Message from the Head
At the start of this month, I took over as Head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department from Prof. S. Arun-Kumar. “SAK”, as he is popularly known, did a brilliant job in running the department with good humour. In the past few months he was instrumental in welcoming into our fold four new faculty members: Prof. Rijurekha Sen, Prof. Rahul Narain, Prof. Srikanta Bedathur and Prof. Chetan Arora. Prof. Anshul Kumar formally superannuated at the end of July, but will continue with us as an Emeritus Professor for several years more, continuing to advise and inspire us with his equanimity and wisdom.And today we just received the news that Prof. Amit Kumar has been awarded the prestigious SSBhatnagar award in the category of mathematical sciences, a richly deserved honour.
I look forward to interacting with all our alumni, and appreciate your continuing involvement with the department. In particular, I look forward to inputs from you all regarding the vision and activities of the department. I am in touch with some of you on Facebook, and would be happy to use social media platforms for interacting with you.
Best wishes and regards,
Sanjiva Prasad
Headline Achievements
ASSISTECH launches Raised Lines Foundation
ASSISTECH, IIT Delhi has been working on developing end-to-end technology for production of affordable tactile diagrams under the “Centre of Excellence in Tactile Graphics” sponsored by MEITY, Government of India. In May a non-profit section 8 company named “Raised Lines Foundation” has been formed to scale up the operations based on this know-how so that millions of blind children in India can get books that contain diagrams like their sighted counterparts. If you would like to contribute to this venture in any way, financially or managerially or thru contacts, please contact mbala@cse.iitd.ac.in
Amit Kumar awarded SS Bhatnagar Award
Prof. Amit Kumar has been awarded the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in the category of mathematical sciences for 2018. Amit joins his collaborator Prof. Naveen Garg, who was conferred this recognition in 2016. Hearty congratulations to Prof. Amit Kumar for this well deserved recognition.
Sayan Ranu awarded SIGMOD Reproducibility Award
Prof. Sayan Ranu has been awarded the ACM SIGMOD 2018 Most Reproducible Paper Award for his paper:
Akhil Arora, Sainyam Galhotra, Sayan Ranu, “Debunking the Myths of Influence Maximization: An In-Depth Benchmarking Study.” Proc. SIGMOD Conference 2017, pp 651-666.
As per the award website: This award recognizes the best papers in terms of reproducibility. The three most reproducible papers are picked every year and the awards are presented during the awards session of the SIGMOD conference (next year).
This paper garnered a lot of positive attention from the community since it established that certain long-held beliefs in the area of influence maximization did not stand up to rigorous empirical verification. This award is a positive step by the SIGMOD community towards supporting core scientific values of rigour and honesty, which makes it a matter of great pride that Sayan has won this award. This pride is doubled by the fact that one of his co-authors, Sainyam, is a recent BTech CS&E graduate.
Prof Balakrishnan elected INAE Fellow
Prof. M. Balakrishnan has been elected as a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.
New Faculty
Chetan Arora
Prof. Chetan Arora works in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. His specific research interests lie in Egocentric Vision (a.k.a. first person wearable cameras) and combinatorial optimization algorithms specially for MRF-MAP inference. He is also committed to applications of his expertise for developing novel tools to assist visually impaired people.
Prior to joining us, Chetan was a faculty at IIIT Delhi (2014-2018). Earlier he did his postdoctoral research at Hebrew University working with Prof. Shmuel Peleg (May 2012-May 2014). He received his Bachelors and PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India in 1999 and 2012 respectively. During his PhD, he worked with Prof. Subhashis Banerjee, Prof. S.N. Maheshwari and Prof. Prem Kalra. From 1999 to 2009, he was involved in co-founding technology startups with his collaborators in India and Japan.
Srikanta Bedathur
Prof. Srikanta Bedathur works in the areas of information retrieval, data management and data mining. His interests include large-scale graph data management; influence propagation and community formation on location- and activity-based social networks; infrastructure, modelling and practical usage of knowledge-bases; data integration, relationship discovery and visualization; and information retrieval using KB and neural models.
Previously, Srikanta worked as a research scientist at IBM Research as part of their AI Research team. Before joining IBM in 2014, he worked as a faculty member at IIIT Delhi, where he founded the Max-Planck Partner Group on Large-scale Graph Search and Mining. Even before joining IIIT-D, he was a senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) as part of the Databases and Informatics Systems department. His PhD(2005) was from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Alumni Outreach
Seattle Meeting on 8th July, 2018
Professor Mausam, an eminent AI researcher and ex-Seattle resident, was in Seattle to reconnect the department to its alumni. Thanks Jyoti Gupta (2004 Entry), Kritarth Anand (2008 Entry) and Sadhika Sharma (2002 Entry) for helping organize this meet.
Doctoral Fellowship Program
Dr. Pankaj Jalote (BTech IITK 1980) has donated Rs 16 Lakhs to endow four doctoral fellowship grants entitled “Pankaj Jalote Doctoral Grant” for new PhDs joining the department. Dr. Pankaj Jalote is the founder and former Director of IIIT Delhi. Thank you, Dr. Pankaj Jalote!
Alumnus Venkat Padmanabhan (BTech 1989) has donated Rs 8 Lakhs to endow two doctoral fellowship grants entitled “Venkat Padmanabhan Doctoral Fellowship Grant” for new PhDs joining the department. Venkat Padmanabhan is currently Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India. Thank you, Venkat!
Alumnus Gaurav Bhatnagar (BTech 1997) has donated Rs 8 Lakhs to endow two doctoral fellowship grants entitled “TBO Group Fellowships for Women” for new women PhDs joining the department. Gaurav Bhatnagar is currently Managing Director at Tek Travels Pvt. Lt. Thank you, Gaurav!
Alumnus Anshuman Goyal (BTech 1992) has donated Rs 7.68 Lakhs to endow two doctoral fellowship grants entitled “G.P. Goyal Doctoral Fellowship Grant” in the name of his father. Thank you, Anshuman Goyal!
Celebrating Professor Anshul Kumar
On 28th July IIT Delhi celebrated one of its finest: Prof. Anshul Kumar
Former students, current colleagues and co-workers, research associates all came together to felicitate Prof. Anshul Kumar. What a fabulous evening at Essex farm, New Delhi. Everyone had such a wonderful time and lots of new memories were made.
Professor Anshul Kumar Chair
Thank you for joining us in celebrating Professor Anshul Kumar’s contributions to the profession and IIT Delhi over five decades. The Department aims to establish a chair position in his honour. A target of Rs. 1 crore is needed in order to establish the Professor Anshul Kumar Chair.
More than 50 alumni have already pledged a total of Rs. 80 Lakhs. We need your support to reach 1 Cr. If you would like to contribute, please make a pledge.
Usha Hasteer Chair
Alumnus Gagan Hasteer (BTech 1990) has donated $150,000 (approx Rs. 1 crore) to establish the “Usha Hasteer Chair in Computer Science & Engineering” in his mother’s name. Thank you, Gagan!
Gagan graduated with a B.Tech in CS from IIT Delhi in 1994. He has an MS and PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and an Executive MBA from Wharton. After his PhD, Gagan worked at two electronic design automation (EDA) startups building synthesis and formal Verification products. These startups were acquired by EDA leaders Cadence and Synopsys respectively. In 2002, Gagan co-founded and led engineering for Calypto Design Systems which was later acquired by Mentor Graphics (now Siemens). He is currently VP of Engineering at Netflix where he has built and led multiple teams in the areas of e-commerce, ad tech and content creation and distribution.
Distinguished Alumnus Award
Alumnus Dr. Venkata N. Padmanabhan has been awarded the IIT Delhi Distinguished Alumnus Award 2018. Dr. Venkata N. Padmanabhan Graduated with a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1993. He has an MS and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Venkata is currently Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India.
Venkata’s major contributions to research include:
- RADAR, the first Radio Frequency (RF) based system for indoor positioning
- Persistent connections and pipelining for HTTP
- ProbeGap – a wireless bandwidth estimation technique
- Nericell, the first smart phone-based system for driving and traffic monitoring.
Hearty congratulations to Dr. Venkata N. Padmanabhan.
PhD Travel Grant
Research scholars Yashoteja Prabhu (2013csz8234) and Prajna Upadhyay (2013csz8110) used the CSE Alumni fund for travel to The Web Conference 2018 held in Lyon, France on 23-27 April, 2018 to present their research papers.
Prajna Upadhyay presented her research paper “Construction and Applications of TeKnowbase-A Knowledge base of Computer Science Concepts”.
Yashoteja Prabhu presented his research paper “Parabel: Partitioned Label Trees for Extreme Classification with Application to Dynamic Search Advertising”.
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