Message from the Head of the Department, Prem Kumar Kalra
This academic year has seen the department taking some new initiatives. Prominent among those were two winter schools organized to reach out to potential PhD students in the areas of Theory and Systems. These two schools generated great excitement among participants and organizing faculty equally and promise to start an exciting new trend in the department. I would like to thank alumnus Mohit Aron whose endowment to the department made this possible. We are also happy to welcome two new faculty members, Vaishnavi Sundararajan and Kaustubh Beedkar, who bring new and diverse capabilities to the mix. On this occasion I would like to thank those of our alumni who have been supporting our new faculty with the support they need to hit the ground running. As we head towards the summer break, I wish all of you the very best. Please do stay engaged with the department in the coming year and continue to support us as you have been doing all this while.
Warm regards, and wishing you all the best.
Prem Kumar Kalra
Alumni Initiatives
Chandruka New Faculty Fellowship
Umesh Kumar, Alumnus from the 1999 Batch has donated Rs.18 Lakh to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi for instituting two New Faculty Fellowships. In the past, Umesh Kumar has donated Rs.20 lakh for “Chandruka Doctoral Fellowship” and Rs.6 lakh for “Chandruka New Faculty Fellowship” .
Umesh is a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft. Prior to this, he built distributed systems at Airbnb, eBay, Amazon and Goldman Sachs.
After graduation from IIT Delhi in 2003, Umesh completed his Masters(2005) at SUNY Stony Brook and Professional education Programs at University of Washington Seattle in Data Science (2012) and Technical Leadership (2019).
He can be found online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/umkumar
Thank you, Umesh!
Achievements
New Book “Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists”
Prof. Aaditeshwar Seth has recently released a book on the subject of technology and its potential to empower or disempower society. The book is a culmination of Prof. Seth’s experiences of over a decade and a half of working in the ICTD space. It delves into the complexities of technology and aims to understand why technology sometimes goes wrong, and how it can be done better. The book is available for purchase on popular platforms such as Emerald Publishing and Amazon, and has previews available on Google Books. The preface, introduction, and foreword (by Tim Unwin) are available for free here.
Faculty Awards
IITD Faculty research award
Prof. Sayan Ranu has been awarded the Mrs. Veena Arora Faculty Research Award for the year 2022. This award recognizes outstanding research contributions made by a faculty member below the age of 40 years at IIT Delhi across all disciplines.
Google India Research Awards 2022
Happy to announce Prof. Abhilash has won the Google India Research Awards 2022. This award aims to support faculty at Indian universities engaged in world-class research in all areas relevant to Google.
ACM India Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education (OCCE) 2022 Award
Prof. Smruti Ranjan Sarangi has been selected for the ACM India Outstanding Contribution to Computing Education (OCCE) 2022 Award. This prestigious award is presented to individuals who have made fundamental, innovative and impactful contributions to computing education in India.
Prof. Sarangi has been chosen for his extensive contributions to the computer architecture community in terms of writing textbooks, remote teaching, and developing educational software. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft Research India.
Prof. Amit is an INAE fellow
Prof. Amit Kumar has been elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) in recognition of his work in theoretical computer science. This achievement is a testament to the remarkable contributions of Prof. Amit Kumar in the areas of combinatorial optimization and online algorithms.
Conferment of INAE Young Engineer Award 2022
Prof. Abhijnan Chakraborty has been awarded the INAE Young Engineer Award 2022 given by the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), and has been inducted as Young Associate to the Academy. This award recognizes the contributions made by young engineers under the age of 35 in the area of engineering research and technology development in India. Prof. Chakraborty has been awarded for his research contributions in the fields of Social Computing and Responsible Artificial Intelligence.
Award for Excellence in Teaching
Prof. Preeti Ranjan Panda has received the Teaching Excellence Award for the academic year 2021-22. Congratulations!
New Faculty Members
Prof. Vaishnavi Sundararajan
Dr. Vaishnavi Sundararajan has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi. Dr. Sundararajan’s research interests lie in the application of formal logic and methods to various fields, with a primary focus on security.
Dr. Sundararajan completed her Ph.D. at Chennai Mathematical Institute, under the guidance of R. Ramanujam and S. P. Suresh. After earning her doctorate, she continued her research as a postdoctoral scholar at CNRS, France, Ericsson Research, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Prof. Kaustubh Beedkar
Dr. Beedkar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Mannheim in Germany, where he conducted research in the Data and Web Science Group under the guidance of Prof. Rainer Gemulla. His current research focuses on integrating constraints related to data sovereignty, data movement, and multiple compute infrastructures into query processing frameworks.
Before joining IIT Delhi, Dr. Beedkar worked as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Technische Universität Berlin, and Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD).
Department Events
System Winter School
The Systems group of the CSE Dept organized a Winter School from 5-9 December, 2022. This workshop included sessions on common security exploits, fuzzing, symbolic analysis, distributed computing, scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and other topics. Students from all over India attended this workshop, the majority of whom were senior undergraduate engineering students from IITs, NITs, and other engineering colleges. Also, a large number of working professionals and graduate (Masters/PhD) students participated. The workshop was supported by Mohit Aaron who also gave an online talk at the school.
Short video of Systems Winter School
Theory Winter School
A week-long Theory Winter School was recently organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and ran from December 5–9, 2022. A wide range of theoretical computer science topics were covered during the school, including algorithms, complexity theory, graph theory, cryptography, game theory, and more. The Theory Winter School was supported by generous funding provided by the Mohit Aron Endowment and Google India.
Short video of Theory Winter School
Alumni feedback form
We would like to hear from you! Please fill out this survey to give us your feedback.