Message from the Head of the Department, Prem Kumar Kalra
In the year 2023-24 that has past the department has earned recognition for both research and teaching, which is a matter of great pride. We have grown further, with three new faculty members joining us. Our senior faculty members were honoured and felicitated by their former students and our alumni continued to support us in our exciting and continuing journey. On a personal note, I have decided to take voluntary retirement in July, so this note is a farewell note from my side. Thank you all for supporting the department. I look forward to your continued engagement with the department in the coming year.
Warm regards and wishing you all the best.
Prem Kumar Kalra
Alumni Initiatives
KnowDis Award for Excellence to Prof SN Maheshwari
KnowDis Data Science, an AI company founded by CSE BTech alumnus Saurabh Singal (Batch 1990), recently honoured Professor S.N. Maheshwari with the KnowDis Award for Excellence. The event took place at IIT Delhi, with several distinguished faculty members of the CSE Department gathering to commemorate this occasion. Ishaan, a budding classical singer, sang the Ganesh Vandana melodiously to start the ceremony.
Prof S.N Maheshwari with the KnowDis Award for Excellence
Professor S.N. Maheshwari has made incredible contributions to our department, which have earned him a well-deserved place as one of our most esteemed faculty members. Throughout his career, his vision has inspired both students and teachers. Mr. Saurabh Singal shared how much Professor Maheshwari has influenced him since his days as an undergraduate student at IIT Delhi.
Professor Prem Kalra, head of the department, praised Professor Maheshwari for his contributions to making the department a world-class institution. He remarked that IIT Delhi continues to nurture top talent from all over the country by giving them the platform to learn from the most renowned experts in their domain. Professor M. Balakrishnan, an honorary professor, also spoke about his association with Professor Maheshwari, which goes back to IIT Bombay. Despite his numerous achievements, Professor Maheshwari remained incredibly humble, gracefully declining awards, a gesture admired by all who know him.
The event concluded with a delightful lunch at Gulmohar, the guesthouse at IIT Delhi, which provided all the members of the CSE department, along with the people at KnowDis, with the opportunity to interact and discuss their thoughts on recent research and the scope of collaborations between industry and academia.
Left to right: N M Anoop Krishnan, Sorav Bansal, Keshav Kolluru*, Krish Vijayan*, Rajat Punia*, Rohan Paul, Ashish Chiplunkar, Vaishnavi Sundararajan, Venkata Vivek Kumar Koppula, Kumar Madhukar, Mausam, Parag Singla, Srikanta Bedathur, Rahul Narain, Amit Kumar, Chetan Arora, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Prem Kalra, M. Balakrishnan, S.N. Maheshwari, Saurabh Singal*, B.N Jain, NC Kalra, Subhashis Banerjee, Sanjiva Prasad, Subodh Kumar, Kaustubh Beedkar. (Pic Credits: Saroj Koushik)
* KnowDis team
Nishant Kumar Memorial Award for the Best PhD Thesis in CSE
“Nishant Kumar (B Tech CSE, IIT Delhi, 2016) was an extremely creative PhD student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In a short span of time, Nishant managed to do wonderful things and touched the lives of many. As a software engineer and then a Research Fellow, he made important contributions to the Azure Backup team in Microsoft Hyderabad and published several outstanding cryptography research papers at both Microsoft Research India as well as UIUC. He had a real strong drive for research and a child-like enthusiasm to learn everything he could. Above everything else, Nishant was an extremely warm, affectionate person with an endearing smile, caring and considerate towards everyone around him. He was a devoted son, brother, and uncle. The “Nishant Kumar Memorial Award for the Best PhD Thesis in Computer Science and Engineering” is instituted to honour his legacy.”
Thank you, Nishant Chandran and other donors of Microsoft for instituting this award at CSE, IIT Delhi.
Chandruka New Faculty Fellowship
Umesh Kumar, Alumnus from the 1999 Batch has donated Rs.16 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. 24 lakhs 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.
Thank you, Umesh!
Achievements
Faculty Awards
Prof. Mausam named AAAI Fellow
Prof. Mausam has been named a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), joining the august company of the leaders in the field (https://aaai.org/about-aaai/aaai-awards/the-aaai-fellows-program/elected-aaai-fellows/). He will be the first AAAI fellow to be based out of India – hopefully many others from India will soon get added.
Many congratulations Prof. Mausam.
Prof. Mausam’s advice for students looking to get into AI.
Prof. Sayan Ranu selected as INSA Associate Fellow
Prof. Sayan Ranu has been selected as an INSA Associate Fellow.
https://insaindia.res.in/scroll_news_pdf/Recipients-of-INSA-Associate-Fellows-2023.pdf
Qualcomm Faculty Award for Prof. Preeti Ranjan Panda
Prof Preeti Ranjan Panda has been awarded the Qualcomm Faculty Award 2024. Hearty Congratulations to him.
IITD Teaching Awards
It’s our pleasure to announce the Teaching Excellence Awards for the last 2 semesters (Semester I, 2022–23, and Semester II, 2022–23). These awards are based on student course feedback and a numerical score (received individually for each faculty member teaching a course).
The list of awardees is:
- Prof. Subodh Vishnu Sharma, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
- Prof. Rohit Vaish, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
- Prof. Ashish Chiplunkar, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
- Prof. Venkata Vivek Kumar Koppula, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Watch CSE’s Teaching Award Winners for 2023 In this video three of these four award-winning teachers share their secrets and offer some advice for potential teachers. They reveal how they came to teaching, what they like about it, and how they do it, apart from offering advice to the teachers of the future.
Congratulations to all the awardees!
Student Awards
CSE Student receives the Gold Medal
Archit Bubna (2019CS10331) has received the president’s Gold Medal during convocation 2023. Congratulations Archit!
Alumni Events
Silver Jubilee 1998 Batch visit on 23rd December 2023
The Department was delighted to host the alumni from the 1998 batch and looks forward to a continuing engagement with them.
New Faculty Members
Prof. Tarun Mangla
Dr. Tarun Mangla has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi. Prior to that, he was Postdoctoral Scholar at University of Chicago working with Nick Feamster. Dr. Tarun completed his PhD in 2020 at Georgia Tech where he was advised by Mostafa Ammar and Ellen Zegura. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in CS from IIT Delhi. His research is broadly in the area of Computer Networking. He build measurement systems and methods that enable various stakeholders of the Internet make data-driven decisions towards optimizing future networks and applications.
Prof. Priyanka Golia
Dr. Priyanka Golia has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi. Prior to that, She was faculty at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security.Dr. Priyanka’s research interests lie intersection of formal methods and artificial intelligence. Dr. Priyanka completed her Ph.D. in a joint degree program with Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India and National University of Singapore, advised by Kuldeep S. Meel and Subhajit Roy. In particular, her work so far has focused on designing scalable automated synthesis and testing techniques. She is the lead designer of the state-of-the-art functional synthesis engine, Manthan, which combines advances in machine learning, constrained sampling, and automated reasoning to achieve significant scalability.
Prof. Rajendra Kumar
Dr. Rajendra Kumar has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi. Dr. Rajendra’s completed his Ph.D. under the Joint degree programme of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and National University of Singapore, advised by Professors Manindra Agrawal and Divesh Aggarwal. His current research focuses on studying the lattice problems to analyze the security of lattice-based cryptosystems.
Before coming to IIT Delhi, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Weizmann Institute of Science hosted by Zvika Brakerski and a research fellow at Center for Quantum Technologies, NUS.
Department Events
VerTeCS symposium in honour of Prof. S. Arun-Kumar on March 9, 2024
The VerTeCS symposium happened on Saturday, March 9, 2024. The symposium was held in hybrid mode and involved talks by researchers from across the world on topics related to logic, semantics, and concurrency, among others. This symposium was organized in honour of Prof. S. Arun-Kumar (SAK), who has been an integral part of the CSE Department and the VerTeCS group for many years now and who is going to retire later this year. The talks are related to areas he has worked in and contributed to.
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