Graduate of CPS: Arjun Shrivatsan
Master of Professional Studies in Applied Machine Intelligence
Where are you from, or where do you consider home?
I am from Pune, India. Pune is home for me. It shaped my recent years with friendships, curiosity, and my love for technology and music.
Three words to describe your experience at Northeastern:
Focused. Enriching. Incredible.
What motivated you to continue through challenging times?
I often reminded myself: this time will pass. During difficult moments, I wanted to emerge stronger on the other side. Challenging times require tough, persistent focus toward growth, and Northeastern was that journey for me.
What has your journey revealed to you about yourself?
My journey at Northeastern revealed that learning is a lifelong skill and that I am capable of starting again, even after years in technology leadership. Coming back to school taught me a new kind of curiosity in the age of AI, and also humility, resilience, and the value of staying intellectually alive. Northeastern also helped me reconnect with my love for music and performance. I am now a performing artist in the local Boston scene, an occasional standup comic, and I play with bands including the well-known cover band Box of Records. The degree gave me more than technical skills. It gave me back myself.
Experiential learning is a core component of a Northeastern education. Describe some of the highlights for you.
My Northeastern journey gave me the space to watch ideas move from coursework into real-world conversations across AI, sustainability, climate technology, and impact-driven innovation. During my time here, I built Reclaim, now published through open-source contributions, a software system that uses AI to independently review scientific literature and help validate study claims. My sustainability and climate-tech work was showcased at Northeastern’s IMPACT Symposium 2025 and Sustainability Week 2025 and 2026. The biggest milestone was seeing this work grow into the foundation for Observium AI, a biodiversity and human-environment observability framework that was presented at the World Biodiversity Forum 2026 in Davos, Switzerland, and the AESS Conference 2026. As a graduate student researcher, I also had the opportunity to present my work and speak as a guest speaker in university programs.
Where do you imagine yourself five years from now?
I imagine myself founding and building Boston Sense: an AI and technology innovation company working at the intersection of cognition, sensible technology, and sustainable impact. I see myself continuing the journey I am beginning now: helping people and organizations make sense of complex problems, bringing together my experience in technology leadership, AI, systems thinking, sustainability, and human-centered innovation. It’s still early, but this feels like the direction my life and work have been moving toward.
Northeastern became more than a university experience for me. It became a place of personal reinvention. Coming here gave me the courage to begin again, to reconnect with my curiosity, and to imagine a future that brings together technology, research, sustainability, music, and public impact.
Arjun Shrivatsan
Is there anything else you wanted to say that we didn’t cover?
As I graduate, I feel nervous, hopeful, and deeply excited for what comes next. Northeastern will always be part of the story of how I found the next version of myself.
