Faculty

Convenor – Rajiv Soundararajan

Rajiv Soundararajan received the BE degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India in 2006. He received the MS and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, USA in 2008 and 2012, respectively. Between 2012 and 2015, he was with Qualcomm Research India, Bengaluru. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He received the 2016 IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award and 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award. He also received a Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 2021 for the ‘Development of Perceptual Metrics for Video Encoding Optimization’. His research interests are broadly in image and video signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, and information theory.


Chair Visiting Professor – C Pandu Rangan

Chandrasekaran Pandu Rangan obtained his Master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Madras, Chennai and Doctorate degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He joined the faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 1982. He has served as a distinguished Visiting Professor at the Information and Communications University, Deajon, South Korea. He joined the rank of Professors in 1995 and served as Head of Department from 1998–2001.

He was a member of the founding team for IIT Hyderabad (IITH) and served as Inaugural Chair to set up the computer science department at IITH (2008–2011). He has upgraded the unit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Chennai to a Centre and served as Inaugural Chair for the ISI, Chennai Centre. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) from 2006. He was honoured as Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman Chair Professor in 2017. He served at IITM until his retirement and superannuated in 2021. Since August 2021, he served at IISc, in the Department of Computer Science and Automation as Sathish Dhawan Visiting Chair Professor. 

Pandu Rangan also served in the Board of Directors of the International Association of Cryptology Research (IACR), USA and in the Board of Directors of the Society for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS), Chennai. He was also on the editorial board of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series published by Springer Verlag, Germany.  He has developed special outreach programme-related lecture series and customised competency building lecture series at TCS, INFOSYS, IBM Research, Tokyo, Japan, SAMSUNG R&D, Seoul, South Korea.   During his forty year-long academic life, he has taken special interest in promoting undergraduate research and many of his mentee are in top positions in academia and industry. He has pioneered the research in multiparty computation in India and emerged as the fourth most prolific researcher in the world among the ACM PODC community around 2015 (and first in India). Recently, just begore his retirement from IITM, he has initiated the research in blockchain technology at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IITM.  His areas of interest include technology enhanced learning, algorithms, cryptology, discrete mathematics, puzzle based learning, and algorithmic thinking.


Visiting Professor – Viraj Kumar

Viraj Kumar is a Visiting Professor at KIAC. He completed his PhD (2007) in computer science and later taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was awarded the Rose Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (2011). Viraj Kumar’s primary research areas are in educational technology and computer science education, with emphasis on India-specific challenges. He serves as an elected member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council (2021–28) and co-chairs its Educational Initiatives Committee. He has contributed to the development of the revised All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) computer science curriculum (2022) as well as the international CS2023 curriculum. Previously, he served as a consultant to the Kasturirangan Committee for drafting the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) and to the Ministry of Education’s committee creating the National Curricular Frameworks.

At KIAC, Viraj Kumar experiments with novel forms of assessment in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. At present, his work explores responses to advances in artificial intelligence code generation techniques, and he presently serves as a member of ACM’s Task Force on Generative Artificial Intelligence and Student Programming Assessment. In addition, he conducts outreach programmes for training high school teachers and computer science faculty in higher education. For school teachers, his recent efforts include integrating computational thinking and coding into IISc’s training programmes at Challakere. For faculty, he has contributed to IIIT Delhi’s CSEDU Programme and ACM India’s Teaching Partnership Programme. He also offers shorter-duration training programmes at IISc. Viraj Kumar is presently developing an NPTEL course on Programming with Generative AI (July 2025) as well as an open textbook on the same subject.


Steering Group

Anirban Chakraborty

Department of Computational and Data Sciences

Research interests: data-efficient and privacy-preserving deep learning, cross-modal computer vision, perceiving humans and their actions

Danish Pruthi

Department of Computational and Data Sciences

Research interests: natural language processing, deep learning, interpretability and analysis of models, inclusive evaluation, societal and ethical considerations of artificial intelligence

Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan

Department of Computational and Data Sciences

Research interests: computer vision, deep learning

Chiranjib Bhattacharyya

Department of Computer Science and Automation

Research interests: machine learning, convex optimisation, autonomous systems

Shirish K Shevade

Department of Computer Science and Automation

Research interests: machine learning, data mining, convex optimisation, applications of deep learning

Pushpak Jagtap

Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems

Research interests: control of cyber-physical systems, robotics and control, learning-based control, formal analysis and control methods, safety-critical autonomous systems, control theory (nonlinear, stochastic), spatio–temporal logic tasks 

Suresh Sundaram

Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems

Research interests: intelligent flight control system, autonomous systems, applied game theory, computer vision, robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence

Aditya Gopalan

Department of Electrical Communication Engineering

Research areas: machine learning, statistical inference, control, performance modelling, analysis of complex systems

Prathosh A P

Department of Electrical Communication Engineering

Research interests: deep-representational learning, cross-domain generalisation, signal processing, and their applications in computer vision and speech analytics

Rajiv Soundararajan
(Convenor)

Department of Electrical Communication Engineering

Research interests: image and video signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, information theory

Chandra Sekhar Seelamantula

Department of Electrical Engineering

Research interests: speech/biomedical/image processing, sampling theory, compressed sensing, neuromorphic imaging, inverse problems in computational imaging, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, AI for digital healthcare

Soma Biswas

Department of Electrical Engineering

Research interests: computer vision, pattern recognition, image processing

Sriram Ganapathy

Department of Electrical Engineering

Research interests: signal processing, machine learning, deep learning, neuroscience

Chetan Singh Thakur

Department of Electronic Systems Engineering

Research interests: neuromorphic computing, mixed-signal VLSI systems, computational neuroscience, probabilistic signal processing, machine learning

International Chair Visiting Professor (2024–25)

Alan Bovik

Cockrell Family Regents Endowed Chair Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Alan Bovik’s research interests land at the nexus of visual neuroscience and digital pictures and videos. His recent interests include immersive, virtual, and augmented visual experiences, and how they can be perceptually optimised. An elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and Academia Europaea, his many honours include the John Fritz Medal, IEEE Edison Medal, Primetime Emmy Award, Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, RPS Progress Medal, and Edwin H Land Medal.

Visiting Professors (2024–25)

Srinath Sridhar

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Srinath Sridhar leads the Interactive 3D Vision & Learning Lab (https://ivl.cs.brown.edu) at Brown University. He received his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. His research interests are in 3D computer vision and machine learning. Specifically, his group focusses on visual understanding of 3D human physical interactions with applications ranging from robotics to mixed reality. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a Google Research Scholar award, and his work received the Eurographics Best Paper Honourable Mention. He spends part of his time as a visiting academic at Amazon Robotics and has previously spent time at Microsoft Research Redmond and Honda Research Institute.

Prabhat Mishra

Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida, USA

Prabhat Mishra received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine. His research interests include AI for cybersecurity, design automation for embedded systems, hardware security verification, and quantum computing. He has published 9 books, 35 book chapters, 30 patents, and more than 250 research articles in premier international journals and conferences. His research has been recognised by several awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award, three best paper awards, 11 best paper nominations, and EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award.

He currently serves as the Chair of the IEEE CEDA Fellow Evaluation Committee as well as the Chair of the Editor-in-Chief Search Committee for ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS). He also serves as the Program Chair of the International Conference on Hardware-Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS) and IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST). He serves as an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) and ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES). He is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.