Faculty Profiles

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Somdev Kar
Department: Humanities & Social Sciences

Dr. Somdev Kar is an associate professor at Indian Institute of Technology Ropar. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, and his MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hyderabad. Prior to joining IIT Ropar, he worked at the Leibniz-Center for General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, as a research associate and at CIIL, Mysore, as a Fellow, and later as a visiting faculty at Qatar University, Qatar. His research interests are in Phonetics, Phonology (Optimality Theory), Distributed Morphology, Evolutionary Linguistics, and NLP. He has published a book and several research articles in internationally acclaimed journals.

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Ramanathan Subramanian
Department: Computer Science & Engineering

Dr. Ramanathan Subramanian received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engg., from NUS in 2008. He is an Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engg., at IIT Ropar. His past affiliations include IHPC (Singapore), U Glasgow (Singapore), IIIT Hyderabad (India) and UIUC-ADSC (Singapore). His research focuses on Human-centered computing, and especially on extracting and modeling non-verbal behavioral cues for interactive analytics. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the ACM and AAAC

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Arun Kumar
Department: Mathematics

Dr. Arun Kumar received his PhD degree in Mathematics from IIT Bombay in 2012. He also holds a Master degree in Industrial Mathematics from IIT Roorkee. His PhD work is related to Subordinated Stochastic Processes that have applications in finance, fractional partial differential equations and statistical physics. After completion of his PhD he worked for 3 years in ARP Research which was an asset management firm. During his stint at ARP Research LLP, Mumbai, he worked on all the major asset classes, namely, fixed income, currency, commodity and equity. He is an Assistant Professor at IIT Ropar from past 3.5 years. At IIT Ropar, he is offering courses on probability, statistics, stochastic processes and data science.

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Shashi Shekhar Jha
Department: Computer Science and Engineering

Dr Jha did his PhD from department of computer science and engineering, IIT Guwahati in 2016. His dissertation focused on learning and coordination in networked robots. He was a Research Scientist at the Fujitsu-SMU Corp lab in Singapore till 2018 where he was involved in using Big Data and AI for solving urban problems. Dr Jha is an Assistant Professor in the department of computer science and engineering, IIT Ropar since 2018. His current research interests includes multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence. He has published his research at various international conferences and journals such as IAAI-AAAI, AAMAS, ACM-TAAS, etc.

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Subrahmanyam Murala
Department: Electrical Engineering

Dr. Subrahmanyam Murala received the B.E. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Andhra University, Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2007. Afterwards, he received his M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, India, in 2009 and 2012 respectively. He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada from July 01, 2012 to June 30, 2014. Currently, he is working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Ropar, Rupnagar, Punjab, India. His major fields of interests are Image Retrieval, Computer Vision, Medical Image Processing and Object Detection.

Dr. Gupta is an Associate Professor and currently holding the position of Head in the Department of Mathematics at IIT Ropar. He did masters and PhD from IIT Roorkee and worked initially for four years at BITS Pilani. He is having 14 years of teaching experience and guided 5 PhD scholars. He has published more than 50 papers in international journals of repute. His research interests include modelling of stochastic transport, cellular automata, etc.

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Ashish Sahani
Department: Biomedical Engineering

Dr. Ashish Sahani is working as an Assistant Professor at Center for Biomedical Engineering (CBME) of Indian Institute of Technology Ropar where he is heading the medical devices lab. He obtained his PhD from IIT Madras and has undergone postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and University of Michigan. His lab works on multiple fronts of medical device development spanning hardware, software and simulations. He has a great interest in Applied AI especially pertaining to its applications in healthcare. In this line he teaches a popular course in Applied Machine Learning at IIT Ropar which attracts students from all disciplines.

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Shweta Jain
Department: Computer Science and Engineering

Dr. Jain’ research interests include the areas of Game Theory and Mechanism Design. She is interested in working at the intersection of Machine Learning and Mechanism Design. Currently, she is looking at the problem of Multi-armed Bandit Mechanism and its applications to Auctions, Crowdsourcing, Internet Advertising, and smart grids. She is also interested in working towards design of fair and interpretable machine learning algorithms.

Name of the Faculty: Dr. Abinav Dhall
Department: Computer Science & Engineering

Assistant Professor: Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, 2016 onwards Postdoctoral Fellow: University of Waterloo, 2016, Supervisor: Prof. Jesse Hoey Postdoctoral Fellow: University of Canberra, 2014-2016, Supervisor: Prof. Roland Goecke Visiting Student: Imperial College London, 2013, Supervisor: Prof. Stefanous Zaferious Visiting Student: University of California San Diego, 2012, Supervisor: Prof. Gwen Littlewort and Prof. Marian Bartlett PhD: Australian National University, 2010-14, Panel: Prof. Roland Goecke, Prof. Tom Gedeon and Prof. Simon Lucey Senior Software Engineer: Samsung India, 2007-09 https://sites.google.com/site/dhallabhinav/ Dr. Dhall's research interests are Computer Vision, Affective Computing and Deep Learning. His research has been recognised by awards such as the best student paper honorable mention award at IEEE AFGR 2013 and the best doctoral consortium paper award at ACM ICMR 2013.