National and International Experts

Dr. Amit Deshpande
Microsoft Research

Amit Deshpande is a researcher in Microsoft Research, where he works in theoretical computer science and machine learning. His research interests include fairness and robustness of models in supervised and unsupervised learning, and sampling techniques for subsampling large data to efficiently explore, summarize, and learn. He received his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from CMI and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT.

Dr. Anush Sankaran
Microsoft

Anush Sankaran is a senior Research Scientist at Microsoft. He received his PhD degree from IIIT Delhi. His research expertise is in the applications of machine learning and deep learning with applications to computer vision and natural language processing. He has worked on a variety of applied research projects and specializes in the introduction of machine learning and deep learning-based solutions to traditional industry problems.

Dr. Balaraman Ravindran
IIT Madras

Balaram Ravindran heads the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at IIT Madras. He is the Mindtree Faculty Fellow and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. He received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Currently, his research interests are centred on learning from and through interactions and span the areas of geometric deep learning and reinforcement learning. He is a senior member of the Association for Advancement of AI (AAAI) and an ACM Distinguished Member.

Jidnya Shah
LinkedIn

Jidnya Shah currently leads a team of ML engineers in the Content Abuse Prevention team of AI at LinkedIn that keeps LinkedIn users safe from unprofessional content such as hate speech, commercial/promotional spam on the platform. She has also led efforts at LinkedIn directed at improving the search experience by improving retrieval and ranking algorithms. She has over 15 years of R&D experience in the fields of image processing, computer vision and machine learning. She has worked as SME for Face/Iris/Fingerprint for the world’s largest National ID program, AADHAAR from NEC. She has built the first iris camera integrated tablet at Samsung for enabling AADHAR authentication. She has also filed patents around biometrics.

Dr. Partha Pratim Talukdar
Google Research

Partha Pratim Talukdar is a Staff Research Scientist at Google Research, Bangalore where he leads a group focused on Natural Language Understanding. He is also an Associate Professor (on leave) at IISc Bangalore. Partha founded KENOME, an enterprise Knowledge graph company with the mission to help enterprises make sense of unstructured data. Previously, Partha was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Tom Mitchell on the NELL project. He received his PhD (2010) in CIS from the University of Pennsylvania. Partha is broadly interested in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Knowledge Graphs. Partha is a recipient of several awards, including an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2019. He is a co-author of a book on Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning.

Pratik Gupte
LinkedIn

Pratik Gupte is presently working at LinkedIn's Trust Artificial Intelligence Group as a Senior Applied Research Engineer/Scientist. He has over 9 years of professional experience in Data Science and Machine Learning. He completed his MS by Research at IIT Madras in the area of graph mining with primary focus on Role Identification and Discovery in Large Social Networks. He has keen research interests in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Deep Learning and Graph Mining.

Dr. R. Venkatesh Babu
IISc Bangalore

R. Venkatesh Babu is a professor at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He received his doctorate degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He held postdoctoral positions at NTNU, Norway and IRISA/INRIA, Rennes, France, through ERCIM fellowship. He also worked as a research fellow at NTU, Singapore. He spent couple of years working in industry before joining IISc in August 2010. His research interests include Computer Vision and Deep Learning. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Dr. Ragini Verma
University of Pennsylvania

Ragini Verma is a Professor in Diffusion and Connectomics In Precision Healthcare Research (DiCIPHR), Department of Radiology as well as a Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. She has masters in Mathematics and Computer Applications followed by a PhD in computer vision and mathematics, from IIT Delhi (India). She was a post doctoral fellow at INRIA, Rhone-Alpes, with the MOVI project (currently LEARS and PERCEPTION) for two years. She was also a post doctoral fellow at SBIA and worked on medical imaging, prior to taking up her current position. Her research interest span the area of diffusion tensor imaging, multi-modality statistics and facial expression analysis. She is actively involved in several clinical studies in schizophrenia, aging, tumors and multiple sclerosis) as well as projects in animal imaging.

Dr. Ramalingam Chellappa
Johns Hopkins University

Rama Chellappa is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering and the chief scientist at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy. He is a pioneer in the area of artificial intelligence. He received the B.E. (Hons.) degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Madras, India in 1975 and the M.E. (with Distinction) degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 1977. He received the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. Degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1978 and 1981 respectively. He joined Johns Hopkins after 29 years at the University of Maryland, where he served lengthy stretches as chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Center for Automation Research. He is a member of Johns Hopkins Mathematical Institute for Data Science and the Center for Imaging Science. His works in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning have had a profound impact on areas including biometrics, smart cars, forensics, and 2D and 3D modeling of faces, objects, and terrain. His work in motion capturing and imaging shows promise for future use in health care and medicine. He is the 2020 recipient of the Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for his contributions to image and video processing, particularly face recognition. Among many other honors, Chellappa has also won technical achievement awards from the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society; the latter also awarded him with its highest honor, the Society Award.

Sachal Lakhavani
Meta

Sachal Lakhavani is a product manager at Surreal, Reality Labs Research at Meta where he has been working with AI / Computer Vision researchers to build future AR / VR / Metaverse experiences.

Dr. Sameep Mehta
IBM IRL

Sameep Mehta leads the Data and AI Platform strategy at IBM Research India. He is also an adjunct faculty at IIT Jodhpur. He completed his PhD from The Ohio State University. His work focuses on developing novel AI and ML algorithms & solutions for real-world enterprise problems and infusing Trust, Transparency & Fairness in AI algorithms and platforms. The work is part of multiple products and customer deliverables. His work has appeared in premier AI conferences and leading newspapers and magazines. He delivers guest lectures on these topics at conferences and educational institutes.

Dr. Sudeep Sarkar
University of South Florida

Sudeep Sarkar is a professor and Department chair of Computer Science and Engineering and Associate Vice President for Research & Innovation at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, FL. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering, on a University Presidential Fellowship, from The Ohio State University. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 1994, the USF Teaching Incentive Program Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1997, the Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award in 1998, and the Theodore and Venette Askounes-Ashford Distinguished Scholar Award in 2004. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR); and a charter member and member of the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He has 25 years of expertise in computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms and systems, holds three (3) U.S. patents, and has published high-impact journal and conference papers. His research topics ranged from video image processing to biometrics and medical image analysis of burn scars. With a series of funding from the National Science Foundation, he has made seminal algorithmic and theoretical contributions to the field of computer vision, particularly in the problem of computing perceptual organization, sign language recognition, and, more recently, in event understanding using pattern theory. With funding from DARPA HumanID at a Distance program, US Army and STS Intl., SOCOM (via USF-NSF I/UCRC Center), Unisys Corporation, CIA, and Raytheon Inc., he has made many seminal contributions to the field of biometrics, i.e., using physical and behavioral properties of humans to identify them. He is considered the world leader in gait biometrics and is frequently called upon to participate in world meetings regarding this topic. The benchmark developed by him is the de facto standard in the development of gait recognition algorithms.

Dr. Tejas Dhamecha
IBM

Tejas Dhamecha has been working in the research area of machine learning and pattern recognition with application into computer vision, biometrics, and natural language processing. He has been a research staff member at IBM Research AI since 2016. He is also a visiting faculty member at IIT Jodhpur. He received his PhD from IIIT Delhi. He has focused on the research domain of NLP to apply to the Education domain and to strengthen the core capabilities for Indic languages. He has two patents in the domain of Education. He is currently focused on inventing and expanding NLP capabilities for various Indic languages. He was a part of the Cognitive Education Solutions Group. He was the lead researcher for NLP components of a dialog-based tutor for medical students. He has also worked on developing student assessment and response analysis capabilities as part of Watson Tutor. He has also led research efforts for automatic short-answer grading. The Watson Tutor was featured in the Discovery Channel documentary series called "This is AI".

Utkarsh Uppal
NVIDIA

Utkarsh Uppal is a data scientist, solutions architect at NVIDIA. His areas of interest are Computer Vision and Deep Learning.

Speakers From CSE@IITJ

Prof. Richa Singh
IIT Jodhpur

Richa Singh is currently a Professor and Head of the CSE department with IIT Jodhpur, India. She received the M.S. and Ph.D. degree in computer science from West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA. Her areas of interest are pattern recognition, machine learning, with focus on trustworthy ML, biometrics and medical image analysis. She was a recipient of the Kusum and Mohandas Pai Faculty Research Fellowship at the IIIT-Delhi, the FAST Award by the Department of Science and Technology, India, and the several best paper and best poster awards in international conferences. She is/was the Program Co-Chair of CVPR2022, ICMI2022, IJCB2020, FG2019, and BTAS 2016 and the General Co-Chair of FG2021 and ISBA 2017. She is a recipient of the Verisk Faculty Award, Facebook Ethics in AI Award, and NVIDIA Innovation Award. She is also the Vice President (Publications) of the IEEE Biometrics Council and an Associate Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition. She is/was associate or guest editor for several journals including IEEE T-PAMI, IEEE T-BIOM, CVIU, PR, and Information Fusion. She is a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR and AAIA and a Senior Member of ACM.

Prof. Mayank Vatsa
IIT Jodhpur

Mayank Vatsa is currently a Professor at Department of CSE and Dean of Research and Development at IIT Jodhpur, and the Project Director of the Technology and Innovation Hub on Computer Vision and Augmented and Virtual Reality under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems by the Government of India. He received the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from West Virginia University, USA. His areas of interest are biometrics, image processing, machine learning, computer vision, and information fusion. He is the recipient of the prestigious Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the Government of India, the A. R. Krishnaswamy Faculty Research Fellowship at the IIIT-Delhi, and several best paper and best poster awards at international conferences. He is an Area/Associate Editor of Information Fusion and Pattern Recognition, the General Co-Chair of IJCB 2020, and the PC Co-Chair of IEEE FG2021. He has also served as the Vice President (Publications) of the IEEE Biometrics Council where he led the efforts to start the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMETRICS, BEHAVIOR, AND IDENTITY SCIENCE. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, AAIA, and a Senior Member of ACM.

Dr. Anand Mishra
IIT Jodhpur

Anand Mishra is a faculty member at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and an affiliate faculty member at the School of AI and Data Science at IIT Jodhpur. Anand's group at IIT-J focuses on problems intersecting vision, language, and knowledge graphs. Previously, Anand was a postdoctoral fellow at IISc Bangalore where he worked with Dr. Partha Talukdar and Dr. Anirban Chakraborty on knowledge-aware computer vision. Anand received his Ph.D. from IIIT Hyderabad working on Scene Text Understanding under the supervision of Prof. C. V. Jawahar from IIIT and Dr. Karteek Alahari from Inria. His research group at IIT Jodhpur has been supported by the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Science and Engineering Research Board, Microsoft R&D, and Accenture labs. Anand has received the prestigious Microsoft Research India Ph.D. Fellowship (in 2012), Google Travel Grant to attend CVPR (in 2012), IEEE Student Fellowship to attend ICCV (in 2013), the XRCI Doctoral Dissertation Award-First Runner Up (in 2015), Google Gift to attend AAAI (in 2019), the IIT-J Teaching Excellence Award (in 2020), and Microsoft Academic Partnership Grant (in 2021). Recently, he was recognized as one of the outstanding reviewers at ICCV 2021.

Dr. Angshuman Pal
IIT Jodhpur

Angshuman Paul is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Jodhpur. His primary research interests are in Machine Learning, Medical Image Analysis, and Computer Vision. He completed his Ph.D. from the Indian Statistical Institute, India. He has held a postdoctoral fellow position at the National Institutes of Health, USA (2019 - 2021) and a visiting scientist position at the Indian Statistical Institute (2019). Dr. Paul is the recipient of the Start-up Research Grant from SERB (2022), NIH Intramural Fellowship (2019) from the National Institutes of Health, USA, and the best paper award in the Tenth Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing (ICVGIP, 2016). He serves as a reviewer of several journals including IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and conferences including AAAI, CVPR, MICCAI, and ISBI.

Dr. Deepak Mishra
IIT Jodhpur

Deepak Mishra is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Jodhpur. He received his M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from IIT Delhi. His research interests are machine learning, resource constrained AI, medical image analysis, and biomedical electronics. Prior to his M.Tech. at IIT Delhi, he was with Healthcare R&D team at Siemens Information Systems Ltd in 2010. His works are published in top tier journals and conferences. He has received findings from MeitY, DST, and MSME for his ongoing research. He serves as a reviewer of various journals including IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, Medical Image Analysis, and conferences including AAAI, CVPR, and ICCV, and IEEE SENSORS.

Dr. Pratik Mazumder
IIT Jodhpur

Pratik Mazumder is an Assistant Professor n the CSE department of Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. He received his M.Tech-PhD joint degree from the Computer Science and Engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. His research interests include data-efficient learning techniques, few-shot learning, zero-shot learning, and continual learning. He has published papers at reputed international journals and conferences such as Neurocomputing, Pattern Recognition, Knowledge-based Systems, CVPR, NeurIPS, AAAI, ECCV, ICASSP, WACV, and others. He has also served as a reviewer for multiple international journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, Neural Networks, Neurocomputing, CVPR, ECCV, AAAI and others.