Speakers
Senior Speakers
Gautam Shroff
Dr Gautam Shroff is Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist at Tata Consultancy Services and heads TCS Research. He has published 90 research papers in the areas of computational mathematics, parallel computation, distributed systems, software architecture, software engineering, big data, information fusion, virtual reality as well as artificial intelligence including machine learning, deep learning, Bayesian inference and natural language processing.
Prior to joining TCS in 1998, Dr Shroff had been on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA (1990 - 91) and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India (1991 - 1997). He has also held visiting positions at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, and at Argonne National Labs in Chicago and is currently an Adjunct Faculty with APPCAIR at BITS. Dr Shroff received his B.Tech in EE from IIT Kanpur and completed his PhD in CS at Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute, NY in 1990.
Sachindra Joshi
Sachindra Joshi is a Senior Technical Staff Member and a research manager in IBM Research at New Delhi. He is currently leading the research efforts in building multi-modal conversational systems. He is focused on adapting and applying various machine learning and natural language processing techniques to build computing systems that can interact with humans in a natural manner.
Prior to joining IBM Research, Sachindra completed a Master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he was the recipient of the gold medal award for standing first in the department. His current research interests lie in the area of dialogue systems, text processing, natural language processing and machine learning.
Aaditeshwar Seth
Aaditeshwar Seth is an associate professor at IIT-Delhi where he runs the ACD4D Research Group. He is also the co-founder and Director of Gram Vaani, a social tech company using Information and Communication Technologies for facilitating societal development.
His area of interest are -
- Analysis of factors impeding socio-economic development.
- Participatory information sharing on social networks.
- Low-cost computer network and ICT Systems for rural areas.
Systems built by Aaditeshwar’s teams at Gram Vaani and IIT Delhi have been used by more than 150 developmental organisations in India, Africa, and Afghanistan, where collectively more than two million people have directly touched their platforms. Several elements of their work have also been adopted by government departments in India for scaling up, and have influenced the use of ICTs for development within many international aid and development organisations.
Arun Ravindran
Arun Ravindran is the Chief Data Scientist for BCG GAMMA, Boston Consulting Group’s advanced analytics and data science arm. Arun focuses on designing, developing, and delivering AI, advanced machine learning, and deep learning models across industries. He leads over 15 scientific domains in GAMMA, from quantum computing to climate analytics.
Arun works in many industries, but of late has been focusing on travel and tourism, climate analytics, technology, and energy. He works with: retail and consumer clients on demand forecasting, revenue management, and many more topics. Arun was previously an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University for machine learning, and a principal data scientist at Accenture. He received his B.E. Degree from BITS Pilani and completed his PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University.
Aruna Rajan
Aruna Rajan is a senior research manager at Amazon, where she leads the Amazon Food and Pharmacy businesses. She was previously a Senior Director at Myntra and Director at Target, where she led data science teams working on various problems including Search, Recommendation, and Demand Forecasting. Prior to this, she worked on applied research at Flipkart, American Express and IBM as well as academic research on data-driven healthcare and medical interventions at UIUC and Princeton.
She is also a board member and partner at the Magasool foundation, a not-for-profit foundation, that builds technology products in food processing, quality detection and sorting based on computer vision/image processing/ML in collaboration with agricultural research institutes. She completed her Bachelors from BITS Pilani, and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC).
Early Career Speakers
Mansi Gupta
Mansi is experienced at modeling and deploying large-scale ML-based recommender systems and NLP solutions. From a research perspective, she is interested in unearthing hidden biases in ML systems and making them fair and interpretable. She aspires to eventually develop ML systems and policies for the next billion under-served population.
Currently, Mansi is a part of the Trends and Event Discovery team at Twitter where she writes algorithms to surface the trends and events at Twitter. She has had past stints at LinkedIn and an AI startup, Petuum. She finished her Master in computational Data Science from CMU in 2018.
Sanket Gupte
Sanket Gupte is a 3rd year Computer Science PhD student at Stanford University and is part of the Medical AI and Computer Vision Lab led by Prof. Serena Yeung.
His current research is focused on using Computer Vision and Deep Learning for cellular imaging to study the impact of neurodegenerative and viral diseases on the molecular machinery of the cell. His previous research at BITS Goa spanned multiple domains including Computational Genomics and Proteomics, and Parallel Computing.
Vidhi Jain
Vidhi Jain is currently an AI Resident at Facebook AI Research and an incoming PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. She is interested in robotics, unsupervised learning, sequence modeling, and reinforcement learning.
Earlier this year, she completed her Masters in Robotics Research from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, wherein she worked at the AART lab with Prof. Katia Sycara. She completed her Bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science from BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus in 2018.
She also worked as a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research India with Dr. Amit Deshpandae and Dr. Navin Goyal, did her thesis at Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms with Prof. Aaron Courville and spent a summer at the Simon Fraser University as a research intern.
She has published several of her works in top conferences like NeurIPS, ACM, ICML, IJCAI, and more.