IIT Madras Robert Bosch Centre awards fellowship to world-renowned researchers

Indian Institute of Technology Madras Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) has awarded the ‘RBCDSAI Distinguished Fellowship’ to three world-renowned researchers from international institutions for their valuable contributions to Data Science and AI. The fellows will engage in long-term collaborations with the Centre, by inspiring, mentoring and initiating meaningful collaborations.

The First Three RBCDSAI Fellowships have been awarded to Dr Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Department of Computer Science & Engineering and Department of Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State University, US, Dr Sriraam Natarajan, Director, Center for Machine Learning, The University of Texas, US, Dr Krithi Ramamritham, who has spent almost equal lengths of time at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at IIT Bombay as a Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. 

Dr Srinivasan Parthasarathy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Department of Biomedical Informatics at Ohio State University and works in the areas of Data Mining, Database Systems and High-Performance Computing.  His work in these areas has received several best paper awards or similar honours from conferences such as VLDB, SIGKDD, ICDM(2), SIAM DM(2), and ISMB. He leads Data Mining Research laboratory at Ohio State and co-directs (along with a colleague in Statistics) a brand-new UG program in Data Analytics at Ohio State (among the first of its kind).

Dr Sriraam Natarajan is the Director, Center for Machine Learning, The University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests lie in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and their application to healthcare problems. Especially in the areas of Relational Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Graphical Models, and Planning. Till 2013, he was a faculty member at Translational Science Institute of Wake Forest School of Medicine. He was a postdoc earlier at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he worked with Professors Jude Shavlik and David Page. He also holds a PhD from the School of EECS, Oregon State University, where he was advised by Professor Prasad Tadepalli.

Dr Krithi Ramamritham has spent almost equal lengths of time at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and at IIT Bombay as a Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His current research involves applying computational approaches to energy management, based on the SMART principle: Sense Meaningfully, Analyze and Respond Timely. This work exploits and extends state-of-the-art in database systems, real-time computing, sensor networks, embedded systems, mobile computing, and smart grids. He holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He did his B. Tech (Electrical Engineering) and M. Tech (Computer Science) degrees from IIT Madras. During 2006-2009, he served as Dean (R&D) at IIT Bombay. He also headed IIT Bombay's new Center for Urban Science and Engineering (CUSE).

As part of welcoming the fellows, RBCDSAI is holding a series of events interacting with them on topical issues in Data Science and AI. In the first of these events, a fireside chat with Dr Srinivasan Parthasarathy on ‘AI Ethics: Separating Perception from Truth’ has been scheduled for January 21 — tinyurl.com/dsai-ethics-chat.

Dr B Ravindran, Head, RBCDSAI, said, “RBCDSAI is honoured that these distinguished researchers accepted our request to be associated with our centre as fellows. We look forward to improving the research impact and global visibility of RBC DSAI with their advice and our continued collaboration.”

RBCDSAI was founded in August 2017 with a vision to expand and further the research, education and outreach activities in the areas of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. It comprises faculty from several departments across the Institute, who carry out research in various areas of data science and artificial intelligence.