Kushagra Chitkara

Kushagra Chitkara is an AI researcher and entrepreneur based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.¹ He is a co-founder of The Almanac (now OpenAlmanac), an AI-powered knowledge base founded in October 2025 alongside Rohan Sharma.¹¹⁰ Chitkara holds a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur and a Master of Science in Data Science from Harvard University, where he maintained a 3.9 GPA and cross-registered at MIT.¹

Education

Chitkara's undergraduate admission followed an All India Rank of 1352 on the JEE Advanced examination in May 2019, which placed him among the top entrants of a test taken by hundreds of thousands of candidates.¹ He enrolled in the B.Tech program in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kharagpur, attending from 2019 to 2023.¹

After graduating, Chitkara entered the MS in Data Science program at Harvard University in August 2023, with an expected completion in May 2025.¹ He cross-registered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the same period and earned a 3.9 GPA at both institutions.¹

Undergraduate research at IIT Kharagpur

Chitkara worked on several research projects with IIT Kharagpur faculty across different areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

From August to December 2021, he conducted spatio-temporal analysis of COVID-19-related tweets under Professor Pabitra Mitra in the Computer Science and Engineering department.¹ The work produced a co-authored paper, "Time Series Analysis on Covid 19 Summarized Twitter Data Using Modified TextRank," with Ajit Kumar Das and Apurba Sarkar, presented at the International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Pattern Recognition (CIPR-2022) and published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems series.⁶⁷

From January to April 2022, Chitkara worked with Professor Animesh Mukherjee, a Distinguished Member of the ACM, on algorithmic auditing of sponsored search results on Amazon India.¹¹² The project fell within Mukherjee's broader research program on platform fairness, which produced the paper "Antitrust, Amazon, and Algorithmic Auditing," examining self-preferencing practices in Amazon's marketplace through audits of the Buy Box, offer listing pages, Alexa search, and recommendation systems.⁵¹¹

From April to August 2022, Chitkara held an international research internship at the Universite Grenoble Alpes in France, working with Professor Bruno Raffin and the DataMove team at INRIA, Grenoble Rhone-Alpes.¹ The IIT Kharagpur Foundation USA funded the position with a scholarship of up to $4,000; the foundation's announcement listed his host institution as Ecole Polytechnique.⁴ The scholarship was part of the Foundation's program supporting meritorious students for internships at global institutions, which awarded 13 students in the 2022 cohort.⁴¹⁵

In his final undergraduate year, from August 2022 to May 2023, Chitkara researched neural network pruning techniques under Professor Jiaul Hoque Paik in IIT Kharagpur's AI Department.¹¹³ The work focused on reducing the computational cost and size of large neural network models.¹

Harvard AI Safety Team

At Harvard, Chitkara was a Technical Intro Fellow at the Harvard AI Safety Team (HAIST) from September 2023 to January 2024.¹ HAIST is a student-led research group founded in the spring of 2022 by Alexander Davies to encourage undergraduates to pursue careers in technical AI safety.³ By March 2023, the group had grown to 35 Harvard and MIT students, with a fellowship program enrolling roughly 50 additional students.² The introductory fellowship curriculum, developed in collaboration with Richard Ngo of OpenAI, covers topics including Transformer interpretability and Eliciting Latent Knowledge.²³

Industry experience

In the summer of 2024, Chitkara completed a data science internship at C3 AI in Redwood City, California.¹ C3 AI is an enterprise artificial intelligence software company founded by Tom Siebel in 2009 and publicly traded on the NYSE since December 2020.¹⁴

Earlier career

From February to July 2020, Chitkara served as Marketing Team Lead for the Kharagpur chapter of AIESEC in India, where he organized events including a Mental Health Day commemoration attended by over 200 students and the annual "Balakalakaar" event for underprivileged children.¹

From February to May 2021, he worked as a Data Science Fellow at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Hospital in Ahmedabad, building a query system to track vaccination status for over 2,500 healthcare workers.¹ The system was later expanded to cover the 0.73 million healthcare professionals in Ahmedabad, with functionality to handle data inconsistencies such as misspellings and records of vaccine refusals.¹

OpenAlmanac

In October 2025, Chitkara co-founded The Almanac with Rohan Sharma.¹¹⁰ Sharma, an IIT Delhi graduate and Harvard Master of Engineering candidate in Computational Science, serves as CEO.¹ The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, builds an AI-powered knowledge base.¹ The Almanac is part of the Canopy Spring 2026 cohort at Founders, Inc..

Projects and interests

Chitkara is a member of Cerebral Valley, a San Francisco-based AI community, under the username @ligma.⁹ At the Nano Banana Hackathon, he built a solo project called "Comics as a service" using the Gemini API to generate AI comics with consistent style and character design across panels.⁸

At Harvard, he completed a CS171 Data Visualization project analyzing all Indian Premier League cricket matches from 2008 to 2022, and an AC209A Introduction to Data Science project on factors contributing to coffee quality.¹

References

1. Kushagra Chitkara — The Almanac(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
2. Undergraduates Ramp Up Harvard AI Safety Team Amid Concerns Over Increasingly Powerful AI Models — The Harvard Crimson(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
3. Announcing the Harvard AI Safety Team — EA Forum(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
4. IIT Kharagpur Foundation USA awards 13 students with International Internships — IITKGP Foundation(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
5. Antitrust, Amazon, and Algorithmic Auditing — arXiv(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
6. Computational Intelligence in Pattern Recognition: Proceedings of CIPR 2022 — Springer LNNS(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
7. Book Chapters and Conference Papers 2021-22 — Netaji Subhash Engineering College(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
8. Gallery — Nano Banana Hackathon — Cerebral Valley(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
9. Ligma — Cerebral Valley(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
10. The Almanac — Product Hunt(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
11. Antitrust, Amazon, and Algorithmic Auditing — SSRN(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
12. Animesh Mukherjee — IIT Kharagpur CSE(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
13. Jiaul Hoque Paik — Personal Page(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
14. C3 AI — Wikipedia(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
15. IIT Kharagpur Foundation (IITKGPF) USA Award Program for International Internships — IIT Kharagpur(accessed Apr 18, 2026)