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ML Research · Paris

Learning across domains

I’m Saranga, a machine-learning researcher interested in computer vision, multimodal learning, generative modeling, and representation learning. My work so far has involved projects across healthcare, scientific machine learning, cultural heritage, text, and audio.

Currently Doctoral Researcher
Sorbonne Université

Research Publications

* Equal contribution where indicated in the author list.

  1. 2026

    DiffEx: Explaining a Classifier with Diffusion Models to Identify Microscopic Cellular Variations

    Anis Bourou*, Saranga Kingkor Mahanta*, Thomas Boyer, Auguste Genovesio

    Under review at MICCAI 2026
    Paper ↗
    BibTeX
    @article{bourou2025diffex,
      title={DiffEx: Explaining a Classifier with Diffusion Models to Identify Microscopic Cellular Variations},
      author={Bourou, Anis and Mahanta, Saranga Kingkor and Boyer, Thomas and Mezger, Valérie and Genovesio, Auguste},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09663},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2502.09663},
      archivePrefix={arXiv}
    }
    
  2. 2025

    Detection of Malaria Infection from parasite-free blood smears

    Nicolas Bourriez*, Saranga Kingkor Mahanta*, Ivan Svatko, Eleanor Lacassagne, et al.

    medRxiv (preprint)
    Paper ↗
    BibTeX
    @article{bourriez2025malaria,
      title={Detection of Malaria Infection from parasite-free blood smears},
      author={Bourriez, Nicolas and Mahanta, Saranga Kingkor and Svatko, Ivan and Lacassagne, Eleanor and Atchade, Aurore and Leonardi, Francesco and Cohen, Ethan and Massougbodji, Achille and Argy, Nicolas and Cottrell, Gilles and Genovesio, Auguste},
      journal={medRxiv},
      year={2025},
      doi={10.64898/2025.12.29.25343125}
    }
    
  3. 2023

    Exploiting Cepstral Coefficients and CNN for Efficient Musical Instrument Classification

    Saranga Kingkor Mahanta, Nihar Jyoti Basisth, Eisha Halder, Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman Khilji, Partha Pakray

    Evolving Systems (2023)
    Paper ↗
    BibTeX
    @article{mahanta2023exploiting,
      title={Exploiting Cepstral Coefficients and CNN for Efficient Musical Instrument Classification},
      author={Mahanta, Saranga Kingkor and Basisth, Nihar Jyoti and Halder, Eisha and Khilji, Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman and Pakray, Partha},
      journal={Evolving Systems},
      year={2023},
      doi={10.1007/s12530-023-09540-x}
    }
    
  4. 2023

    Textual Entailment as an Evaluation Metric for Abstractive Text Summarization

    Swagat Shubham Bhuyan*, Saranga Kingkor Mahanta*, Partha Pakray, Benoit Favre

    Natural Language Processing Journal (2023)
    Paper ↗
    BibTeX
    @article{bhuyan2023textual,
      title={Textual Entailment as an Evaluation Metric for Abstractive Text Summarization},
      author={Bhuyan, Swagat Shubham and Mahanta, Saranga Kingkor and Pakray, Partha and Favre, Benoit},
      journal={Natural Language Processing Journal},
      volume={4},
      pages={100028},
      year={2023},
      doi={10.1016/j.nlp.2023.100028}
    }
    
  5. 2021

    COVID-19 Diagnosis from Cough Acoustics using ConvNets and Data Augmentation

    Saranga Kingkor Mahanta, Shubham Jain, Hoang Van Truon, Darsh Kaushik, Koushik Guha

    First International Conference on Advances in Computing and Future Communication Technologies · IEEE Xplore (2021)
    Paper ↗
    BibTeX
    @inproceedings{mahanta2021covid,
      title={COVID-19 Diagnosis from Cough Acoustics using ConvNets and Data Augmentation},
      author={Mahanta, Saranga Kingkor and Jain, Shubham and Truong, Hoang Van and Kaushik, Darsh and Guha, Koushik},
      booktitle={2021 First International Conference on Advances in Computing and Future Communication Technologies (ICACFCT)},
      year={2021},
      doi={10.1109/ICACFCT53978.2021.9837350}
    }
    
  6. 2021

    Deep Neural Network for Musical Instrument Recognition using MFCCs

    Saranga Kingkor Mahanta, Abdullah Khilji, Partha Pakray

    Computación y Sistemas (2021)
    Paper ↗
    BibTeX
    @article{mahanta2021deep,
      title={Deep Neural Network for Musical Instrument Recognition using MFCCs},
      author={Mahanta, Saranga Kingkor and Khilji, Abdullah Faiz Ur Rahman and Pakray, Partha},
      journal={Computación y Sistemas},
      volume={25},
      number={2},
      pages={351--360},
      year={2021},
      doi={10.13053/CyS-25-2-3946}
    }
    

Professional Pathway

01

Feb. 2026 – Present

Doctoral Researcher

Sorbonne Université

Applying computer vision and multimodal methods to interpret and restore Byzantine seals, in collaboration with historians.

Paris, France
02

Jan. 2025 – Jan. 2026

Research Engineer (CDD)

Institut de Biologie de l’École Normale Supérieure (IBENS)

Developed smartphone-embedded deep-learning models and an app for microscopic and sub-microscopic malaria detection.

Paris, France
03

Apr. 2024 – Oct. 2024

Research Intern · Master Thesis

Institut de Biologie de l’École Normale Supérieure (IBENS)

Proposed diffusion-model counterfactual explanations for interpreting classifier decisions on biological datasets.

Paris, France
04

May – Sep. 2023 · Jun. – Sep. 2022

Google Summer of Code Contributor

ML4SCI

Worked on regression, classification, anomaly detection, and dark-matter substructure analysis for DeepLense.

Remote
05

Apr. 2023 – Jul. 2023

Intern

DXOMARK

Stress-tested image-quality assessment models and built an automated evaluation pipeline.

Boulogne-Billancourt, France
06

Jul. 2021 – Sep. 2021

Research Intern

NIT Silchar · Aix-Marseille University

Developed textual-entailment methods for evaluating semantic consistency in abstractive summaries.

Silchar, India · Marseille, France

Academic Record

01

Feb. 2026 – Present

PhD in Computer Science (Machine Learning for Digital Humanities)

Sorbonne Université, France
02

Sep. 2022 – Oct. 2024

Master in Data and Artificial Intelligence

Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France
03

Aug. 2018 – Jun. 2022

Bachelor of Technology in Electronics and Communication Engineering

National Institute of Technology Silchar, India

additional projects

Generative AI · Biomedical

DiffEx

Diffusion-model counterfactual explanations for identifying microscopic cellular variations.

Read more ↗
Natural Language Processing

Text Summarization Evaluation

Textual entailment as a measure of semantic consistency in abstractive summaries.

Read more ↗
Generative Vision · PyTorch

Neural Style Transfer

Implemented neural style transfer from scratch in PyTorch and compared it with a pretrained TensorFlow Hub model.

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Generative Audio · TensorFlow

Sound Generation with VAEs

Trained vanilla and variational autoencoders on the Free Spoken Digit Dataset and studied their performance.

Read more ↗
Computer Vision · CNN

Facial Expression Recognition

Built a CNN to classify five facial expressions and run real-time recognition through a webcam with OpenCV.

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Computer Vision · Transfer Learning

Real-time Face Mask Detector

Fine-tuned VGG19 to build a real-time face-mask detector using OpenCV and Keras/TensorFlow.

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Computer Vision · Clustering

Colour Detection in Images

Used K-means clustering to identify dominant image colours and retrieve images using colour names.

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NLP · Topic Modelling

Topic Extraction from Chats

Applied latent Dirichlet allocation to dialogue topics and generated day-wise WordClouds from WhatsApp chats.

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NLP · Web Scraping

Citation Generator from URLs

Built a system that extracts title, author, and year from webpages to generate Chicago-style reference strings.

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NLP · Flask

Spam & Random Text Classifier

Combined multinomial Naive Bayes with additional checks for gibberish and selected abusive language.

Read more ↗
Regression · Ensemble Learning

Restaurant Delivery Prediction

Combined multiple regression models through weighted averaging to predict restaurant delivery times.

Read more ↗
Time Series · SARIMA

Bribery Cases Forecasting

Built a SARIMA forecasting instance for bribery-case counts for a Smart India Hackathon project.

Read more ↗

A few milestones along the way

2022

Charpak AME Scholarship

Full scholarship from the Embassy of France in India to pursue a Master’s degree in France.

2021

1st position · DiCOVA 2021 Challenge

Track 1: COVID-19 diagnosis from cough sound recordings.

2020

Finalist · National Crystal Ball Hackathon

Restaurant delivery-time prediction problem by Blue Yonder.

2020

Grand Finalist · Smart India Hackathon

Built a spam classifier, SARIMA forecasting instance, and chatbot for the main website.

Beyond research · Personal

There’s more to a man than his papers

I often travel and seldom write...

Any questions or just wanna say Hi?

To realize our dreams, we must first learn to normalize them.

— SKM