About the Donor:

The Halepete Family Chair of Artificial Intelligence Research was set up with a generous donation from IIT Bombay alumnus, Mr Sameer Halepete (BTech. Electrical Engineering, 1993). Mr. Halepete is currently the Vice President, VLSI Engineering at NVIDIA, California, which is part of the computer equipment and peripherals industry.

The vision of this chair professorship is to promote academic pursuit and research in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

About the Appointee:

Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti is currently the Halepete Family Chair of Artificial Intelligence Research at IIT Bombay.

Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti received his B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, in 1991, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and 1996 respectively.

At Berkeley, he worked on compilers and runtime systems for running scalable parallel scientific software on message-passing multiprocessors. He was a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Centre from 1996 to 1999, where he worked on the Clever Web search project and led the Focused Crawling project. In 1999 he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. In Spring 2004 he was a Visiting Associate Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. During 2014-2016 he was a Visiting Scientist at Google, Mountain View.

He has presented academic papers at several conferences including the WWW, ACL, SIGIR, SIGKDD, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, SODA, STOC, SPAA, and more. He has also published in numerous journals including Scientific American, IEEE Computer, VLDB, and more.

He won the Best Paper award at WWW 1999. He was a co-author of the Best Student Paper at ECML 2008. His work on keyword search in databases got the 10-year Influential Paper award at ICDE 2012. He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 2014, the Jagadis Bose National Fellowship in 2019, and is a fellow of the Indian National Academies of Engineering and Science.

He holds 13 US patents on web-related inventions and is the author of one of the earliest books on web search and mining.

Prof. Chakrabarti has served as a technical advisor to search companies. He has been vice-chair and/or program committee member at several conferences including WWW, SIGIR, SIGKDD, NeurIPS, ICML, VLDB, ICDE, SODA, and more.  He was the guest editor and/or editorial board member for DMKD and TKDE journals. He served as the inaugural program chair for WSDM 2008 and was the program chair for WWW 2010.

His current research interests include integrating, searching, and mining text and graph data models, exploiting types and relations in search, and knowledge graph representation.