For the love of Mathematics, Music and More

One look at Gopi’s shelves of awards shows you the spectrum of his honours; the prestigious SBPA Award, MX CTO Award, multiple Excellence and Annual Awards from Samsung, and a growing list of patents and research papers, including a Best Paper award. Each one, a reminder of his deep commitment to excellence and a display of his varied interests.

That’s what keeps moving Gopi. He is defined by a mosaic of passions; technology, sports, and music. From building AI systems to strumming the guitar with Systolica, SRI-B’s in-house band, he thrives on learning and creating. However, what first captured his imagination was the world of numbers. As a child, he was drawn to mathematics and programming.

“I still remember the first program I wrote - it was to check if there were other numbers like Ramanujan’s famous 1729. I looped through numbers to find others with equal sums of cubes, and when I did, I rushed to my math teacher thinking I had discovered something new. That early spark of curiosity has guided me throughout life.”

A World full of Dreams: SRI-B

An IIT Kanpur graduate, Gopi’s story with SRI-B began early. What started with writing bits of code for Samsung Health across RPM systems, Beta feedback, and Ask an Expert - soon evolved into building the foundations of AI at SRI-B.

He joined the OnDevice AI team (now Platform Intelligence) when it was still taking shape. “We were a small group with big dreams,” he recalls. “We wanted to build something meaningful from the ground up.”

That dream took form in STRIDE (Scene Text Recognition In-device) - Samsung’s very own OnDevice OCR engine. Designed, trained, and deployed by the SRI-B team, STRIDE today matches global benchmarks for accuracy while staying light enough to run on-device. The project’s models ranked among the top 15 worldwide in the ICDAR leaderboard and were even cited in a leading AI paper - Parseq: Scene Text Recognition with Permuted Autoregressive Sequence Models. Milestones like these have only led him to achieve more.

Learning Curve, Mentors and Guidance

According to him, SRI-B is an ideal place that nurtures his love for continuous learning and teaching.

“SRI-B gave me the freedom to keep evolving,” he says. Over the years, he’s taken up several technical and managerial programs, conducted sessions through DeepBlue and Transcend, and mentored learners for Andrew Ng’s deeplearning.ai program. These are behavioural learning frameworks developed at SRI-B.

He’s currently also a part of two ongoing programs; the Associate Architect program and Commup Plus for managers.

He reminisces his learning journey with great joy. “I began as a developer, moved into AI research and development, and today I work as an Architect in the domain. This evolution has been possible only because of SRI-B’s culture that encourages growth.” Gopi deeply credits his mentors like Ravi Sankar Guntur, Sukumar Moharana, Barath Raj, Vanraj Vala, Sreevatsa DB, and Raju Dixit for shaping his journey.

“They’ve not just taught me how to code better, but how to think better,” he says.

He believes that dreams don’t stay the same; they evolve. While he enjoyed playing sports during his college days, after moving to Bangalore – he picked up guitar, learnt from scratch and even played at a few places. He also has another superpower of solving the Rubik’s cube in under 40 seconds!

Fond memories in Korea

Gopi had the chance to travel to Korea a few times for work and to him, the experience was memorable not just for the technical collaboration, also for the warmth and support of his Korean team.

Gopi derives inspiration from the multiple roles he has played. He says that wearing both hats of an engineer and manager - has taught him a lot of things.

“My advice as an engineer would be to focus like a sniper. As engineers, we often face an endless list of things we could do. The key is not to stretch ourselves thin, but to pick the few high-value targets and execute them with precision. That’s how real impact is created.” he said.

His advice as a Manager is simple and strong: Guide, then let go. According to Gopi, knowing when to guide and when to let go is what makes a manager truly effective.

“Looking back, I realize that passions and ambitions never really die, they just find new forms. My curiosity in math became AI research, my love for sports keeps me active, and music and puzzles continue to refresh me in the midst of my work schedule.” Pushing boundaries and reinventing himself at every step – that is Gopi’s motto to script more success stories in his journey.