Rakesh Etikala
PhD candidate and in the Computer Vision Group, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Rakesh Etikala is an PhD candidate and research associate in the Computer Vision Group at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, led by Prof. Joachim Denzler. He started out in Mechanical Engineering at CMR College of Engineering and Technology in India and worked as a data analyst at Accenture before moving to Germany, where he completed his M.Sc. in Scientific Instrumentation at Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena, Germany. His master’s thesis looked at energy demand transformation pathways and the role of green hydrogen and low-carbon technologies in the industrial and transport sectors. Alongside his studies he worked at the Fraunhofer Institute for Casting, Composite and Processing Technology on computer vision models for a pultrusion machine, and at the Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology on the H2 Global project. Before starting his PhD he was a research assistant in the Computer Vision Group, where he worked on debiasing with optimal transport and on improving model robustness under distribution shifts. As part of the GENAI-X project, his doctoral research focuses on uncertainty estimation approaches for non-stationary spatio-temporal regimes, with hydro-climatic extremes such as floods, droughts, landslides and late-frost events as the main application. He is interested in understanding when models can be trusted, and how uncertainty estimates can improve the reliability of predictions in real-world environmental applications. His broader research interests include domain adaptation, time series analysis and forecasting, climate and environmental AI, and renewable energy systems.

Mail: rakesh.etikala@uni-jena.de
Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WSIbARcAAAAJ&hl=en
Website: https://inf-cv.uni-jena.de/home/staff/etikala/