Ajinkya Kulkarni

Principal Research Scientist IV

Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville · Huntsville, Alabama, USA

ajinkya.kulkarni@uah.edu Google Scholar ORCID 0009-0000-2232-6181 GitHub LinkedIn

Research software engineer and scientist in NASA Earth-science data infrastructure. Sixteen years building and leading the operational systems NASA’s Earth-science archives run on — data publication workflow, cloud-native services, and 3D scientific visualization — with systems still in production at the Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center DAAC and across NASA EOSDIS. Currently working on AI agents for scientific discovery at NASA’s Office of Data Science and Informatics (ODSI).

Selected Roles & Contributions

Project Lead Accelerated Knowledge Discovery (AKD) — AI Agents for Science 2025–present NASA ODSI, with IBM Research. Own the project charter and its ownership functions, team allocation, release planning and sprint delivery. Turning AI into a cognitive research partner for Earth and space science — agent guardrails, scientific query, and an enterprise services layer. Shipping since 2025 on a monthly release cadence. Project

Project Lead NASA Science Research Data Repository 2025–present A secure, NASA-hosted repository giving Science Mission Directorate researchers a home for publicly accessible research data and software. Built on InvenioRDM, it mints DOIs for citation, validates metadata against NASA’s SPD-41a information policy, and surfaces records through NASA’s Science Discovery Engine. Entering public beta.

Technical Lead VISAGE — Visualization for Integrated Satellite, Airborne and Ground-based data Exploration 2016–2019 NASA Earth Science Technology Office, Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) 2016 Award, grant 80NSSC17K0414. PI: Helen Conover. Role printed on project deliverables. NTRS 20170011709

Originating dev. Field Campaign eXplorer (FCX) 2016–2020 Wrote the initial codebase and led development; credited in NASA’s GitHub organization as originating developer. Open-sourced, migrated to NASA NGAP across four environments, and handed to a successor team with onboarding and training. In continuous production on NASA Earthdata since 2020. Original concept: Manil Maskey. Repository · Live

Architect DAPPeR — GHRC Data Publication Workflow Portal 2016–2020 Built GHRC’s end-to-end data publication system, operational May 2017. Designated Task 1 and the Cumulus integration point of the NASA MSFC Migrating GHRC to the Cloud Statement of Work, FY18. Identified in NASA documentation as one of two data publication workflow tools then in operation across EOSDIS.

Co-architect Earthdata Pub — EOSDIS-wide data publication framework 2018–2019 Sole author of the 2018 proposal converting DAPPeR into the Earthdata Pub cloud MVP with its component migration design; second author of the 2019 architecture. The module structure specified there is the structure of the system now deployed in production across NASA EOSDIS. NTRS 20190033898 · Repository

Systems eng. GHRC cloud-native data services 2017–2020 Developed GHRC’s serverless AWS framework for ingesting, cataloging, subsetting, downloading and visualizing multi-instrument Earth science datasets. Sole presenter at the NASA EOSDIS Systems Engineering Technical Interchange Meeting, Goddard Space Flight Center, 2019. Member of the team migrating GHRC — the first of NASA’s twelve DAACs to move to commercial cloud, and the designated pathfinder for the rest. NASA Earthdata

Measured Impact

38 → 74

GHRC datasets published per year after DAPPeR entered operation — “double historical numbers,” per the GHRC Data Management Team’s 2018 User Working Group briefing.

days → minutes

Time to produce a multi-instrument 3D lightning analysis for GLM validation, replacing a manual Python workflow with FCX in the cloud.

75,000+

Views across two recorded ESIP technical tutorials; the Drupal module development tutorial became the first Google result for its search term.

103 · h-5

Citations and h-index, Google Scholar. i10-index 3.

Employment

Principal Research Scientist IV

01/2025 – Present Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville — Huntsville, AL Promoted from Principal Research Scientist III effective July 2026. Project lead, Accelerated Knowledge Discovery (AKD) / AI Agents for Science, NASA ODSI. Project lead, NASA Science Research Data Repository — entering public beta.

Team Lead

09/2022 – 12/2024 Gordian Software — Bengaluru, India

Engineering Manager

05/2021 – 08/2022 Appsmith Software — Bengaluru, India

Research Scientist IV

10/2019 – 10/2020 NASA IMPACT — Huntsville, AL Concurrent with the GHRC DAAC appointment below. Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) processing infrastructure.

Research Scientist III

05/2017 – 12/2020 NASA Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center DAAC — Huntsville, AL Software team lead for GHRC’s data publication and visualization systems through the DAAC’s migration to Earthdata Cloud.

Instructor, Department of Computer Science

05/2014 – 12/2019 University of Alabama in Huntsville — Huntsville, AL Part-time, concurrent with research appointments.

Research Associate

02/2012 – 04/2017 Information Technology and Systems Center, UAH — Huntsville, AL

Graduate Research Assistant

01/2010 – 02/2012 Information Technology and Systems Center, UAH — Huntsville, AL

Graduate Teaching Assistant

01/2009 – 12/2009 Department of Computer Science, UAH — Huntsville, AL

Education

Master of Science, Computer Science

01/2009 – 12/2010 The University of Alabama in Huntsville — Huntsville, AL Thesis: “Understanding Identity Exposure and Reciprocity Attacks in Pervasive Computing Environment”

Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Science

06/2004 – 07/2008 Sant Gadge Baba Amravati University — Maharashtra, India Thesis: “Rich Internet Application for Weekly Automatic College Timetable Generation”

Peer-Reviewed Publications

The Field Campaign Explorer. G. T. Stano, Y. Wu, N. R. Selvaraj, M. Maskey, A. Kulkarni. 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2021. 10.1109/IGARSS47720.2021.9553677
VISAGE — A Visualization and Exploration Framework for Environmental Data. H. Conover, T. Berendes, P. Gatlin, M. Maskey, A. Naeger, S. Wingo, A. Kulkarni, A. Marouane, L. Wang, B. Ellingson, B. Dahal, K. Singhirunnusorn. 2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2019. 10.1109/IGARSS.2019.8897954
Use of Semantic Technology to Create Curated Data Albums. R. Ramachandran, A. Kulkarni, X. Li, R. Sainju, R. Bakare, S. Basyal. The Semantic Web in Earth and Space Science — Studies on the Semantic Web, vol. 20, pp. 107–125, IOS Press, 2015. 10.3233/978-1-61499-501-2-107
Data Albums: An Event Driven Search, Aggregation and Curation Tool for Earth Science. R. Ramachandran, A. Kulkarni, M. Maskey, R. Bakare, S. Basyal, X. Li, S. Flynn. IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2014. NTRS 20140012495
Introducing Provenance Capture into a Legacy Data System. H. Conover, R. Ramachandran, B. Beaumont, A. Kulkarni, M. McEniry, K. Regner, S. Graves. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 51(11), 5098–5104, 2013. 10.1109/TGRS.2013.2282817
Talkoot: Software Tool to Create Collaboratories for Earth Science. R. Ramachandran, M. Maskey, A. Kulkarni, H. Conover, U. Nair, S. Movva. Earth Science Informatics, 5(1), 33–41, Springer, 2012. 10.1007/s12145-012-0094-y
DynamicSD: Discover Dynamic and Uncertain Services in Pervasive Computing Environments. F. Zhu, A. Kulkarni, Y. Wang. IEEE International Conference on Computer Communication Networks (ICCCN), 2011. 10.1109/ICCCN.2011.6005929
Reciprocity Attacks. F. Zhu, A. Kulkarni, S. Carpenter, S. Kolimi. Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), Carnegie Mellon University, 2011. 10.1145/2078827.2078839
Understanding Identity Exposure in Pervasive Computing Environments. F. Zhu, S. Carpenter, A. Kulkarni. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 8(5), 777–794, Elsevier, 2011. 10.1016/j.pmcj.2011.06.007
Understanding and Minimizing Identity Exposure in Ubiquitous Computing Environments. F. Zhu, S. Carpenter, A. Kulkarni, C. Chidambaram, S. Pathak. International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (MobiQuitous), 2009. 10.4108/icst.mobiquitous2009.6853

Preprints

Paper Pilot: A Human-in-the-Loop Expert System for Evidence-Traceable Scientific Manuscript Generation in Applied Sciences. N. Jha, S. Chaudhary, A. Kulkarni. arXiv preprint, cs.AI, 2026. An eight-stage governance pipeline for LLM-assisted scientific writing — approval gates, claim classification, audit logging and evidence-locked revision control. In controlled evaluation, ungated AI drafters fabricated up to 25% of citations; the gated system produced none. arXiv:2608.28596
Plain-Language Names for NASA Earthdata: An LLM Experiment in Dataset Discoverability for Non-Specialists. A. Kulkarni. Zenodo working paper, 2026. 10.5281/zenodo.21196618
Cost Modeling for Public-Facing LLM Chat Applications: An Equal-Budget, Refusal-Aware Comparison of Commercial APIs and Self-Hosted GPU Fleets. A. Kulkarni, P. Parajuli. Zenodo, 2026. 10.5281/zenodo.21195375

Software & Datasets

Earthdata Pub. K. Broughton, E. Campos, B. Ellingson, W. Ellett, D. Gaunt, B. Huffer, A. Kulkarni et al. U.S. Department of Energy Software, 2023. github.com/eosdis-nasa/earthdata-pub
GHRC Field Campaign eXplorer (FCX). NASA GitHub organization — initial code developed by Ajinkya Kulkarni. github.com/nasa/GHRC-FieldCampaign-eXplorer-UI

Invited & Selected Talks

Cloud Native Data Services for Earthdata — sole speaker, 20 minAug 2019 NASA EOSDIS Systems Engineering Technical Interchange Meeting, Goddard Space Flight Center. Session moderated by the EOSDIS System Architect.
VISAGE Framework for Interactive Exploration of Diverse Precipitation Data2019 NASA Earth Science Technology Forum (ESTF2019), Mountain View, CA.
Earthdata Search Bulk Downloader Extension Prototype2018 NASA EOSDIS Systems Engineering Technical Interchange Meeting, GSFC.
Cumulus Metrics Prototype2017 NASA EOSDIS Systems Engineering Technical Interchange Meeting, GSFC.
Data Albums: An Event Driven Data Discovery and Access Tool2014 NASA Earthdata Webinar Series — invited webinar, published on the official NASA Earthdata channel.
FY18 Plans for DAPPeR and FCX — sole presenter2017 GHRC User Working Group Meeting, Huntsville, AL.
Introduction to Drupal Module Development2012 ESIP Federation Meeting, Madison, WI. Recorded tutorial, 60,500+ views; first Google result for its search term.

Honors & Awards

NASA Group Achievement Award — GHRC Cloud Migration2020 “For commitment to innovation, collaboration, and teamwork in the transition of the NASA Global Hydrology Resource Center data center to the cloud.”
NASA MSFC Science and Technology Office — Shark Tank Peer Award2019 “For demonstrating a strong desire to improve operations and software development processes for NASA’s Global Hydrology Resource Center.”
NASA MSFC Science and Technology Office — Peer Award for Innovation2017 “Played a critical role in improving GHRC infrastructure and tools, bringing in hard work, innovation and enthusiasm to the job.”
NASA Group Achievement Award — Arctic Collaborative Environment (ACE)2014
NASA Group Achievement Award — MC3E Field Experiment2011
NASA Group Achievement Award — GRIP Field Experiment2010