Career Highlights

Current and significant former positions- Dr. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Department IIT Bombay. His area of research is Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). He currently holds the Major Bhagat Singh Rekhi Chair Professorship of IIT Bombay and had formerly held Vijay and Sita Vashi Chair Professorship (2014-16). He was formerly Director of IIT Patna (2015-20) and President of Association of Computational Linguistics (2016). He is a Fellow of National Academy of Engineering (2015) and Abdul Kalam National Fellow (2020). Prof. Bhattacharyya is an Editor of Journal of Natural Language Engineering (JNLE) Cambridge University Press and an Editor of AI Magazine AAAI Press.

Education and Visits- Prof. Bhattacharyya received his B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur (1984, its Distinguished Alumnus Awardee in 2018), M.Tech from IIT Kanpur (1986) and Ph.D from IIT Bombay (1994). He has also been visiting scientist/researcher/faculty in MIT Cambridge USA, Stanford Univerity USA, University Joseph Fouriere Grenoble France and University of Texas at Houston USA. Prof. Bhattacharyya has been lecturing on NLP in top national and international academic institutions and industries throughout the world.

Research and Development- Prof. Bhattacharyya has published more than 350 research papers covering all major areas of NLP in top journals and conferences and has guided more than 300 students for their PhD, masters and undergraduate research. Automatic Sarcasm Detection, Multilingual Computation, Indian Language Neural Machine Translation and Indowordnet are some of his reearch trail blazers. His textbook ‘Machine Translation’ sheds light on all paradigms of machine translation with abundant examples from Indian Languages. Three monographs co-authored by him titled 'Investigations in Computational Sarcasm' (Springer, with Dr. Aditya Joshi), 'Cognitively Inspired Natural Language Processing- An Investigation Based on Eye Tracking' (Springer, with Dr. Abhijit Mishra) and 'Machine Translation and Transliteration of Low Resource Related Languages' (CRC Press Taylor and Francis group, with Dr. Anoop Kunchukuttan) describe cutting edge research in NLP and ML. Prof. Bhattacharyya has executed sponsored and consultancy projects for various ministries and top industries and startups, with amount running into tens of crores.

Professional Service- Prof. Bhattacharyya is Chairman AI Standardization Committee of Govt. of India and member Governing Council of The Centre for Advanced Financial Research and Learning (CAFRAL) set up by Reserve Bank of India. In 2010, he brought one of the top NLP conferences to India- Computational Linguistics (COLING). He has served as Program Committee Chair and Area Chair and also as reviewers for major conferences in NLP and ML.

Honors, Awards, Visibility- For sustained contribution to technology Prof. Bhattacharyya received H.H. Mathur Research Excellence Award of IIT Bombay (2021), Manthan Award of the Ministry of IT (2009), P.K. Patwardhan Award of IIT Bombay (2008) and VNMM Award of IIT Roorkey (2014). Prof. Bhattacharyya's research has gained national and international visibility. His work on Computational Sarcasm with his students featured in The TIMES London Edition, 19th Sept, 2017 (Link) and also in Hindustan Times, 22nd August, 2018 (Link). The deep learning based sarcasm research also featured in MIT Technology Review and ACM Tehnology News (Link-MIT; Link-ACM).