About the Donor:

IIT Bombay alumnus, Dr. Shashidhar Thakur (B.Tech., Computer Science and Engineering, 1990), established the Thakur Family Chair Professor at IIT Bombay.

Dr. Shashidhar Thakur is currently the Vice President of Engineering for Search at Google Inc., California, where he is responsible for building Google Knowledge Graph in web search. Dr. Thakur has 11 patents in the areas of Search and Electronic Design Automation and has also published papers in refereed journals and conferences.

Dr. Thakur’s vision for this chair professorship is to promote excellence in teaching and research in the domains of Machine Intelligence and Data Science.

About the Appointee:

Prof. Parthe Pandit, Assistant Professor, Center for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (C-MInDS)

Prof. Parthe Pandit is currently the Thakur Family Chair Assistant Professor at IIT Bombay.

Prof. Pandit received his undergraduate dual degree in electrical engineering at IIT Bombay. He then obtained his MS in Statistics and a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UCLA. Before joining C-MInDS at IIT Bombay, he spent two years as a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego.

His research focuses on foundational aspects of Machine Learning and Data Science. His postdoctoral research included understanding the generalization properties of contemporary machine learning models such as neural networks. During his PhD, he worked on understanding generative models, and optimization-based solutions for solving inverse problems in signal processing.

His articles have been published in premier machine learning venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, and AISTATS. He has also published foundational articles on other topics such as graph theory, and economics. He has worked on applied problems in the industry as a research intern with Citadel LLC where he worked on quantitative financial modelling and large language modelling at Amazon Search and Amazon AWS working.

Prof. Pandit received the Jack K. Wolf Student Paper award in 2019 at the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) and the Best Poster award at the IEEE Information Theory and Applications (ITA) workshop.