IIT Madras Professor Balaraman Ravindran Elected AAAI Fellow for Advancing AI Research in India

Professor Balaraman Ravindran of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has been elected as a fellow of the international scientific society Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The AAAI Fellows Program honours individuals who have made substantial, sustained contributions to AI, typically over a decade. Each year, a select group of members is nominated by their peers, and the nominations are reviewed by a committee. 

“Honoured and humbled to be elected an AAAI fellow this year, along with an illustrious cohort,” he said in a LinkedIn post. 

Ravindran was elected alongside professor Sriraam Natarajan from the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). “Humbled and honoured to be elected as [an] AAAI Fellow! To be walking among giants is a dream come true. Many of the folks in this list are people that I have always looked up to (and still do),” he said on Linkedin. 

Natarajan is a prominent professor of computer science and the director of the Centre for Machine Learning at UTD. He has made significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), particularly in statistical relational learning, reinforcement learning, and their applications in healthcare.

Ravindran’s election reflects his longstanding impact on AI research and education in India, particularly during a time when ML was not widely recognised in the country. He has been instrumental in advancing AI education in India. He founded the Wadhwani School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (WSAI) at IIT Madras and has played a key role in developing curricula that integrate machine learning into various academic programs. 

Ravindran heads the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI), the WSAI, the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) and the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras.

His research has focused on deep reinforcement learning, where he has made foundational contributions. One of them is the introduction of Markov Decision Process (MDP) homomorphisms – a framework that has influenced various applications in AI.

His collaboration with students and researchers has led to numerous publications in top-tier conferences and journals. Notably, he co-authored a paper on deep reinforcement learning for action hierarchies that was accepted at AAAI 2017, when he mentored Perplexity AI co-founder Aravind Srinivas. 

“My first accepted conference paper was with him at the AAAI 2017; research we did together on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for action hierarchies when I was an undergrad at IIT-M. He was super early to adopting DL and RL at a time when India hardly had any machine learning education and awareness to begin with,” Srinivas said. 

Ravindran’s work extends beyond academia. He has collaborated with industry leaders such as Google Research and IBM to apply AI techniques to real-world problems. His efforts have significantly contributed to fostering an AI research community in India, which has helped bridge theoretical advancements with practical applications.

With over three decades of experience in the field, Ravindran’s election as an AAAI fellow marks a significant milestone in his career and underscores his role as a leading figure in artificial intelligence research in India.

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}