Two Indian-origin students awarded SoftBank–Arm Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon

Leena Mathur and Pranjal Aggarwal are among eight CMU Ph.D. students selected for the fellowship.

Leena Mathur and Pranjal Aggarwal. / Carnegie Mellon University.

Two Indian-origin doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Leena Mathur and Pranjal Aggarwal, have been awarded the SoftBank Group–Arm Fellowship to support their research in artificial intelligence. The fellowships, announced this month, fund tuition, research expenses, and provide stipends for selected Ph.D. candidates working on AI and human collaboration.

Mathur, a student at CMU’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI), received a two-year fellowship for her work on socially intelligent AI systems. Her research focuses on algorithms that enable robots to infer human intent from speech and gestures, with applications in healthcare and daily life.

Aggarwal, also based at LTI, received a one-year fellowship. His research develops computer-use agents that autonomously interact with digital environments, including software development platforms and scientific tools. He aims to design self-improving systems that not only solve problems but also generate new ones, advancing open-ended AI applications with potential economic impact.

The fellowships are part of CMU’s broader collaboration with Keio University in Japan. In 2024, the two institutions announced a $110 million partnership with universities, government, and industry to advance AI research. The CMU–Keio initiative has already explored robotics for home use, reducing hallucinations in large language models, and AI-driven biomedical discovery.

In May, SoftBank Group Corp. and Arm pledged $15.5 million to CMU to support this collaboration, including the fellowship program. The fellowships are awarded in four research areas: multimodal and multilingual learning, embodied AI for robotics, autonomous AI symbiosis with humans, and life sciences applications.

Martial Hebert, dean of CMU’s School of Computer Science, welcomed the support. “Carnegie Mellon is thankful for the support of SoftBank Group Corp. to fund the SoftBank Group–Arm Fellowship,” he said. He added that the program would help students “harness AI to push scientific discoveries in fields like multimodal and multilingual learning, robotics, autonomy and life sciences.”

Hebert said the initiative will also “catalyze transformative research and promote collaboration with industry to unlock the full potential of AI.”

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