Speakers

Assistant Professor @ BITS Goa, APPCAIR  

Aditya Challa is an Assistant Professor at Computer Science and Informations Systems (CSIS) affiliated to APPCAIR at BITS-Pilani, Goa from August 2021. Prior to joining BITS-Pilani, Goa, he worked as Raman Post-Doctoral Fellow at CSA, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore from October 2019. He received his PhD in Computer Science from SSIU, ISI-Bangalore in October 2019. In his PhD thesis, he  established that using simple tools from Mathematical Morphology can lead to huge gains in efficiency of ML (machine learning) algorithms - Both supervised and unsupervised approaches. Before joining the PhD program in 2014, he worked as a Business Analyst at TCS, Bangalore from October 2012 - September 2014. At TCS, he was responsible for designing and analysis of sample surveys for estimating the sales. Prior to this, he received his B.Math.(Hons.) degree in Mathematics and M.Sc. in Complex Systems from University of Warwick, UK.

Professor @ IIT Kharagpur  

Niloy Ganguly is a professor of computer science, IIT Kharagrpur and a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering who works in three different but related  fields: (1) Online Social networks, (2) Network Theory, (3) machine learning. He was a Visiting Professor in Leibnitz University of Hannover for two years for the period 2021 - 2022.  Prior to his current position as a faculty at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, he was working as a Research Scientist in Zentrum für Hochleistungsrechnen, Technische Universität Dresden for two years. He received his Ph.D from IIEST, Shibpur and BTech from IIT Kharagpur. 

He is a part of  a very active research group CNeRG (Complex Network Research Group) http://cnerg.org in IIT Kharagpur. He has been collaborating with various national and international universities and research lab including UIUC, TU Dresden, Germany, MPI PKS and MPI SWS, Germany, Microsoft Lab, Adobe Labs, HP Labs, NetApp Labs etc. He currently publishes in various top ranking international journals and conferences including ICDM, ACL, WWW, INFOCOM, SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGCHI, ICWSM, CSCW, NIPS CCS, PODC,  Euro Physics Letters, Physical Review E, ACM and IEEE Transactions, etc.

Assistant Professor @ CDS, IISc Bangalore

Danish Pruthi is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where he leads an NLP research group. His work focuses on inclusive evaluation, model control (such as editing, de-biasing, and personalizing trained models), and inspecting and validating data sources to address biased or harmful behavior. He is also interested in advancing key NLP applications, including content moderation and assisted writing, while exploring the broader societal implications of language technologies.

Danish received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he was co-advised by Zachary C. Lipton and Graham Neubig. His doctoral research centered on improving the interpretability of deep learning models. He earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from BITS Pilani, Pilani in 2015. Over the years, he has conducted research at leading organizations such as Google AI, Microsoft Research, Facebook AI Research, and Amazon AI. Danish is a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, the Siebel Scholarship, and the CMU Presidential Fellowship, recognizing his contributions to advancing AI and NLP research.

Research Engineer @ Google Deepmind  

Ashwin Vaswani is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, with a specialization in Machine Learning and Deep Learning, focused on applications in Computer Vision. He holds a graduate degree in Computer Vision from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS Pilani), Goa Campus.

Before joining Google DeepMind, He served as a pre-doctoral researcher at Google Research India, working on the MyHealth team in Assistive Healthcare and have also been a part of the Data Science team at CommerceIQ. His  research experience extends to Video Understanding and Activity Recognition at the SHI Lab, University of Oregon, and Knowledge Distillation as an undergraduate at the Anuradha and Prashanth Palakurthi Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (APPCAIR) at BITS Goa.

ML PhD @ Georgia Tech  

Nikolas McNeal is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning program at Georgia Tech, where he collaborates with Ratan Murty. His research interests center on understanding the computational principles of visual perception, particularly the connections between neural network and human representations. 

He has published work on adversarial perturbations, social cognition, musical perception, and GPT-3 limitations in biomedical information extraction at conferences like NeurIPS, ICMPC, and CogSci. He completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Science at The Ohio State University in 2023.