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Balaraman Ravindran

Member

1. Academic Summary



Balaraman Ravindran is a leading expert in machine learning, reinforcement learning and related areas such as geometric deep learning, data mining and social network analysis. He leads major AI research centres at IIT Madras and has nearly three decades of experience in fundamental and applied AI research. 


2. Education


  • Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA (Advisor: Andrew G. Barto) 

  • M.S. (Engg), Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India 

  • B.E., Electronics and Communication Engineering, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India 



3. Professional Experience (Selected)


  • Head, Department of Data Science and AI (DSAI), IIT Madras — Apr 2024–Present 

  • Professor, DSAI & RBC-DSAI, IIT Madras — 2018–Present 

  • Mindtree Faculty Fellow, IIT Madras — 2019–2024 

  • Visiting Researcher, Google Research, Bengaluru — 2020–2021 

  • Visiting Faculty / Fellow, IISc Bangalore & University of Technology Sydney 

  • Co-Director, Reconfigurable and Intelligent Systems Engineering (RISE) Group, IIT Madras 



4. Research Interests


  • Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep RL 

  • Machine Learning & Data Mining 

  • Geometric Deep Learning 

  • Network Analytics / Social Network Analysis 

  • Responsible AI (through CeRAI) 



5. Honors & Awards


  • Elected Fellow, Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) (2023) 

  • ACM Distinguished Member (2021) 

  • Senior Member, Association for Advancement of AI (AAAI) (2020) 

    (Additional local/industry awards and recognitions likely, needs confirmation from personal CV.)



6. Scholarly Output & Impact


  • Nearly 100+ publications in top venues including ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, ICLR, NIPS/NeurIPS, AAMAS and others. 

  • Co-author of a chapter on reinforcement learning in the Handbook of Neural Computation (Oxford Univ. Press). 

  • Served on program committees of leading AI/ML conferences (e.g., PAKDD, Big Data Summit). 



7. Academic Leadership & Service


  • Founding executive committee member and President of India Chapter of ACM SIGKDD 

  • Editorial board member for journals like PLOS One and Frontiers in Big Data 

  • Key contributor to curriculum design for AI/DS programs at IIT Madras