praneel bhatia

lead applied ai engineer · zanderlabs · berlin

email · linkedin · github · scholar · cv (pdf)

about

swiss army knife engineer, built for zero to one. t-shaped: breadth across embodied ai, agentic development, and enterprise xr; depth into whichever one the problem demands. drawn to greenfield projects and cold-starts into new tools; i bring fresh ideas to every team i join. i close the loop between brains, robots, and language models: passive bci, vla robot learning, and llm systems are normally three different jobs, and i do all three.

now

• lead applied ai engineer at zanderlabs, berlin (since 05/2026). leading the llm side of a neuroadaptive ai program co-founded by prof. thorsten o. zander, funded with €30m by the german cyber agency.

before

• founding ai engineer at auryal, berlin (05/2025 - 04/2026). 14-person team, worked directly with the ceo. built the flagship neuroadaptive robotics system, ran the team's ai tooling and infrastructure, helped land the ilb grant. nvidia inception member, sprind-funded.
• intern at siemens healthineers, openit studio (during the b.sc.). took a cybersecurity metaverse from discovery workshops to a multi-region rollout; power platform apps and internal trainings on the side.
• teaching and research assistant at hsrw, kleve.

selected work

• a robot that takes correction from your brain, mid-task, with no retraining. vla policy (pi0.5 droid) trained in isaac sim, sim-to-real onto a lerobot so-101; eeg-derived signals become natural-language hints at 15 hz control / 10 hz reasoning. first-author paper at nat 2026; seeds two patent filings.
• linkedchat: cut eeg paradigm rollout from 3-5 weeks to under 18 hours; used by 4 eu labs.
• redactable: open-source pii redaction in front of chatbots and agents. mcp server + hooks, evals gated in ci, benchmarked on ai4privacy. github.com/PraneelBhatia/redactable
• enterprise xr: cybersecurity training metaverse shipped across regions at siemens healthineers.
• socialtree: consumer ios app, swift + swiftdata, llm-assisted from day one.
• more, with moving diagrams: instrument.html

publications

• neuroadaptive architecture integrating synthetic neural feedback and reasoning for robotic control. bhatia et al. nat 2026, first author; companion poster at ik 2026, presenting author.
• from interlocutor to cognitive extension: brain-computer interface as a step beyond dialogue in conversational ai. mihic zidar, bhatia, wicke. acm cui 2026, bremen.
• decoding workload and agreement from eeg during spoken dialogue with conversational ai. mihic zidar, wicke, bhatia, lutz, klug, zander. arxiv 2026, under review.
• design of electronic chess board using analogue hall-effect sensors for piece identification. cheong, bhatia, krauledat, hartanto. ieee ichora 2025.
• 2 patent filings (hal, gcrm).

education

• b.sc. mechatronics, rhine-waal university of applied sciences, kleve (09/2021 - 03/2025). grade 1.7, deutschlandstipendium scholarship.

stack

python, pytorch, isaac sim, lerobot, cosmos-reason1, eeg/lsl, zeromq, llm agents and evals, mcp, claude code, swift/swiftdata, typescript, linux infra.

misc

english (native), hindi (native), german (a2). eu blue card; uae golden visa. open to relocation. dubai-raised, germany-trained, berlin-based.

what brings you here?

• agentic engineering - evals, context engineering, agent harness, llm systems, model routing
• autonomous robotics - vla, bci, neuroadaptive control, so-101 / lerobot, world models

last updated 06/2026 · plain html, no javascript, no tracking · animated version: instrument.html