Alumni Newsletter August 2021

Message from the Head of the Department

Due to the pandemic, this has continued to be a difficult period for students, faculty and staff. We miss face-to-face meetings, discussions in the corridors, working at a shared whiteboard, and sitting with one another in labs, and having cups of tea and samosas together.

 

The online mode will continue for at least one more semester, after which things will hopefully return to normal as more of us are fully vaccinated, and classroom arrangements are reconfigured. One bright spot is that, notwithstanding the pandemic, we have been able to continue to expand and recruit more faculty members of outstanding quality and likewise with students. We were also granted a respectable sum of money for equipment from the Institute under the IoE scheme. 

 

We are thankful to our alumni for their continued support which has been a key enabling factor in our growth and achievements. The meeting with the '92 batch brought back great memories and we look forward to more such meet-ups. Please stay in touch and write to us with any new ideas for the department to excel further in its mission.


Warm regards, and wishing you all the best.

 

Sanjiva Prasad

 

Alumni Initiatives

Mohit Aron Endowment

 

Mohit Aron (BTech CSE 1995) has donated a sum of USD 1 Million to the IITD Endowment Fund. Mohit has expressed the desire that his donation be used in support of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The support from the Mohit Aron Endowment will be used to facilitate and support initiatives that are directed towards the Department’s twin goals of excelling in teaching and research, and in projecting the Department as a leading Computer Science and Engineering department in the world.

 


 

TBO New Faculty Fellowship

Alumnus Gaurav Bhatnagar (BTech 2001) has donated three New Faculty Fellowship grants entitled TBO New Faculty Fellowships to support the jumpstarting of research by new faculty joining the department. Thank you, Gaurav!

 

 

Faculty Awards

 

Professor Aaditeshwar Seth and the Centre for Collective Development have been awarded a Google AI for Social Good grant of $30,000 to collaborate on Building AI-based Market Intelligence Systems for Farmer Collectives. The goal of the project is to support farmer cooperatives and producer organisations to compete effectively with large agricultural corporations. 

Aaditeshwar was also recently conferred with the Varshney Award for contributions to systems science, application, and technology, by the Systems Society of India. 

 

Congratulations Aaditeshwar!

 

 

  

New Faculty Members

Dr. Abhijnan Chakraborty has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to joining IIT Delhi, he spent two and half years at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) as a post-doctoral researcher. He obtained his PhD from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur where he was jointly advised by Prof. Niloy Ganguly from IIT Kharagpur and Prof. Krishna Gummadi from MPI-SWS. During his PhD, he was awarded the prestigious Prime Minister's Fellowship for Doctoral Research and the Google India PhD Fellowship. Prior to that, he worked with Microsoft Research India for two years.

 

Meet Abhijnan (YouTube link) 

 

 

Dr. Abhilash Jindal has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to joining IIT Delhi, he spent a year at Instabase and another couple of years as the CTO of Mobile Enerlytics, a startup he co-founded. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University where he worked closely with professors Y. Charlie Hu and Samuel Midkiff. His undergraduate degree is from IIT Kanpur.

 

Meet Abhilash Jindal (YouTube link)

 

 

Dr. Nikhal Balaji has joined as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before this, he worked as aResearch Associate at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, and as a lecturer at The Trinity College at Oxford. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Ulm university and at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He obtained his Ph.D in Computer Science from the Chennai Mathematical Institute.

 

Meet Nikhil Balaji (YouTube link)

 

Alumni Events

92-entry 25th graduation anniversary

 

 

Write up by Kamal Jain (BTech, CSE, 1992)

 

On April 25th this year, 92 entry batch organised their 25th-year online meet-up. The meet-up was sponsored by IITD-CS department and organised by Prof. Amitabha Bagchi, who himself is a part of the batch. The meeting was attended by about 30 alumni, 8 professors and 1 former teaching assistant. Some alumni could not attend due to the pandemic. The meeting started with introductions. The students described both their professional and family lives. Prof. Bhatt, Prof. Maheshwari, Prof. Vazirani, Prof. Anshul Kumar, Prof. Balakrishnan, Prof. S Arun-Kumar, Prof. Pankaj Mehra, and Prof. Prasad gave their blessings and their best wishes for the continued success of their former students. It is clear that the batch holds a special place in the hearts of many of these professors who vividly remembered many of their past interactions with the students. Prof. Naveen Garg, now the Dean of Alumni Affairs at IITD, TAed some of the classes of this batch. Prof. Sanjiva Prasad gave a closing speech on behalf of the department and Prof. Bagchi presented a short video showing how well the department is doing. The success of the batch clearly demonstrates that the education imparted by the institution is invaluable and world class. I ended the meeting by thanking all the professors who not only made us more educated but also made us good human beings.

Events

 

IoT Security:  On December 3rd 2020, faculty members and students of the CSE Department organised and participated in the Indo-Japanese Online Workshop on Security in the IoT Space, with Kyushu University.

 

Doctoral Fellowship Grant



Rahul Kanyal

 

Supervisor: Prof. Smruti R. Sarangi

 

Research area keywords: Cross-architecture Binary analysis, Reverse engineering, and software security.

 

Research overview: Currently working on finding clones of code in binaries compiled for different architectures. The implications of this research are in discovering vulnerable code reuse in malware analysis and plagiarism detection in proprietary code.

He has been awarded the “G.P Goyal Doctoral Fellowship” sponsored by alumnus Anshuman Goyal (BTech 1992).

 

 

Anjali

 

Supervisor name: Prof. Sayan Ranu and Prof. Amitabha Bagchi

 

Research area key words: Algorithmic fairness, Fair allocation and recommendation, GNN, Generative models, Data Analytics

 

Research overview: I am currently working on estimating fairness issues in existing algorithms related to allocation and recommendation problems. Here we aim to come with alternate fair algorithms that not only establish fairness in corresponding domain but are efficient and scalable. My other interests include graph neural network (GNN) and generative graph modelling.

 

She has been awarded the “Chandruka Doctoral Fellowship” sponsored by Umesh Kumar (BTech 2003)

 

 

Rajat Singh

 

Supervisor name: Prof. Srikanta Bedathur

 

Research area key words: Embeddings in Relational Database.

 

Research overview: In this research project we are trying to explore the area of learning low dimensional embedding on entities of relational database consists of multiple tables. Using these low dimensional embeddings we will perform various downstream tasks such as Table Autocompletion and Join Prediction. Table Autocompletion – In this the aim is to get the ranked list of most probable candidates for the masked entity in a table. Join Prediction – In this given two joint compatible table Tα and Tβ that are joined over primary key and foreign relationship, we want to predict the tuple of Tβ given a tuple of Tα. Thus, we are aiming to propose such algorithms that can take care of the above given problems and is scalable for real world datasets.

He has been awarded the “Chandruka Doctoral Fellowship” sponsored by alumnus Umesh Kumar (BTech 2003).

 

 

Sumaiya Dabeer

 

Supervisor Name: Prof. Amitabha Bagchi

 

Research area keywords: Graphs, Networks, GPUs, Laplacian solvers

 

Research overview: My areas of research are scientific computing and algorithms and their possible impact on data science. I am working on solving linear systems of equations describe by graph  Laplacians. The real-world applications of these solvers are in image processing, network management of 5G, clustering and portioning on large graphs. We are also focusing on processing graphs using GPUs to make solutions to solvers like these more scalable and fast.

She has been awarded the “TBO Group Fellowship for women” sponsored by the TBO group thanks to the efforts of alumnus Gaurav Bhatnagar (BTech 2001).

 

  

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