SAMBARAN BANDYOPADHYAY, PhD

Applied Scientist II at Amazon Science, Bangalore


Past Position: Advisory Research Scientist at IBM Research AI, Bangalore (Oct 2013 - May 2021)

Research Interests: Representation Learning on Graphs, Graph Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Optimization, Computational Sustainability


Recent Updates:



I am Sambaran, currently working at IBM Research AI, Bangalore as an Advisory Research Engineer. The goal of my project is to analyse and assess the quality of unstructured and text datasets for AI applications. We are dealing with different aspects of data such as outlierness, representation learning of text, representation of text through graphs, detecting formality of text, etc. Previously, I have also worked on AI for industry solution department of IBM Research, where our focus was to build AI driven solutions for precision agriculture and smart grids.

I am particularly interested in Graph Representation Learning (GRL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and their applications to other domains of computer science such as text, software engineering and computational sustainability. In GRL, the goal is to learn a map which transforms the high dimensional and extremely sparse network (or graph) data (from social networks, citation networks, biological networks, etc.) to a lower dimensional vector space, which can help the downstream machine learning tasks (such as node classification, community detection, graph classification, etc.) to perform better. I focus on the role of random walk, optimization and deep learning on graphs. Most of my ongoing research involves developing novel graph neural network algorithms. I have published my research to top tier machine learning conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, WSDM, ICAPS, ECAI etc. and also have around 8 patents filed. I have also been a member (by invitation) of the technical program committee of the top AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, ECML-PKDD, etc.

Recently, I have completed PhD (August 2016 - June 2020) in the department of Computer Science and Automation at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore under the guidance of Prof. M. Narasimha Murty. I am extremely lucky and thankful to both IBM Research and IISc, Bangalore to allow me to be a part of them at the same time. Before this, I have completed Master of Engineering from the same department of IISc, Bangalore. I have completed my Bachelors of Technology from Institute of Engineering and Management (IEM), Kolkata, while did the final year research project from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. I was born and brought up in a town named Chinsurah (or Chuchura), which is roughly 50km away from Kolkata, the city of joy, in West Bengal, India. I did my schooling from Hooghly Branch (Govt.) School, Hooghly.