Balaraman Ravindran

Balaraman Ravindran is the founding head of the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science & AI and the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at IIT Madras, as well as Mindtree Faculty Fellow at IITM. He has held visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and Google Research. He has more than three decades of experience working in reinforcement learning, and his research interest spans learning on graphs and deep RL.

He is a member of the ACM Publications board’s AI task force. He co-chaired the committee that suggested regulations for the use of AI in financial markets in India and chaired the national task force on AI and cybersecurity. He was also a member of the Government of India’s taskforce on defence applications of AI. He is a member of the Government of India’s Advisory Group on AI for India Specific Regulatory AI Framework and the AI Advisory Council of the AI for India 2030 initiative of C4IR India of the World Economic Forum. He represents India on the Expert Advisory Panel to the UK’s State of the Science Report on Advanced AI Safety. He is serving as a GC REAIM Commissioner.

He currently serves on the editorial boards of top journals and has helped organize some of the premier conferences in this area, such as AAAI 2021, 2023-24 and KDD 2023. He has published more than 150 papers in premier journals and conferences. His works with students have won multiple best paper awards, the most recent being the best application paper at PAKDD 2021.

Ravindran led the design of the curriculum for several data science and AI degree programs offered by IIT Madras and currently directs the dual degree program on data science and the joint MSc in data science and AI with the University of Birmingham, UK. He has been closely collaborating with various Industrial Research Labs, such as Google Research, Intel Research, Ericsson R&D, TCS, Robert Bosch, KLA Tencor, Applied Materials, GE, Adobe Research, IBM India Research Labs, Yahoo! Labs and General Motors, working on applications of AI techniques to hard real-world problems.

He was elected ACM Distinguished Member (2021) for his significant contributions to computing. He was recognized in 2020 as a Senior member of AAAI (Association for Advancement of AI) for his long-standing contributions to AI. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the apex engineering society of India.