Meet Our Distingushed Speakers
Dr. Manasi Patwardhan
With over 17 years of expertise in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, Dr. Patwardhan has led
numerous industry-driven Proof of Concepts. Her distinguished track record includes more than 10 granted
patents and over 40 publications at premier conferences like ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. She has
notably served as a demo-chair and program committee member for these esteemed gatherings.
Her contributions at TCS have been consistently recognized with an ‘A grade’ throughout her
seven-year tenure—a distinction achieved by only 2% of the workforce. She is also a recipient of the TCS
Innovista Award, the Young Engineer’s Award from the Institute of Engineers, and the ACM Grace Hopper
Scholarship.
Before entering the industry, she spearheaded R&D activities as Dean (R&D) at VIT, Pune, and
chaired the Board of Studies for Computer Science. As a Professor, she was instrumental in securing grants
from diverse funding agencies and fostering collaborative partnerships with industry while mentoring PhD and
MTech students.
Her current research focuses on GenAI, LLM Agents, training foundational models, and enhancing
reasoning in language models. She is currently leading the development of a platform designing to accelerate
the research lifecycle for scientists.
Topic: AI 4 AI Research
Abstract: We are building Acceleron, an intelligent partner designed to
accelerate the research lifecycles of TCS researchers. Leveraging GenAI, we provide workflows that are
steerable by researchers to improve efficiency in tasks such as ideation, exploration, codification, and
critique. This talk elaborates on these GenAI techniques and their applications in Acceleron for
AI4Research, while also highlighting relevant research problems and their solutions.
Dr. Rohit Gurjar
Serving as faculty at IIT Bombay since 2018, Dr. Gurjar holds dual B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees, along with a
Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur. His doctoral thesis was recognized by the ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Awards.
Prior to his current role, he broadened his international research perspective through postdoctoral work at
the University of Ulm (Germany), Tel Aviv University (Israel), and Caltech (USA).
Dr. Gurjar's research interests center on theoretical computer science, specifically
Computational Complexity, Derandomization, Polyhedral Combinatorics, and Parallel Complexity. His work
addresses foundational problems such as polynomial identity testing and perfect matching, contributing
significantly to core understandings in algorithm design.
Dr. Sushmita Gupta
Dr. Gupta, who earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern Denmark, is internationally acclaimed for
her contributions to algorithm design and analysis. Her research primarily explores graph algorithms,
algorithmic game theory, computational social choice, and streaming algorithms.
At IMSc, she teaches advanced courses including Algorithmic Game Theory and Algorithm Design.
She is also deeply involved in academic service, serving on program committees for major conferences and
coordinating summer schools.
Her influential publications cover multiagent systems, strategic behavior in voting, and the
computational complexity of collective decision-making, bridging theoretical foundations with
interdisciplinary computer science applications.
Dr. Jitesh Choudhary
A distinguished senior scientist and technology leader, Dr. Choudhary steers research, development, and
outreach as the Centre Head of C-DAC, Northeast Centre. His leadership at this autonomous R&D organization
under MeitY focuses on strategic initiatives in advanced computing.
His technical expertise spans high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, data science,
and cybersecurity, with an emphasis on developing scalable, indigenous solutions aligned with national
priorities.
Dr. Choudhary actively fosters collaboration between academia, industry, and government to drive
innovation and capacity building, particularly within Indias northeastern region, contributing significantly
to the national mission of technological self-reliance.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Leading advanced research initiatives at Samsung R&D Institute India – Bangalore (SRI-B), Mr. Mukherjee is a
seasoned technology director. He oversees teams dedicated to NLP, Deep Learning, and Generative AI, driving
innovations that bridge foundational research with next-generation product applications. His work reinforces
Samsung’s leadership in the global AI landscape.
Under his guidance, his team has published multiple papers at prestigeous international venues
like ACL and ICASSP. These contributions cover diverse topics ranging from multi-agent evaluation frameworks
to robust language model assessments and vision–language models.