About Me
Omkar Thawakar is a PhD researcher at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) specializing in video understanding, multimodal learning, and large multimodal models (LMMs). He is advised by Prof. Fahad Khan and Dr. Salman Khan.
His research explores composed video retrieval, open-world video instance segmentation, multimodal reasoning, and self-evolving agentic systems. He aims to design AI systems that reason, adapt, and generalize beyond closed-world assumptions.
Beyond academia, he is the Founder and Tech Lead of Lawa.AI, an agentic AI startup building privacy-preserving, multilingual AI assistants deployed in enterprise and various business settings across the UAE.
Research Interests
Primary
- Multimodal Learning & Reasoning
- Video Understanding & Retrieval
- Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
- Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
- Agentic & Self-Evolving AI
- Open-World Learning
Secondary
- Efficient & Transparent LLMs
- Multilingual & Cultural AI
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- World Models & Long-Horizon Reasoning
Teaching & Service
Teaching Assistant — MBZUAI
- Computer Vision
- Multimodal Learning
Reviewer
CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IJCV, ACL, TPAMI
50+ papers reviewed
Working With:
PhD Advisors
Collaborators & Mentors
Startup Mentors
Bachelor's Advisors
