Home Page: Sunita Sarawagi

Professor: Computer Science and Engineering
Member: AI Labs@CSE
Also associated with: Center of Machine Intelligence and Data Science
KR 220: Kanwal Rekhi Building
IIT Bombay
Powai, Mumbai-400076.
sunita [at] iitb.ac.in

Research

Publications

Professional Activities

Education and Experience

Research Interest

My topics of interest span several fields including machine learning, data analytics, databases and statistics. My current research interests are sequence models for text and time-series, domain adaptation, effective human intervention in learning, graphical models and structured learning.
A good idea about my research interests can be obtained by following my publications. Also, please visit this page to know more about our current team and ongoing research projects.

Office Hours:

Usual schedule: Tuesday 10--11am and Friday 12:00pm to 1:00pm. At other times by appointment.

Education and Affiliations

Professor, IIT Bombay
Founding head, Center for Machine Intelligence and Data Science (CMInDS), IIT Bombay (March 2020--June 2023)
Visiting Scientist at Google Research, Mountain View, CA (July 2014 to June 2016)
Visiting associate professor at the Computer science department of CMU (Jan 2004 -June 2004).
Research Staff Member in the QUEST database mining group at IBM Almaden Research Center from Aug 96 to Feb 99.
PhD: Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Thesis title: Query processing in tertiary memory databases, Thesis advisor: Michael Stonebraker.
BTech: Computer Science and Engineering, Indian institute of technology, Kharagpur.

Selected professional activities

IT Sub-committee of Reserve Bank of India, 2018-
IEEE John Von Neumann Medal committee2017-
VLDB 2011 Research track Co-chair
VLDB member of the endowment board (2008--)
ACM SIGKDD 2008 PC Co-chair
ACM SIGKDD, member of the Board of directors (2005-present)
SIGKDD Explorations, Editor-in-chief (2003-2005), Associate Editor (1999 - 2002)
ACM TODS, Editorial board(2004-2007)
ACM Transactions on KDD, Editorial board(2005-present)
Foundations and Trends® in Machine Learning Editorial board (2007-present)
IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Associate Editor (2000 to 2001)
Senior PC, Vice chair etc

ICML 2008
KDD 2011, KDD 2012, KDD 2013, KDD 2014
NIPS 2011, 2012
WSDM 2015
Knowledge discovery and data mining track, ICDE 2000
ICDE 2008
SIGMOD 2009, 2015

Award committees

VLDB Early career researcher, Ten year best paper awards (2013-2014)
ACM SIGKDD 2010,2013, 2014: Innovation award and service award committee
ACM SIGKDD 2001, 2009, 2010, 2014 Best paper award committee

Program committe member
- ACM SIGKDD 2006 Workshop chair
- ACM SIGMOD 1998, 2002 (Demo committee), 2003, 2005, 2006
- VLDB 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007
- ACM SIGKDD 2001 (also in Best paper award committee), 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009 (Best paper committee), 2010 (Best paper committee)
- ICML: 2003, 2011, 2013
- IEEE ICDE 98, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 (demo)
- IEEE ICDM, Vice chair 2005
- EDBT 2006,2011
- EMNLP 2014
- COMAD 2000, 2005, 2008,2010
- WWW 2006, 2013
- CIDR 2009, 2010
- WSDM 2013
Others
- ICDE 2010 Tutorial chair
- WWW 2011 Tutorial chair

Teaching

Probabilistic Foundations of AI Fall 2025,
Advanced Machine learning, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2014, 2016--2024
Data Analysis and Interpretation. Autumn 2025
Foundations of Machine learning, Autumn 2009, Autumn 2012, 2013, 2019, 2023
Introduction to Machine Learning, Autumn 2011
CS 627: Graphical models and structured learning Spring 2008
CS 636: Data mining Fall 2007
IT655:Advanced data mining: Probabilistic graphical models , Spring 2006, Spring 2007
IT608: Data warehousing and data mining, Spring 2000-03, 2005, Fall 2005, Fall 2006
IT655:Advanced data mining: Beyond record data mining: Prediction with richer structures (sequences, trees, and graphs) , Fall 2004
IT603: Data Base Management Systems, Fall 1999, 2001
IT619: Graduate Software Lab, Autumn 2000

Publications

Patents

1 6,324,533 Integrated database and data-mining system
2 6,189,005 System and method for mining surprising temporal patterns
3 6,094,651 Discovery-driven exploration of OLAP data cubes
4 5,832,475 Database system and method employing data cube operator for group-by operations

Old Talks (Pre-2010)

Statistical Machine Learning for Complex Predictions in Large-scale Scenarios, Invited speaker at the International Colloquium on Perspectives in Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Birth Centenary Event. March 2010.
Structured learning. Tutorial at Machine Learning Winter School, Bangalore Jan 2010. Slides: part 1 and part 3 part 2
Queries over unstructured data: probabilistic methods to the rescue. Keynote talk at BIRTE 2009 slides
Structured prediction models in information extraction. Invited talk at the Data mining Forum Hongkong May 2008
The Role of Probabilistic Graphical Models in Databases. Tutorial at VLDB 2007. (with Amol Deshpande) Slides
Scalable information extraction and data integration. Tutorial at KDD 2006. (with Eugene Agichtein) Slides
Record linkage: Similarity measures and algorithms Tutorial at SIGMOD 2006 (with Nick Koudas and Divesh Srivastava). Slides
Graphical models for structure extraction and information integration. Keynote talk at ICDM 2005, Nov 2005. Slides
Models and indices for integrating unstructured data with a relational database. Keynote talk at KDID workshop, ECML/PKDD, September 2004.
Sequence data mining. Tutorial at KDD 2003 (with Mark Craven). Slides
Automation in Information extraction and data integration. Tutorial at VLDB 2002. Slides