Minesh Mathew

ML/CV Researcher

Bangalore, India

I am a senior machine learning scientist at Wadhwani AI, where I lead the ML team for Oral Reading Fluency (ORF). ORF is deployed in multiple states in India and millions of students are assessed for reading fluency. I have completed MS + PhD from IIIT Hyderabad. I obtained my undergraduate degree in B.Tech Computer Science Engineering from NIT Warangal.

My PhD thesis deals with machine-understanding of document images. Specifically, I worked on problems such as OCR in Indian languages, scene text understanding, and Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA). I co-created the DocVQA benchmark and task, which is widely used to evaluate whether models understand document layout and content, not just recognize text. Through open challenges at CVPR and ICDAR and an ongoing challenge series, this work helped shift document AI research toward integrated, purpose-driven reasoning. OCR and scene text recognition models from my master's and PhD research are deployed on Bhashini, India's national language technology platform.