics, to handle the complexity of real-world visual inputs.