His research spans the areas of natural language processing and reinforcement learning, with a view towards building intelligent agents that learn to operate in the world through both experience and existing human knowledge (ex. text). He is especially interested in developing autonomous systems that can acquire language understanding through interaction with their environment while also utilizing textual knowledge to drive their decision making. Karthik received his PhD from MIT in 2017, and spent a year as a visiting research scientist at OpenAI prior to joining Princeton. His work has received a best paper award at EMNLP 2016 and an honorable mention for best paper at EMNLP 2015.