Nikhil Behari

I'm a PhD student in the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab, advised by Professor Ramesh Raskar. My research interests include computational imaging and 3D scene understanding with a focus on automating imaging system design for perception in human and planetary health. My research is supported by the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellowship, under which I am advised by Dr. Corey Ippolito and Dr. Uland Wong.

I received my B.A. in Computer Science and Statistics from Harvard in 2022, and my M.S. from MIT in 2026. During my undergrad, I was a Research Fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society advised by Prof. Milind Tambe. I am also a Non-Resident Tutor for Harvard's Mather House, where I lead the Higher Education advising team. This year, I'm co-organizing the MIT Visual Computing Seminar.

Email / Google Scholar / Github

Talks & Media

What Happens If You Keep Slowing Down?
Featured in Veritasium, January 2026
video / mit feature

The Hidden Information in Your Photos
TEDxMIT Talk, December 2025
video

Publications

	ArtifactArena: Evaluating Models by What They Build in the Physical World Kushagra Tiwary, David Mayo, Nikhil Behari, Xiangzhou Sun, Abdulrahman Alabdulkareem, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Boris Katz, Brian Cheung project page / paper
	DENALI: A Dataset Enabling Non-Line-of-Sight Spatial Reasoning with Low-Cost LiDARs Nikhil Behari, Diego Rivero, Luke Apostolides, Suman Ghosh, Paul Pu Liang, Ramesh Raskar CVPR, June 2026 Highlight Top 14% of accepted papers Transparency Award 4.2% of accepted papers project page / paper / code / dataset
	Task-Driven Implicit Representations for Automated Design of LiDAR Systems Nikhil Behari, Aaron Young, Tzofi Klinghoffer, Akshat Dave, Ramesh Raskar CVPR, June 2026 Highlight Top 14% of accepted papers project page / paper / code
	Spatial Calibration of Diffuse LiDAR Nikhil Behari, Ramesh Raskar Technical report, March 2026 project page / paper / code
	Blurred LiDAR for Sharper 3D: Robust Handheld 3D Scanning with Diffuse LiDAR and RGB Nikhil Behari, Aaron Young, Siddharth Somasundaram, Tzofi Klinghoffer, Akshat Dave, Ramesh Raskar CVPR, June 2025 Highlight Top 13% of accepted papers project page / paper / code
	A Decision-Language Model (DLM) for Dynamic Restless Multi-Armed Bandit Tasks in Public Health Nikhil Behari, Edwin Zhang, Yunfan Zhao, Aparna Taneja, Dheeraj Nagaraj, Milind Tambe NeurIPS, December 2024 project page / paper / code
	A Roadmap for Generative Design of Visual Intelligence Kushagra Tiwary, Tzofi Klinghoffer, Aaron Young, Siddharth Somasundaram, Nikhil Behari, Akshat Dave, Brian Cheung, Dan-Eric Nilsson, Tomaso Poggio, Ramesh Raskar MIT Press, 2024 paper
	Towards a Pretrained Model for Restless Bandits via Multi-arm Generalization Yunfan Zhao, Nikhil Behari, Edward Hughes, Edwin Zhang, Dheeraj Nagaraj, Karl Tuyls, Aparna Taneja, Milind Tambe IJCAI, August 2024 paper / code
	SUNDIAL: 3D Satellite Understanding through Direct, Ambient, and Complex Lighting Decomposition Nikhil Behari, Akshat Dave, Kushagra Tiwary, William Yang, Ramesh Raskar CVPR EarthVision, June 2024 paper
	DISeR: Designing Imaging Systems with Reinforcement Learning Tzofi Klinghoffer, Kushagra Tiwary, Nikhil Behari, Bhavya Agrawalla, Ramesh Raskar ICCV, October 2023 project page / paper / code
	ORCA: Glossy Objects as Radiance Field Cameras Kushagra Tiwary, Akshat Dave, Nikhil Behari, Tzofi Klinghoffer, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Ramesh Raskar CVPR, June 2023 project page / paper / code / mit news article
	Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping and Policymaking: Toward Planetary-Scale Resilience, Equity, and Sustainability Snehalkumar 'Neil' Gaikwad, Shankar Iyer, Dalton Lunga, Takahiro Yabe, Xiaofan Liang, Bhavani Ananthabhotla, Nikhil Behari, Sreelekha Guggilam, Guanghua Chi KDD, August 2022 project page / paper
	A Framework for Rapid Active Learning in Resource-Constrained Environmental Sensing Domains Nikhil Behari Senior Thesis, Harvard College, May 2022 paper
	Micronutrient Deficiency Prediction via Publicly Available Satellite Imagery Elizabeth Bondi, Haipeng Chen, Christopher Golden, Nikhil Behari, Milind Tambe IAAI, February 2022 paper
	Using Public Data to Predict Demand for Mobile Health Clinics Haipeng Chen, Susobhan Ghosh, Gregory Fan, Nikhil Behari, Arpita Biswas, Mollie Williams, Nancy E. Oriol, Milind Tambe IAAI, February 2022 paper
	Contextual Segmentation of Fire Spotting Regions Through Satellite-Augmented Autonomous Modular Sensor Imagery Nikhil Behari, Henry Holbrook, Paris Garrett, Corey Ippolito, Chester Dolph AIAA Scitech, January 2022 paper
	Representative Travel Time Mapping: Highlighting Transportation-Based Citywide Inequities in Hospital Access Nikhil Behari KDD Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping, August 2021 paper
	Satellite-Based Food Market Detection for Micronutrient Deficiency Prediction Nikhil Behari, Elizabeth Bondi, Christopher D. Golden, Hervet J. Randriamady, Milind Tambe AAAI Health Intelligence, February 2021 paper