Nandan Thakur

@beirmug

Postdoc @MSFTResearch | PhD @uwaterloo | working on search and agents | (beir.ai, miracl.ai, TREC-RAG and FreshStack)

Bengaluru, India

thakur-nandan.github.io

Joined July 2016

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Nandan Thakur
@beirmug
Aug 15
Life Update: Last month I started as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research India! If you are curious on why I chose to return to India after my PhD from Canada; I've written some personal thoughts about it!
Article
Why am I returning to India after my PhD?
Disclaimer: Please note that a lot of my views in this article are of my own, shaped by conversations with my wife and personal experiences. My intention is not to impose my views on you in any way. I...
Nandan Thakur
@beirmug
Aug 16
Wow, i just woke up and received such a tremendous amount of messages, thank you everyone for resonating with me! 😁 That being said, if you ever feel you are in the same boat and wish to return to India or otherwise, I'm happy to have a casual chat!
Nandan Thakur
@beirmug
Aug 15
Life Update: Last month I started as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research India! If you are curious on why I chose to return to India after my PhD from Canada; I've written some personal thoughts about it!
Article
Why am I returning to India after my PhD?
Disclaimer: Please note that a lot of my views in this article are of my own, shaped by conversations with my wife and personal experiences. My intention is not to impose my views on you in any way. I...
Nandan Thakur
@beirmug
Aug 13
Thanks to @HamelHusain, I recently spoke about search agents in three directions: evaluation, data and analysis. Absolutely essential for anyone looking to research into search agents!
Hamel Husain
@HamelHusain
Aug 12
Over the summer, @sh_reya and I hosted 13 sessions on AI Engineering topics like retrieval, post-training, inference, and evals. I've summarized all the sessions, organized by theme, with links to the source materials. Warning: I've tried to pull the most important ideas from
Nandan Thakur
@beirmug
Aug 11
In the past year, we've seen rapid progress in search agents! However, how well do these search agents work outside English? Introducing⛵️MAST @🔥FIRE 2026, a new shared task focused on multilingual agentic search.
Nandan Thakur
@beirmug
Aug 10
Thank you for contributing towards this effort and getting your agents to go berserk and burn tokens! 🔥🔥🔥
TREC RAG @ 2026
@TREC_RAG
Aug 10
And with that, all TREC RAG 2026 submissions are in 🎉 We had an incredible turnout this year, with 30 teams submitting more than 80 RAG runs and 110 retrieval runs! A huge thank you to everyone who participated! We can’t wait to start evaluating your submissions 🚀