Pranav Durai

Applied AI Researcher & Systems Engineer

Building intelligence for robotics, healthcare, and planetary environments. Co-Founder & CTO at FRNTL. Research Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Pranav Durai — Applied AI Researcher and Systems Engineer

Milestones

Pranav Durai pitching FRNTL at South Park Commons Curiosity event, IIM Bangalore 2026 — FRNTL Pitch Day — South Park Commons, IIM Bangalore (2026)

Pranav Durai building a custom 9-DOF humanoid robot arm at FRNTL 2026 — Custom 9-DOF Humanoid Arm — FRNTL (2026)

Pranav Durai delivering ACM invited lecture on Transformer architectures and LLMs 2026 — ACM Invited Lecture — Transformers & LLMs (2026)

Pranav Durai as invited panelist at IIT Guwahati Convolve 4.0 Pan-IIT AI ML Hackathon 2026 — Pan-IIT AI/ML Panelist — IIT Guwahati (2026)

Pranav Durai keynote speaker at IIT Kharagpur Kshitij 2026 on Generative AI image generation — IIT Kharagpur Keynote — Generative AI (2025)

Pranav Durai wiring power harness on drywall finishing robot at Origin Robotics 2025 — Drywall Robot Power System Integration — Origin (2025)

Pranav Durai soldering test points on robot subsystem at hardware engineering bench 2024 — Soldering Test Points on Robot Subsystem (2024)

Pranav Durai training deep learning models late night GPU workstation 2026 — Training Deep Learning Models at 3AM (2025)

Pranav Durai designing computer vision detection pipelines at OpenCV office whiteboard 2023 — Designing Medical Diagnosis Systems — OpenCV (2024)

Pranav Durai receiving TIFAC VISION 2047 award from Ex-ISRO Chairman Dr Kiran Kumar at Indian Institute of Science IISc 2023 — TIFAC Award at IISc — Honored by Ex-ISRO Chairman (2023)

Pranav Durai FRTDS non-contact infrared thermal screening system COVID-19 contribution 2020 — COVID-19 Thermal Screening System — FRTDS (2020)

Pranav Durai PRANAV-1 shoebox computer built from scraps Pentium 4 custom kernel 2012 — The Shoebox Computer — PRANAV-1 (2012)

Experience

Co-Founder & CTO — FRNTL (Sep 2025 – Present)
Research Fellow — Stanford University School of Medicine (Jun 2023 – Present). Area of Research: Multi-bed PET-CT Imaging for Early Detection of Cancer Cells.
Technology Strategist — REPLACI (Oct 2024 – Present)
Senior Perception Engineer — Origin (Aug 2024 – Aug 2025). Built and scaled the Computer Vision & Perception Team as a Founding Engineer.
Senior Computer Vision Engineer — OpenCV, Palo Alto (Apr 2023 – Aug 2024). Machine Perception, 3D LiDAR, Multi-Modal Digital Pathology.

Featured Publications

MANTLE: A Framework for Adaptive In-Situ Planetary Perception Using a Modular Uplink Principle — Pranav Durai, Gary Doran (2026)
QuViT: Quantum Vision Transformer — Pranav Durai, Acta Scientific Computer Sciences (2024)
Evaluation of BiRAT for Biomedical Image Registry and Management — WMIC Alaska (2025)
A Novel Human Face Recognition and Temperature Detection System — FRTDS — Springer (2022)

Datasets

HiRISE Landform Classification Dataset — Pranav Durai, Gary Doran (2026)
MSL Boulder Segmentation Dataset — Pranav Durai, Gary Doran (2026)

Selected Talks

Building AI-Native Startups with Foundation Models — IIT Bombay (2026)
Discussion on Physical AI, Egocentric Data Collection & Tactile Sensing — UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab (2026)
Vision-Action-Language Models for Humanoid Autonomy — ROSCon 2025, Pune
Image Generation using Generative AI — IIT Kharagpur (2025)
Quantum Linux: Pioneering the Future of Computing — The Linux Foundation, Monterey CA (2023)

Awards

TIFAC VISION 2047 Award — National Level Finalist, Indian Institute of Science (2023)
Rising Star Award — OpenCV (2024)
Invited Panelist — IIT Guwahati (2026)
Invited Guest Lecture — IIT Kharagpur (2025)

Patents

Context-Aware Rendering of Objects in an Image — Indian Patent No. 202511034956 (Pending, 2025)
Novel IoT-based Multi-Coconut Shell Smoothener — Indian Patent No. 202341015110 (Pending, 2023)

Projects

MANTLE — Multi-task Adaptive Network for Terrain and Landform Extraction using DINOv2 backbone for Mars rover perception.
ML for Planetary Sciences — Co-Founder of the Zenodo community for open science planetary exploration.