I'm building the UPI for food.

A computer once declared Maggi healthier than rice. iSRL (@isrl-research) is the open research lab teaching it why a grandma would slap it for saying that.

Maida and refined wheat flour are the same thing. Kashmiri chilli is not just a noisy version of chilli. No system in Indian food data can currently tell the difference — so nutrition studies run on shaky ground and compliance checks guess. I lead iSRL's work on IFID, the layer that makes these questions answerable: grounded in FSSAI regulations, ITC-HS codes, and Supreme Court rulings on food classification.

All of it — process, dead ends, and outputs — is open on GitHub: https://isrl.in/

Apart from the main track, I also go down rabbit holes in equity and access (who gets to do what), responsible use of AI in research and also research whether curd rice is better with potato roast or pomegranate.

"How do you build systems that respect human complexity?"

(No, don't try to understand 'so what is your domain' there isn't one except for building systems that meets and respects the human complexity. So the domain is whatever sphagetti that problem has.¹)

• Identity, Transformation, and Function: A Tri-Axial Model for Food Ingredient Classification
• Food Allergens in India: Evidence, Regulation, and the State of Current Knowledge (with Dr.Mahesh PA of JSS Medical College)
• Regulatory Delta of Food Labelling Laws in India: FSSAI 2011 vs 2020 (with S.N. Vukka)
• Indian Supreme Court Defines Hierarchical Classification Framework for Food Products
• Context-Adaptive Color Optimization for Web Accessibility
• Reimagining Software Engineering Interviews in the AI Era: Beyond LeetCode
• Making Accessibility Accessible, Part I: A Care Framework for Developer-Centered Tooling

• ideabank — a scratchbook of half-formed and fully-formed ideas. If something sparks, take it, no attribution needed.
• If you ask of my tech stack? I just pick up whatever is needed for the problem at hand. Recently? Tauri x Svelte, Django x HTMX x Alpine Js with a sidedish tools of typst x quarto.
• Yes, rest and life > hustle.
• Total yes for free and open source. Check out cm-colors py library that I built, cuz I finally picked out the best color palette....but it wasn't readable rip viewer's eyes and I was too lazy to change the colors again - cm-colors finds the closest color visually s.t it's now readable too. The 2 papers that came out of that algorithm is readable on Arxiv too.
• You are so worthy of all the love and goodness regardless of anything you did or didn't do and I don't accept otherwise. Thank you very much.

lalithaar@isrl.in

Ya Devi Sarva Bhuteshu Buddhi Roopena Samsthita, Namasthasyai Namo Namah Salutations to the Goddess who dwells in all beings in the form of intelligence. I bow to her again and again.