We have a new paper that shows that the tone of a prompt affects inference cost of the prompt.
About Me
I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and have previously been on the faculties at Cornell University and the University of Colorado. I have also spent a sabbatical year as a scientist at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. I have published around 150 papers in academic journals and international conferences.
Research Interests and Activities
My current research interests are in AI, BPM and workflow systems, Blockchain technology, Business analytics, Deep learning, Health IT and Healthcare forums, and process mining.
I serve as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems. I was previously an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, INFORMS Journal on Computing and Information Systems Research. I was a co-program-chair of BPM 2017 Conference. I also served as a co-program chair of CoopIS'11 and as a co-chair of Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS'07). I was a principal investigator for National Science Foundation, and also received support from IBM, Sun Microsystems and other organizations for his work. I am a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. I have collaborated extensively with researchers in US, and internationally with many co-authors at the Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands; Ulm University, Germany; Tsinghua University, China; Chinese University of Hongkong; and Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.
My work with Om Dobariya on how the tone of prompts accuracy of ChatGPT results has received widespread attention in media.
Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar. Mind Your Tone: Investigating How Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy. arxiv. org/abs/2510.04950 (October 2025)
Followup/recent work
Om Dobariya and Akhil Kumar. Mind Your Tone: Does Tone Alter LLM Performance? arxiv.org/pdf/2605.29027 (May 2026)
Akhil Kumar and Om Dobariya. Understanding Tone-Dependent Inference Cost in Large Language Model https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.23915 (July 2026)
Akhil Kumar. An ER-Model-Based Framework for Case Notion Selectionin Object-Centric Processes https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26384 (July 2026)
Highlights
- Fulbright Scholar Award (2022–2023)
- Author: Business Process Management (Routledge, 2018)
- Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
Courses Taught
- MIS479W: Enterprise Resource Planning
- MIS431: Database Systems
- MIS434: Internet Technologies
- BA523: Introduction to Information Technologies
Hobbies
Badminton, tennis, yoga, hiking, and bicycling.