My name is Harshith Kethavath. I'm an MS Computer Science student at the University of Georgia, currently an Applied ML Engineer at Lab for Geoinformatics and AI Modeling. My current work is SignsOfExtremes, where I use computer vision for extreme weather event prediction.
💼 Open to Applied/ML Engineer and ML Systems roles.
Low-Data Supervised Adaptation Outperforms Prompting for Cloud Segmentation Under Domain Shift Kethavath & Hu - Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF CVPR Workshops, 2026
Zero-shot VLM prompting fails on Sentinel-2 cloud segmentation under domain shift, and the 60 engineered CLIPSeg prompts scored as low as 0.07 mIoU against a 0.255 baselne. Supervised adaptation overtakes all prompting at roughly 8 labeled images, and 5-10% of labels recover ~85% of peak mIoU.
Code, experiments and models -> uga-gaim/2026_CVPRW_CloudPrompts
🛰️ MarsDEMNet - Single-image elevation (DEM) prediction from Mars satellite imagery. Built and ablated 4 architectures on 80,000+ NASA image pairs; a 5-block multi-output U-Net reaches 59.9m validation RMSE via multi-task masked MAE loss over elevation, slope, and roughness. Diagnosed a Lustre filesystem bottleneck on HPC and cut per-epoch data loading from 3,800s to under 600s with RAM-cache preloading.
🌦️ WeatherMind - Modular VLM framework for weather analysis on sky imagery across 4 backends (Qwen, SmolVLM2, Moondream2, Gemma3) with context-aware prompting. A spatiotemporal ETL pipeline (Pandas + OCR) aligns image timestamps with ASOS station logs to generate 15,000+ ground-truth labels, alongside a zero-shot weather-feature detector on open-vocabulary object detection.
🌊 FloodPrint - CONUS-scale spatiotemporal verification of NWS Flash Flood Warnings for the 2024 warm season. A spatial-index + buffer-intersect join matches ~3,700 warning polygons against ~4,730 Flash Flood storm reports for a 45.2% national verification rate. Surfaced a sharp geographic gradient, 0-13% in the desert Southwest vs. 77-85% in the Northeast, and traced it to spotter-density bias rather than forecast skill.
📨 Reach me at: harshith@kethavath.com