Message from the Head
Dear Alumni,
I have great pleasure in reporting to you that the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has seen many positive developments and received international recognition in the last 6 months. As you will read in the newsletter, our faculty members have won major awards, and we have welcomed new faculty members while retaining the guiding wisdom of our seniors. Our alumni are recognised and celebrated for their achievements. Our students continue to perform outstandingly. We look forward to continuing this journey towards excellence.
The CSE Research Acceleration Fund, started with your support, has begun to show results with our scholars publishing in important venues worldwide. I urge you to continue to support us on this path towards greater visibility and impact in shaping ideas, research and action.
The department looks forward to engaging more fruitfully with you through the coming years. I appeal to all of you to connect with us, directly and through social media.
With best wishes and greetings for Dussehra and Diwali, Sanjiva Prasad
A loss
The Department mourns the untimely demise of Abhishek Sharma, who breathed his last on August 25th at his parental home in Himachal Pradesh. He joined the CSE staff fresh out of college, and for almost four years he anchored the upkeep and maintenance of the IT infrastructure at the Department. Loved by all, he was extremely passionate about his work and was always looking for new things to learn and challenges to take up with a smile. Abhishek was diagnosed with stomach cancer and bravely battled it for several months. We will miss him dearly.
Achievements
Prof. M. Balakrishnan awarded Eugene L. Lawler Award
The Eugene L. Lawler Award for 2018 has been awarded to Professor M. Balakrishnan for humanitarian contributions within Computer Science and informatics in the “research, development, and deployment of cost-effective embedded-systems and software solutions addressing mobility and education challenges of the visually impaired in the developing world”. This award honours his work of over more than a decade in founding and leading the ASSISTECH group, which develops affordable assistive devices to address the mobility and education challenges of the visually impaired in India. Many Congratulations!
Prof. Sanjiva Prasad selected as ACM Books Editor-in-Chief
Prof. Sanjiva Prasad has been selected as the “Editor-in-Chief” of the ACM Book series. ACM Books aims to address the information needs of various members of the computing community, including researchers, practitioners, educators, and students to expose the rich history of computing and the substantial global impact it continues to have. Sanjiva’s vision is to bring more diversity into the portfolio of books published by ACM Books, in the area of computer science covered, and its pool of authors. ACM Books has recently published a book by IITD CSE alumnus Sanjam Garg. Hopefully more will follow.
New textbook by Prof. Sandeep Sen and Prof. Amit Kumar
A new textbook titled Design and Analysis of Algorithms: A Contemporary Perspective has been published by Prof. Sandeep Sen and Prof. Amit Kumar.
Focusing on the interplay between design and underlying computational models, this book enables an advanced understanding of key principles of conventional design techniques including gradient descent method for convex optimization, techniques like randomization and approximation and contemporary applications of dimension reduction techniques to real world problems like nearest neighbor searching. The importance of computational models and their effect on algorithm design is highlighted in specially dedicated chapters. Emphasis is given on incorporating many elegant methods discovered by algorithms researchers in the past three decades to make the reader more aware of a contemporary perspective of this area.
Air pollution monitoring by Prof. Rijurekha Sen
Professor Rijurekha Sen was in the news recently for her work on tackling air pollution. IIT-Delhi will put up pollution monitoring mechanisms a top 200 cluster buses to gauge the air quality across the city during different times of the day in the peak pollution period of September to February. The sensor-based devices will be installed through a partnership with Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System. Each bus makes 16 trips daily, covering different routes —each 30-40km long. This deployment will collect particulate matter (PM) data across different terrains, weather and times of the day.
Prof. Preeti Ranjan Panda awarded Techno Mentor Award
Prof. Preeti Ranjan Panda has been awarded a Techno Mentor Award for Excellence in Electronic Systems Design and Manufacturing at “Technovation 2018” by the Indian Electronics and Semiconductors Association (IESA). Technovation 2018 Awards
Prof. Manik Verma awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Engineering Sciences
Prof. Manik Verma, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India has been awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Engineering Sciences for his work in machine learning.
Student achievements
Himanshu Jain (PhD Student) and Manik Verma won the Best Paper Award at WSDM 2019 for their work on extreme classification. This paper solves a classic problem in our field with a new technique based on classification. In other words, it really is a step forward, beyond simply refining previous approaches and making those work better. The paper addresses an important problem and proposes an elegant and effective solution. The potential for impact is large, as already demonstrated by its deployment in a large commercial web search engine. Especially laudable is the authors’ effort to have their experimental evaluation reproducible by also using public datasets and releasing their code.
Rahul Jain wins the Best PhD Thesis Award at the recently concluded 32nd International Conference on VLSI Design and 18th Intl. Conf. on Embedded Systems for his thesis titled “Machine Learned Machines: Reinforcement Learning Exploration for Architecture Co-optimization”. The research was supervised by P. R. Panda, supported by Intel and DST/SERB’s PM Fellowship program. Rahul Jain’s work explored the application of machine learning techniques to run-time optimisation strategies in computer architecture. The thesis focused on an important new area in Embedded Systems and Architectures: that of the simultaneous optimization for performance and energy by dynamically controlling multiple architectural parameters.
A team of three students from CSE/SIT, Anupam Sobti, Ayushi Agarwal and Saurabh Tewari, won the first prize in the Cadence Tensilica Hackathon held on 5th January as a part of Embedded and VLSI Design Conference 2019. The theme of the hackathon was “Porting deep Neural Network for Cadence® Tensilica® AI Processor”.
Sandeep Chandran has been awarded the FITT Best Industry Relevant PhD Project in IIT Delhi Award for his PhD thesis titled “FlexDFD: Flexible DFD Hardware for Efficient Post-silicon Validation” for the year 2017-18. The award carries a cash prize of Rs. 60,000. The research was carried out in collaboration with Freescale/NXP Semiconductor and the Semiconductor Research Consortium.Sandeep Chandran’s PhD dissertation introduced techniques to improve the efficiency of silicon validation for debugging paradigms that are prominent in the industry, thereby helping them deliver bug-free silicon within the time-to-market deadlines. The techniques were area-efficient, minimally invasive, effective in targeting the most relevant on-chip data to be dumped for validation, and involved a careful synthesis of various Computer Science and Engineering concepts: language design and hardware synthesis, architecture development, hardware implementation, and verification.
Staff achievements
Congratulations to Mr. Som Dutt Sharma who has been awarded the Sansthan Incentive Award (to Group ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ staff) for 2018. He received a cash award of Rs. 12,000 along with a citation and certificate on Aug 15th 2019 at the Award Ceremony held in the Seminar Hall of the Institute.
Establishment of Prof. Anshul Kumar Chair
IIT Delhi has crowdsourced money from alumni donors to establish a Chair in the name of distinguished faculty member Prof Anshul Kumar. Click here for details.
New faculty
Soham Chakraborty
Prof. Soham Chakraborty works in the area of Programming Languages and Software Engineering. His specific research interests lie in relaxed memory concurrency, compiler correctness, and related topics. Prior to joining CSE Department, IIT Delhi, Soham was a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS),Germany under the supervision of Dr. Viktor Vafeiadis. He obtained his MS from CSE Department, IIT Kharagpur, India in 2008 and have worked in various industrial research positions for 5 years before starting a PhD.
Ashish Chiplunkar
Prof. Ashish Chiplunkar works in the area of design and analysis of algorithms. He is particularly interested in problems involving data uncertainty, such as online and stochastic optimization problems. His current research focuses on prophet inequalities under various feasibility constraints and arrival order assumptions. Previously, Ashish worked as postdoctoral researcher: at EPFL with Prof. Michael Kapralov and Prof. Ola Svensson, and at Tel Aviv University with Prof. Amos Fiat and Prof. Haim Kaplan. Prior to that, he was a research scientist at Amazon. He obtained his Ph.D. from IIT Bombay, where he was supervised by Prof. Sundar Vishwanathan.
Rohan Paul
Prof. Rohan Paul’s research goal is to enable robotic systems and devices to work with, learn from and assist people. His focus is on algorithms that allow robots to acquire and reason with semantic models of the world for decision making from perception, interaction and exploration. His research draws from estimation,learning/AI,planning and embedded computation and impacts human-machine teaming applications as service & collaborative robots, intelligent vehicles and assistive devices for the infirm. Rohan was fortunate to receive undergraduate education at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi,conduct doctoral research at the University of Oxford and postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has engaged with industry, govt. and non-profits in collaborative projects. At IIT Delhi, he is excited to engage with student, researchers and faculty to advance the science of embodied intelligence and translate into applications towards national needs.
Alumni events
Prof. M.Balakrishnan visited on Microsoft Research, Bengaluru on April 15th 2019. He was at Microsoft Research along with the Univ of Queensland team for presenting the joint PhD program between IIT Delhi and the University of Queensland. Dr. Venkata N. Padmanabhan, organized a short meeting with the other Department alumni. After the meeting he gave them an update on the Department and the Institute.
Farewells
The Department Felicitated Professor Saroj Kaushik for her 65th birthday and retirement on Feb 21st 2019. Thank you Prof Kaushik for inspiring us all to do our absolute best. You are a very motivating and pleasant person to work with. You will not be forgotten even after you retire!
The Department gave Mr. Rajendra Singh a farewell party for his retirement on January 28th 2019.
Distinguished Alumnus Award
The IITD Distinguished Alumni Award for the year 2019 went to Professor Srinivasan Keshav, Mr Binny Bansal, and Dr. Mohit Aron, all alumni of the CSE department. They will be felicitated during a function on 2nd November 2019 at IIT Delhi.
Prof. Srinivasan Keshav (Teaching & Research)
A professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Prof. Srinivasan Keshav is known for his cutting-edge research in the areas of computer networking and energy informatics. He currently focuses on research in blockchains for transactive energy. He received his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1986 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1991. He was awarded the Director’s Gold Medal for his undergraduate work at IIT Delhi and his doctoral work at UC Berkeley was recognized by the David Sakrison Prize for excellence.
Binny Bansal (Entrepreneurship)
Indian billionaire and Internet entrepreneur, Mr. Binny Bansal co-founded the Indian online retail giant, Flipkart. He served as the Chief Operating Officer till January 2016 and then was promoted to Chief Executive Officer of the Flipkart. The company is a former Unicorn Startup with a valuation of US$ 22 Billion in August 2018 at the time of acquisition by Walmart. After exiting from Flipkart in November 2018, he became a prolific angel investor and now mentors with over thirty investments in the startup ecosystem. He recently co-founded another technology company named, xto10x Technologies, to achieve the vision of helping startups. He is a B.Tech. graduate in Computer Science & Engineering of 2005 from IIT Delhi. He was listed as the 86th richest person in India with a net worth of $1.3 billion by Forbes India Rich List of September 2015. He was ranked 26th among India’s 50 Most powerful people – 2017 by India Today and was awarded 2016 “Asian of the Year” by Straits Times of Singapore.
Dr. Mohit Aron (Entrepreneurship)
Founder and CEO of Cohesity, Dr. Mohit Aron is an entrepreneur & businessman and commonly referred as the “Father of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure”. He earned his PhD from Rice University in Computer Science in 2000 and received his B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from IIT Delhi in 1995. Dr. Aron has more than 15 years of experience in building scalable, high-performance distribution systems. He built his career with various start-ups, Zambeel Inc., Google and Aster Data Systems. He co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and founded Cohesity Inc. in 2013. Both of the companies are unicorn startup companies.He has also been listed as The Top 25 Innovators of 2012 and The Top 25 Disrupters of 2016 by CRN magazine.
CSE Research Acceleration Fund Spending
| Date | Beneficiary Name | Purpose | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12.08.2018 | Prof. Rahul Narain | Pankaj Gupta Young Faculty fellowship | He used his fellowship amount Rs.130000/- to visit Vancouver, British Columbia during 12th-16th August, 2018 for the conference SIGGARPH 2018. |
| 15.09.2018 | Prof. Rijurekha Sen | Pankaj Gupta Young Faculty fellowship | She used her Fellowship amount Rs.130000/- for Mobile Air Pollutions Monitor whjich is related to her research. |
| 07.04.2019 | Prof. Srikanta Bedathur Jagannath | Pankaj Gupta Young Faculty fellowship | He used his fellowship amount of Rs.200000/- to visit IEEE international conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) 2019 at Macao from 8-13th April,2019. |
PhD Travel Grant
| Date | Beneficiary Name | Purpose | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17.06.2019 | Chandrika Bhardwaj (2012CS8276) | Attending FORTE 2019 conference in Denmark to be held during 17-21 June,2019 | Rs.50000/- from CSE Department Alumni Fund to cover her travel expenses. |
| 06.04.2019 | Neha Sen Gupta (2014CSZ8209) | Attending ICDE 2019 conference in Hongkong to be held during 6-12 April,2019 | Rs.200000/- from CSE Department Alumni Fund to cover her travel expenses. |
| 25.03.2019 | Madhulika Mohanty (2012CSZ8279) | Attending EBDT 2019 conference in frankfurt to be held during 25-29 March,2019 | Rs.50000/- from CSE Department Alumni Fund to cover her travel expenses. |
| 15.12.2018 | Prashant Agarwal (2018CSZ8011) | Pankaj Jalote Doctoral Grant | He used his Doctoral Grant amount of Rs.57848/- to visit a winter school on Block chains and Crypto currencies in Jerusalem from 16th Dec to 20th Dec,2018. |
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