Girish A. Koushik

About me

I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Surrey in the UK working on A Robust Multimodal Framework for Hate Speech Detection on Social Media Platforms under the supervision of Dr. Diptesh Kanojia and Prof. Helen Treharne.

I received a Master’s degree in Advanced Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence from the University of Strathclyde, UK in 2023. I also have a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru, India.

I became a Chess Grandmaster in 2019 and an International Master in 2013. I have won several national and international chess tournaments. For more information, see my Chess page.

My CV can be found here.

Recent updates

• Attended the AAAI 2026 in Singapore (Jan 2026).
• Our paper TRACE: Textual Relevance Augmentation and Contextual Encoding for Multimodal Hate Detection was accepted to the AI for Social Impact (AISI) track at AAAI 2026 (Nov 2025).
• Our paper The Mind’s Eye: A Multi-Faceted Reward Framework for Guiding Visual Metaphor Generation was accepted to the GenProCC workshop at NeurIPS 2025 (Oct 2025).
• Received the Best Paper Award at the MM4SG workshop during The Web Conference 2025 in Sydney, Australia (Apr 2025). See the announcement on LinkedIn.
• Attended The Web Conference 2025 in Sydney, Australia (Apr 2025).
• Our paper Towards a Robust Framework for Multimodal Hate Detection: A Study on Video vs. Image-based Content was accepted to the MM4SG workshop at The Web Conference 2025 (Jan 2025).
• Our paper Natural Language Reinforcement Learning was released on arXiv (Feb 2024).
• Team “StrathClust” took third place in the CIUK 2023 Cluster Challenge representing the University of Strathclyde (Dec 2023).
• Graduated with Distinction from the MSc in Advanced Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence at the University of Strathclyde (Oct 2023).
• Started my PhD at the University of Surrey (Sept 2023).