Sayan Ranu

Bio · DS Chair Professor in AI, IIT Delhi

Graph ML
Algorithm Discovery
Agentic Systems
Self-Supervised Learning
Trustworthy AI
Sayan Ranu
At a glance

AppointmentDS Chair Professor in AI, IIT Delhi

Joint homeComputer Science & Engineering and the Yardi School of AI

PhDUC Santa Barbara, 2012

PatentsFive US patents

Spin-outAcelot, drug-discovery R&D

Short bio

Sayan Ranu is a DS Chair Professor in AI at IIT Delhi, jointly appointed in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Yardi School of AI. His group works on machine learning for graphs, automated algorithm discovery, and trustworthy AI. He received his PhD from UC Santa Barbara in 2012, holds five US patents, and has been recognized with the ACM India Early Career Researcher Award (Honorable Mention) and associate fellowships of INSA and the Indian Academy of Sciences.

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Full bio

Sayan Ranu holds the joint position of DS Chair Professor in AI in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Yardi School of AI at IIT Delhi. His research spans machine learning and data mining for graphs, and increasingly automated algorithm discovery, agentic systems, and trustworthy AI. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara in 2012. Before joining IIT Delhi, he was a Research Scientist at IBM Research and an Assistant Professor at IIT Madras.

Sayan has received several awards and recognitions, including the ACM India Early Career Researcher Award, Honorable Mention, 2024, the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Associate Fellowship (2023), the Mrs. Veena Arora Early Career Faculty Research Award of IIT Delhi (2023), Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences (2020), the Teaching Excellence Award (2025), and the Most Reproducible Paper Award at SIGMOD 2018.

He regularly serves on the program committees and review panels of prestigious conferences and journals, and has received Outstanding Reviewer Awards at WSDM 2021, VLDB 2022, ICLR 2024, and KDD 2025. He has also served as a Senior Area Chair at NeurIPS and as Program Co-Chair of the Datasets and Benchmarks Track at KDD.

Sayan has been granted five US patents. His dissertation on graph-based techniques for querying and mining molecular databases served as the seed idea behind Acelot, a life-science R&D startup focused on advanced technology for drug discovery.