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.
Professor Soma Biswas
Soma Biswas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. She received her PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2009. Then, she worked as a Research Faculty at the University of Notre Dame and as a Research Scientist at GE Research before joining IISc. Her research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. She serves as a Senior Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and is a Senior Member of IEEE.
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 (2021–24) and 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 experiments with novel forms of assessment in undergraduate and postgraduate courses. At present, his work explores responses to advances in machine learning (ML)-assisted code generation techniques such as GitHub Copilot. In addition, he conducts outreach programmes for training high school mathematics teachers and computer science faculty in higher education. For schoolteachers, his recent efforts include integrating computational thinking into IISc’s training programmes at Challakere. For faculty, he contributes as a Steering Committee member and course lead in Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi’s CSEDU Programme, and also offers shorter-duration training programmes at IISc.