After a productive year at @TechAtBloomberg, I am back at @iitdelhi. I found BBG to have a supportive environment, open & egalitarian work culture and excellent peers. Thanks to these, I could make several contributions across many product groups. Pics from 2 farewell lunches:

Honored to be featured in @ForbesIndia and @Accel’s list of top 30 minds leading the AI revolution in India. Lots of amazing people on the list….

Overjoyed that @adityagrover_ , ex-ugrad @iitdelhi, won the prestigious once-in-2-yr Computers&Thought award. He has done ground-breaking work in AI4climate, diffusion LLMs, graph embeddings & more. Also beaming with pride as I co-mentored him in his early days. Congrats Aditya!!.

I have had an incredibly positive experience during my sabbatical at Bloomberg. I am glad that they are formalizing this into a program. A major plus for me was that I was treated as fulltime for *everything*. I will be happy to chat in case you had questions about my experience.

RT @cseiitd: Looking to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at one of India's top institutes?.📢 CSE IIT Delhi invites passionate researchers….

Lot of ppl who r not on FB think that I am still in London. I have been in New York since July and will be here until this July before returning to India. Also visiting: Boston, Madison, CA Bay Area, LA, Albuquerque and Buffalo in coming mnths. Ping me if u there and wanna meet.

starting my yr long sabbatical tonight. I will work in @Bloomberg's AI team as a visiting NLP researcher. Excited to learn how modern NLP tools get used in industry. Will start work out of London office on 15th, and will shift to NYC if and when I receive US visa. Wish me luck!.

AIHub interviewed me in their "meet AAAI fellows" series. I discuss my career, information extraction, mentorship and creativity.

Collab w @TCSResearch, esp. Indrajit Bhattacharya, bearing fruit. Two joint papers on #KBQA accepted at @aclmeeting(Main) 1. better model robust to unanswerable questions, 2. 1st(?) in-context learning model for KBQA. A 3rd on KB completion also in. Congrats to all coauthors.

Can NLP technologies review your research papers? Of course, not! Can they help in reviewing, and also help authors in preparing a strong draft, and help conference organizers improve peer review? Absolutely! More details in this opinion piece that's a result of Feb @dagstuhl.

Back to Back PhD defences! Congratulations to Dr. Dinesh Raghu, my PhD #13, for making salient contributions to the field of end-to-end task oriented dialog, with a focus on unseen knowledge. And with his graduation, all of my 1st gen PhD students at IIT Delhi have graduated!

Congrats to Dr Yatin Nandwani (my PhD #12), for completing his defense with flying colors. Yatin made many amazing contributions to neuro-symbolic ML, especially for tasks requiring both perception and reasoning. Joint with Prof Parag Singla)

Another dinner, this time at #AAAI2024, where @ravi_iitm and I discussed challenges and opportunities with academic jobs in India. Lets hope many of these young folks apply to Indian academia in the next couple of years.

My takeaways from amazing panel. 1) is reasoning just iterated pattern matching? 2) don’t conflate form with content, 3) message may no longer be more important than messenger, 4) alignment must be for society, not CS folks, nd 5) jobs that need human experience still important.

Cool Rao-isms interspersed throughout this tutorial. Some I caught: "LLMs don't sometimes hallucinate. They _always_ hallucinate". "Creativity and truth-telling are at natural odds with each other.", "Civilization tries its best not to use System 2, ever!". and more :).

Great to see many familiar faces at #aaai2024.

As I join this august group, I hope I can play the same role for the next generation of AI researchers. Thank you @RealAAAI, for the incredible honor. (2/2).

Really excited to share that I have been elected as a fellow of AAAI -- the global AI organization. In younger times, I remember, getting inspired by my senior colleagues and mentors, @dsweld, @etzioni , @pmddomingos, @fox_dieter17849 and @rao2z , who were all AAAI fellows. (1/2).

A marathon 3 hour dinner at #NeurIPS2023. Many postdocs/PhD students interested in AI faculty positions in India got together to discuss job opportunities, issues, benefits, drawbacks of being a professor in India. Hope I convinced at least a few of them apply to IITs soon 😀

And my ex-students (across 15 years) got together for a quick lunch at #NeurIPS2023! Always great to see students doing so well :)