Message from the Head of the Department, Prem Kumar Kalra
I recently took over from Professor Sanjiva Prasad as the head, and I want to begin with thanking you for your continued support in making the CSE Department stronger and more vibrant. We had a glorious year with several colleagues and students winning prestigious awards. We also welcomed two new faculty members to the Department. Do read the newsletter for more details.
You will also be happy to know that IIT Delhi, at the institute level, has deepened its engagement with our alumni. Several new awards, talks by role models, and other initiatives promise to strengthen our ties with all of you. I look forward to continuing to engage with you, and please feel free to contact me or any of our colleagues with any suggestions.
Warm regards, and wishing you all the best.
Prem Kumar Kalra
Alumni Initiatives
Chandruka Fellowships
Umesh Kumar, Alumnus from the 1999 Batch has donated Rs.12 Lakh to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi for instituting three Doctoral fellowships, and Rs. 6 Lakh for instituting one New Faculty Fellowship. In the past, Umesh Kumar has donated Rs. 8 lakh for “Chandruka Doctoral Fellowship”.
Umesh is a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft. Prior to this, he built distributed systems at Airbnb, eBay, Amazon and Goldman Sachs.
He is a lifelong learner. After graduation from IIT Delhi in 2003, he 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!
TBO Group Fellowships
Alumnus Gaurav Bhatnagar (BTech 2001) has donated Rs 12 Lakhs to endow four travel fellowship grants for Undergraduates, entitled the TBO Travel Fellowship for Undergraduates. In the past, Gaurav Bhatnagar has donated Rs. 30 lakh for “TBO Group New Faculty Fellowship” and Rs. 16 lakh for “TBO Group Fellowship for Women”.
Gaurav Bhatnagar is Co-Founder of the TBO Group and also serves as the Managing Director for TBO Holidays. TBO is one of the leading B2B travel platforms globally with sales of over USD 2 Billion and a customer base spread over 105+ countries across 5 continents. Gaurav is currently Managing Director at Tek Travels Pvt. Ltd. Thank you, Gaurav!
Achievements
Best Doctoral Work
Vinayak Gupta has been awarded the best Doctoral Work Award at the First International Conference on AIML Systems, for his paper titled Learning Neural Models for Continuous-Time Sequences.
Faculty Awards
2021 ACM Fellows
Prof Balakrishnan is now an ACM Fellow! We are thrilled that his contributions to system-level design, embedded systems and assistive technologies for the visually impaired, have been recognized. Read more about the news here.
SIGCHI AWARDS 2022
ACM SIGCHI is the world’s leading technical society focussed on research, education and practical applications of Computer-Human Interaction. SIGCHI’s 2022 Awards recognize Dr Aaditeshwar Seth for the Social Impact of his research. Congratulations, Aadi! Read more about the award here.
Best Community Paper Award at Mobicom
The paper Developing a usable battery drain testing and diagnostic tool for the Mobile industry led by Prof. Abhilash Jindal has received the Best Community Paper award at Mobicom 2022. This paper considers the design of a usable battery drain testing and diagnosis tool for mobile devices. In particular, it describes experience turning an academic prototype tool (Eprof) into an industry grade tool (Eagle Tester), elaborating on the requirements from industry and how they influenced the revamp/redesign of the tool. Further, it shows effectiveness of the tool in terms of accuracy and repeatability through results benchmarked against ground truth. It also shows how the tool has helped identify battery drain related bugs or issues with two popular apps (Netflix and CNN). The paper wraps up with reflections on things to keep in mind when taking academic research prototypes towards industrial adoption.Congratulations, Abhilash!
Prof. Sorav Bansal receives Qualcomm Faculty Award
Sorav Bansal is an Associate Professor and Microsoft Chair Professor in the CSE department at IIT Delhi, and works in the areas of programming languages and operating systems. His primary research interests involve investigating superoptimization-based compiler design. As a prerequisite to developing a superoptimization-based compiler, his research group has been developing an automatic blackbox equivalence checker that checks if the assembly code generated by an optimizing compiler is behaviourally equivalent to the source code. Such an equivalence checker is not only a prerequisite for superoptimization-based compiler design, but also has important applications in the areas of object code verification of safety-critical systems. Sorav received the Qualcomm Faculty Award for his work in these areas of compiler optimization and verification. He is also currently leading a startup company, called CompilerAI Labs, that is commercializing the results of this research. Sorav obtained his B.Tech. from IIT Delhi, and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Google India Research Awards
Prof. Keerti is a winner of the Google India Research Awards. Read more here.
ACL 2022 Test of Time Award
The paper Open language learning for information Extraction by Mausam et al. published at EMNLP 2012 has received the test of Time award from ACL 2022, the premier conference in natural language processing. Congratulations to Prof. Mausam! Listen to Mausam’s acceptance speech here.
New Faculty Members
Rohit Vaish
Prof. Rohit Vaish has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Previously, He was a postdoctoral researcher at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and prior to that, did his PhD from Indian Institute of Science (IISc). His research is in the area of computational social choice, which is the study of collective decision-making problems from a computational lens. More generally, he enjoys thinking about problems at the interface of economics and computer science.
Meet Rohit Vaish (YouTube link)
Madhukar Kumar
Prof. Madhukar Kumar has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before joining IIT Delhi, he worked as a Scientist in the Formal Verification group at TCS Research in Pune for about 11 years. Madhukar completed his Ph.D. from the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) in 2018. Prior to that, he had done a Bachelors in Mathematics (Hons.), and a Masters in Computer Science, also from CMI. His research interests broadly lie in Software Verification, Synthesis, Model Checking and Deep Learning.
Meet Kumar Madhukar (YouTube link)
Alumni Events
Talk by Arvind Jain
On 2nd Oct 2021, the Dean of Alumni Affairs organized a talk by Arvind Jain (BTech CSE 1996) who has been an active participant in some of the most exciting technological advances of the last 20 years, from Akamai to YouTube, Google Maps, and beyond. This is a must watch for anyone interested in technology and/or entrepreneurship: TechToks: An IITD Alumni
Events
Farewell of Prof. M. Balakrishnan and Prof. Anshul Kumar
30th June would be the last working day for both Prof. Bala and Prof. Anshul.
Professor Bala, who retired on 30th June 2022, has worn many hats through his long tenure at IIT Delhi, having been the Philips Chair Professor, Head of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Dean of Post-Graduate Studies & Research, Deputy Director (Faculty) and Deputy Director (Strategy & Planning). He also initiated a number of programmes/activities to promote research, start-ups as well as outreach to the community. ASSISTECH, a laboratory and research group founded by him along with Prof. P.V.M. Rao (Mech Engg), is involved in developing a number of assistive devices targeted towards mobility and education of the visually impaired. SmartCane is a mobility aid for the visually impaired and is currently used by thousands of users in India and other low-income countries.
Prof. Anshul Kumar retired on 31st July 2018, after having served at the Institute for 44+ years since his joining IIT Delhi as an undergraduate in 1969. After his B.Tech. (1974, President’s Gold Medal) he joined as a Project Scientist while simultaneously working for his PhD. He joined the faculty in 1983. Prof Anshul Kumar has played a key role in the establishment and growth of the CSE Department at IIT Delhi as well as in the growth of VLSI Design/EDA in India.
Distinguished Alumnus Award
Each year IIT Delhi recognizes the achievements and contributions of its Alumni to various fields by conferring the Distinguished Alumni Awards (DAA). Hitesh Oberoi (BTech CSE, 1994) is a winner under the entrepreneurship category, for his work as Co-Promoter, MD and CEO, of Info Edge India Limited.
Additionally, this year IIT Delhi initiated the Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) award for recognizing the promise shown by young alumni early in their career. Deepak Vasisht (BTech CSE, 2013) and Divya Gupta (BTech and MTech CSE, 2011) are both winners under the research and teaching category.
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