Aniket Bera

Dr. Aniket Bera is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Purdue University and holds an Adjunct Associate Professor role at the University of Maryland at College Park (UMIACS). He directs the IDEAS Lab at Purdue and previously served as a Research Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on Affective Computing, Computer Graphics (AR/VR), AI & Robotics, Social Robotics, and medical AI applications for mental health diagnostics.

• Affiliations: Purdue University (Primary), University of Maryland (Adjunct), UMIACS
• Career: Joined Purdue in 2017, extensive industry collaborations with Disney Research, Intel, and C-DAC

Research Interests:

• Affective Computing: Emotion perception via gait analysis, speech, and facial/body expressions
• AR/VR: Redirected walking, virtual environments, and human motion modeling
• Medical AI: AI-driven mental health detection systems (e.g., VidSole dataset) in collaboration with medical schools

Key Contributions:

• Developed Project Dost (mental health initiative)
• Received 2020 Brain & Behavior Seed Grant ($X) for emotion-gait research
• Authored 65+ papers (1,800+ citations) with awards at IEEE VR 2021

Funding & Leadership:

• Serves as Senior Editor for IEEE RA-L (Planning/Simulation)
• Conference Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH MIG 2022

Labs/Teams: IDEAS Lab (Purdue), UMD GAMMA Group