Kartic Subr

K.Subr@ed.ac.uk

Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.),

School of Informatics,

Univ. of Edinburgh, UK.

Office: IF 1.10A

  • 2014-2024: Royal Society UR Fellowship
  • 2019: Lead, GCRF Impact Accelerator
  • 2017: Lead, EPSRC First Grant
  • 2016: Royal Society Challenge Grant
  • 2013: Post doc., Disnery Research
  • 2010: Royal Society Newton Intl. Fellow, UCL
  • 2008: Post doc., INRIA-Grenoble
  • 2006: Marie-Curie Visitor, INRIA-Grenoble
  • 2008: PhD in CS, University of California Irvine
  • 2004: MS, University of California Irvine
  • 2001: Software Engineer, Hewlett Packard ISO
  • 2001: B.E. Comp. Sci. and Engg, Bangalore Univ.

The Timely Approximations Group, led by Kartic Subr, develops algorithms that accelerate the simulation of physical phenomena to enable both design and reactive applications. High-fidelity simulations are often too computationally expensive for interactive use. Our research focuses on creating fast approximations that preserve essential accuracy while drastically reducing computation, making them suitable for real-time constraints and the demands of inverse problem solving. In computer graphics, we design methods to approximate light transport, reflectance, and geometry, enabling interactive rendering, realistic appearance modelling, and neural scene representations that respond instantly to user input. In protein engineering and design, we explore efficient surrogates for molecular interactions, allowing rapid iteration and optimization in large combinatorial design spaces. These approximations enable machine learning–guided workflows that balance speed with predictive power. In robotics, our work focuses on approximating dynamics and control to support agents that must reason and act under tight time budgets in unpredictable environments.

Our agenda unifies these domains under a central principle: timeliness matters. By developing scalable, explainable approximations of physical processes, we aim to unlock new capabilities for systems that must react quickly, adapt continuously, and empower human creativity across science, design, and engineering.

Group Members

Kevin Denamganaï
Post Doc

Zhiyuan (Bruce) Zhang
3rd year PhD

Aleksandra Sobieska
3rd year PhD

Sean Memery
2nd year PhD

Zhaocheng Liu
2nd year PhD

Constance Frachon
1st year PhD

Previous members

Leonardo Castorina
(PhD 2025)
Research Scientist
Astra Zeneca

Alexandros Keros
(PhD 2023)
Post Doc
University of Edinb.

Brian Seipp
(MSc Research 2023)


Tatiana Lopez-Guevara
(PhD 2022)
Research Scientist DeepMind

Carson Vogt
(PhD 2020)
Research Engineer
Naval Postgraduate School.

Elizabeth Vargas
(PhD 2019)
Software Engineer, Sense Photonics.

Thomas Guerneve
(PhD 2018)
Research Engineer, SeeByte.

Rita Pucci
(post doc. 2017-18)
Research Associate, University of Udine.

Divakaran Divakaran
(post doc. 2018-2019)
Lecturer
Azim Premji University.

Bio

Pre-publications

Cotet et al. Crowdsourced Protein Design: Lessons From the Adaptyv EGFR Binder Competition (pdf)

Leonardo Castorina, Chistopher Wood, Kartic Subr. From Atoms to Fragments: A Coarse Representation for Functional and Efficient Protein Design. (pdf)

Sean Memery, Mirella Lapata, Kartic Subr. Can Language Models infer parameters of physical systems? (pdf)

Zhiyuan Zhang, Zhaocheng Liu, Stefanos Papanicolopulos, Kartic Subr. Implicit-Explicit simulation of Mass-Spring-Charge Systems. (pdf)

HIGHLIGHTS
2025
Aug Our paper CueTip was selected for Emerging Technologies at SIGGRAPH 2025.
Apr A preprint of our paper on crowdsourced protein design is up.
Mar Sean Memery's paper on an explainable game assistant is accepted to SIGGRAPH 2025.
Feb Leo, Zhaocheng and Chris' Wells Woods research group adapted TIMED to create de novo protein designs that were ranked 18 out of 1857 designs in Adaptyv Bio's design competition to bind to the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor.
2024
Oct Jianning Deng's paper on articulated NERFs is accepted to NeurIPS24.
Jan Leo's paper on protein design is accepted to the Oxford University Press journal, Protein Engineering Design and Selection.
2023
Jul Michael's paper on robotic ultrasound scanning is accepted to Springer's Autonomous Robots journal.
Apr Alex's paper on Spectral Coarsening is accepted to ACM's SIGGRAPH 2023 conference.
Jan Leo's paper PDBench is accepted to Bioinformatics.
Jan The Royal Society published a video on my research on approximate physics.
2022
Jul Our research on Protein Design with Chris Wood in the School of Biological Sciences featured in Royal Society's live youtube channel.
Jul We spent a week at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition informing the public about our project on protein design.
Mar Our paper on the Theoretical Analysis of Compactness of the Light Transport Operator (link) has been conditionally accepted to ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Conference Track.
2021
Dec Alexandros' paper 'Dist2Cycle' is accepted to AAAI 2022. (link)
Jul My paper 'Q-NET' is accepted to EGSR 21 (Conputer Graphics Forum). (link)
Jan Michael's paper 'Action Sequencing using Visual Permutations' is accepted to IEEE RA-Letters and ICRA 21. (link)
2020
Dec Elizabeth's paper 'On Improved Training of CNN for Acoustic Source Localisation' is accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.
Dec Tatiana's paper 'IV-Posterior' is accepted to Neurips 2020 workshop.
Aug Tatiana's paper 'Stir to Pour' is accepted to IROS 2020.
Jun Awarded a 3-year extension to my Royal Society URF.
Jan Floyd Chitalu's paper on simulating brittle fracture is accepted -- Eurographics (CGF) 2020.
Jan Martin's paper Vid2Param is accepted -- ICRA 2020.
2019
Dec Tatiana's invited talk at a NeurIPS 2019 workshop.
Dec Martin's paper Vid2Param accepted to RA-Letters.
Aug I will be speaking about robot autonomy and intuitive physics at the Barbican Centre in London.