Sutanu Chakraborti
I am a
Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at
IIT Madras. I am part of the Artificial
Intelligence and Databases (AIDB) Lab in our department. My research interests
are broadly in computational models of language, memory and learning. I offer four
electives in these areas: Computational Models of Cognition (CMC), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Memory Based
Reasoning in AI (MBR) and Introduction to Machine Learning (IML). Prof. Deepak Khemani, Dr. Ravindran Balaraman and Dr. Ashish Tendulkar teach (or
have taught in the past) part of MBR, NLP and ML courses with me.
A Note for Students: I do not have any open internship positions now. Sorry about this, but I may not be able to respond individually to requests for internships in our lab.
Research Scholars and Students
Industry Research Experience
Contact
Here are some fairly open-ended
questions that drive my research. I am not equally active on all of these, but
I wish I were. I have also been involved in shorter term problems, some derived
out of these long term challenges, and some others which are independently
motivated.
- How can we build real world applications that can help big
organizations make best use of the wealth of wisdom hidden in their
unstructured data repositories (project documentations, proposals, white
papers, user groups, blogs, research reports, employee
feedback, resumes)?
- Can machines reasoning over unstructured text learn by
introspecting over failures? Instead of working hard at solving problems
end to end, can they seek our help intelligently at times? How best can we
exploit the complementary abilities of humans and machines in building conversational
problem solvers? This may need us to take a broader look at systems, the
way they represent knowledge to enable transparency and interpretability,
the way they interact with us (user interfaces and visualizations) and the
way they facilitate learning and evolution - ours and theirs. Yet another
challenge is to estimating complexity of tasks so that we can effectively
involve humans to examine hard cases and provide feedback, which can be
used by the system for introspective learning.
- I walk into a camera store, see the products on display and finally
turn to the assistant to help me finalize my choice. In course of my chat
with her, my model of the world of cameras evolves, and her model of my
requirements evolves. How can the design of recommender systems benefit
from a better understanding of the how these models (should) co-evolve?
- How do language and memory interact? Even before you read an
assassination report in your morning newspaper, you would have glossed
through the news heading and begun anticipating the questions the report
aims at answering (Who killed whom? Where? How? Why? What is unique about
the manner in which the crime is committed?) Can we build
cognitive/computational models that model learning through interaction of memory
and language?
- How can different sources of knowledge (statistical, background,
linguistic) integrate to facilitate better text analysis over tasks like
classification or question answering? I see this line of work deriving
inspiration from cognitive studies on humor. I believe jokes illustrate
beautifully what goes wrong when we fail to combine the knowledge sources
appropriately.
- How can knowledge mined from text be represented at various levels
of abstraction (general through specific)? How can a system identify which
level is appropriate for a task? A classification task may need knowledge
at a very different level of abstraction, when compared to a question
answering task which may need a very high level of granularity. Also, when
we talk to novices, we use level of abstraction very different from the
one we use when we talk to experts. So the problem of choosing the right
level of representation is as important to generation (NLG) as it is to
understanding (NLU).
|
Degree |
Year |
University / Institute |
Specialization |
|
Ph. D. |
2004-2007 |
The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, U.K. |
Computer Science |
|
M.S. (by Research) |
2002-2004 |
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras |
Computer Science and Engineering |
|
B.E. (Hons.) |
1994-1998 |
Regional Engineering College (now NIT), Rourkela |
Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering |
Prior to my engineering education, I
did my schooling at Holy Cross School, Agartala (high school) and Shishu Bihar
School, Agartala (higher secondary school). I was state topper in the ICSE
exam, and stood second in state in the Higher Secondary Examination.
Students and Research Scholars
PhD (completed): Deepak Padmanabhan (external scholar from IBM IRL,
jointly with Prof. Deepak Khemani), Ditty Mathew, Swapnil Hingmire (external scholar from TRDDC, Pune), PhD (submitted thesis): Devi G., PhD (ongoing): Anbarasu, Ashika Naidu (external scholar from CAIR, Bangalore, jointly with Prof. P Sreenivasa Kumar), Adwait Parsodkar
M.S. (completed): Anil Patelia, Saurabh Gupta (winner of Biswajit Sain Best MS thesis award) ,
Bibekananda Kundu (external, CDAC Kolkata), Debarun Kar (jointly with Prof. B. Ravindran), Bhautik Patel (jointly with
Dr. Ashish Tendulkar), Shubhranshu Shekhar (jointly with Prof. Deepak Khemani),
Abhijit Sahoo, Ayesha S., Shashank Srivastava (jointly with Dr. Mitesh Khapra), Neha Dubey (jointly with Prof. Deepak Khemani), Nitin Gupta (primarily supervised by Prof. Sukhendu Das), MS (ongoing): Arup Das, Srashti Kaurav
Mtech, Dual Degree and Btech
Students : To be updated
In addition to the four elective
courses mentioned, I have taught Principles of Communication, an undergraduate
level core course comprising introduction to signals and systems, probability
theory and random processes, and information theory. I also taught an
undergraduate core course introducing Computing (largely C programming) to
first year students.
Approximately 7 years at Tata
Research Development and Design Centre as a scientist (and later as project
leader of a Case-Based Reasoning Research Team).
Once upon a time, I wished I could
write poems. Here is one attempt.
Book of Life
My book of life gets written
Every passing day
By things I couldn't do
Words I couldn't say.
The undone and the unsaid
A silent life do share
Where the said and the done
Seek meaning in despair.
I can feel it not so quite,
I can hear it not so clear;
How my deal for days to come,
Their silent life does steer.
That indeed is silence within,
That indeed is joy profound;
The book is written all over,
And the author never found.
Room No. BSB 304
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
IIT Madras,
Chennai 600 036
Email: sutanuc AT cse DOT iitm DOT
ac DOT in (alternately sutanuc AT iitm DOT ac DOT in)